 Two are initiation tales involving orphans who are driven to perform seemingly impossible tasks by their stepmothers.Both orphans are courageous and take up their task willingly, and their stories have happy endings; both "initiation routes start from a known place to an unknown destination from where they return to the known place".The stories Dadié reworked from oral tradition were originally in Anyin, Nzema, "and other vernacular idioms", according to Robert Farris Thompson (who does not, however, note that Dadié invented three of the stories).