ATU 2010I How the Rich Man Paid his Servant
Open in the ATU tale-type index →
The tale in brief
A servant tells how he was paid for each year of service with another animal, and names the whole growing list at every step. In the Finnish songs ('I served a farmer a full year') each animal has a comic name, such as the hen Kaisahaisa and the pig Sikkelvikkel, and the last wage may be a girl.
Summary written for RunoVerse and checked against the Finnic texts linked on this page.
Runosong types
Possibly related: the songs of these types follow the formula of this chain tale (as judged by a language model).
- Palvelin talonpoikaa vuoteni täyteen I Served the Farmer a Full Year · SKVR · 120 poems
- Suola on salt Salt is salt · SKVR · 1 poem
Motifs and related tale types
Motifs: How the Rich Man Paid His Servant (Lönen Hos Den Rike Man) Z23
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.