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ATU 470 Friends in Life and Death

Tales of Magic › Supernatural Tasks (ATU 460–499)

Open in the ATU tale-type index →

The tale in brief

Two friends are bound to each other in life and in death: when one dies, the other follows him into the other world and stays there a long time.

Summary written for RunoVerse from Antti Aarne’s list of tale types of 1910 and 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 and Finland-Swedish sources cited in the catalogue

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

Finnish Rausmaa 1982ff. I, 486, Jauhiainen 1998, Nos. C500, C1171, C1176

Finnish-Swedish Hackman 1917f. I, No. 90

Estonian Aarne 1918

Livonian Kecskeméti/Paunonen 1974

Full references:

Motifs and related tale types

Motifs: Years Thought Days D2011·Dinner with the Dead E238·Fat and Lean Kine in Otherworld F171.1·Broad and Narrow Road in Otherworld F171.2·People and Things That Strike One Another in Otherworld F171.3·M253

Combines with: ATU 470A The Offended Skull·ATU 471 The Bridge to the Otherworld

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 ↗

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.