ATU 1900 How a Man Came Out of a Tree Stump (Marsh)
Open in the ATU tale-type index →
The tale in brief
A liar tells how he was stuck fast in a hollow tree or a bog until a bear came by; he caught it by the tail, and the frightened bear pulled him out. In the one Finnish song he is dropped from heaven into a bog, a thrush builds a nest in his hand, a bear comes for the nest, and when he grabs its tail the tail breaks off, which, he says, is why the bear is stub-tailed.
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).
- Kyntäjän satu The Plowman's Tale · SKVR · 1 poem
Finnic sources cited in the catalogue
The entries of the catalogue’s list of literature and variants that concern Finnic tradition.
Finnish Rausmaa 1982ff. IV, No. 174
Estonian cf. Loorits 1959, Nos. 2, 3,Viidalepp 1980, No. 136
Lappish, Wepsian Kecskeméti/Paunonen 1974
Full references:
- Rausmaa 1982ff.: Rausmaa, Pirkko-Liisa (ed.): Suomalaiset kansansadut 1–6. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1982–2000.
- Loorits 1959: Loorits, Oskar: Estnische Volkserzählungen. Fabula, Supplement-Serie A: Texte 1. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1959.
- Viidalepp 1980: Viidalepp, Richard (ed.): Estnische Volksmärchen. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980.
- Kecskeméti/Paunonen 1974: Kecskeméti, István; Paunonen, Heikki: Die Märchentypen in den Publikationen der Finnisch-ugrischen Gesellschaft. Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 73 (1974), 205–265.
Motifs and related tale types
Motifs: X1133.4
Related types: ATU 1875 The Boy on the Bear's (Wolf's) Tail
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 ↗
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.