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ATU 1419H Woman Warns Lover of Husband by Singing Song

Anecdotes and Jokes › Stories About Married Couples (ATU 1350–1439)

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The tale in brief

A wife whose lover comes to the house while her husband is at home warns him in a song that sounds harmless, sung as if to the child or to someone else. In the Finnish and Karelian lullabies she sings 'don't come into the house, Frost' as she rocks the child, and between the lulling words tells her lover that the master is at home.

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

Runosong types

The SKVR or ERAB type index cites this tale type in its description of these song types:

Finnic sources cited in the catalogue

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

Finnish Rausmaa 1982ff. VI, Nos. 72–74

Full references:

Motifs and related tale types

Motifs: Woman Warns Lover of Husband by Parody Incantation K1546·Woman Warns Lover of Husband by Singing Song K1546.1

Combines with: ATU 1419B The Animal in the Chest

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 II (FF Communications 285), free online ↗

Runosong types cited in the type indexes: the song-type indexes of SKVR and ERAB.

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.