Abstract
A major advance in our understanding of the 'folktale elements' of Beowulf was begun a few years ago with an article by T. A. Shippey in which he analyzed the poem through the use of the folktale morphological system of the Russian Formalist, Vladimir Propp.' Propp's major work, Morphology of the Folktale, was first published in 1928 but not made available in English until 1958. Unlike most comparative folktale research, his studies were aimed not at locating analogues or motifs2 but at isolating what made all tales what they were the 'deep structure,' or underlying form. Using 100 Russian folktales from the Afanasyev collection, Propp determined inductively that their form was in each instance governed by thirty-one functional ingredients. He further found that although no one tale contained all the functions, the order of those present was the same for all tales.3
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