Structural Analysis of the The Tale of the Three Brothers

Abstract

J.K. Rowling created a fictional universe in which magic is real, and within that universe, she created the Tale of the Three Brothers, which narrates the origin of the deathly hallows. In this work, the aforementioned tale is interpreted based on the methodology developed by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss for the structural analysis of myths. In a homonymous text entitled “The Structure of Myth”, the English anthropologist Edmund Leach rethinks the categories and concepts of the original text. This analytical exercise allows the method of anthropology to think about that myth which is part of literary fiction, since the anthropologist cannot judge the veracity of native beliefs, but rather face and analyze them as narratives within the cultural context that is presented to him/her.