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ATU 122B The Rat Persuades the Cat to Wash her Face Before Eating

Animal Tales › Wild Animals and Domestic Animals (ATU 100–149)

Open in the ATU tale-type index →

The tale in brief

A cat catches a rat, but the rat persuades it that a well-bred cat washes its face before eating; while the cat washes, the rat runs off, and since then cats wash after their meal. In the Finnish songs the captive is a sparrow that has brewed beer in an eggshell: it begs the cat not to eat it without saying grace, and flies off when the cat raises a paw.

Summary written for RunoVerse and checked against the Finnic texts linked on this page.

Runosong types

Possibly related: the songs of these types tell this tale (as judged by a language model).

Finnic sources cited in the catalogue

The entries of the catalogue’s list of literature and variants that concern Finnic tradition.

Finnish Rausmaa 1982ff. V, No. 115

Estonian Kippar 1986

Full references:

Motifs and related tale types

Motifs: Rat Persuades Cat to Wash Face Before Eating: Escapes K562

Combines with: ATU 227 Geese Ask for Respite for Prayer·ATU 47B The Horse Kicks the Wolf in the Teeth

Sources

Tale-type number, title, classification, related types and the Finnic sources: Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales (FF Communications 284–286, Helsinki 2004). · Uther 2004, part I (FF Communications 284), free online ↗

Possibly related runosong types: a reading of the song types by a language model (Claude Opus 5.5, 2 November 2026); only links it rated high or medium in confidence are shown.

Motifs and combinations with other tale types: the Trilogy dataset, from Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature and the ATU catalogue.

The plot summary, the notes and the arrangement of this page are RunoVerse’s own.