ATU 720 The Juniper Tree (previously My Mother Slew Me; My Father Ate Me)
Open in the ATU tale-type index →
The tale in brief
A boy is killed by his mother and eaten by his father; his bones turn into a bird, which drops a millstone on the mother and becomes a boy again.
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:
- Vaeslaps käoks Orphan turned cuckoo · ERAB · 31 poems
- Pääskysen laulu The swallow's song · SKVR · 7 poems · marked uncertain
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, No. 139
Finnish-Swedish Hackman 1917f. I, No. 148
Estonian Aarne 1918
Livonian Loorits 1926
Full references:
- Rausmaa 1982ff.: Rausmaa, Pirkko-Liisa (ed.): Suomalaiset kansansadut 1–6. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1982–2000.
- Hackman 1917f.: Hackman, Oskar (ed.): Finlands svenska folkdiktning I A: Sagor. Referatsamling 1–2. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 1917–1920. Read online ↗ (National Library of Finland)
- Aarne 1918: Aarne, Antti: Estnische Märchen- und Sagenvarianten. Verzeichnis der zu den Hurt'schen Handschriftensammlungen gehörenden Aufzeichnungen. FF Communications 25. Hamina: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1918.
- Loorits 1926: Loorits, Oskar: Livische Märchen- und Sagenvarianten. FF Communications 66. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1926.
Motifs and related tale types
Motifs: Resuscitation by Arrangement of Members E30·Bones of Dead Collected and Buried E607.1·Reincarnation: Boy to Bird to Boy E610.1.1·Reincarnation of Murdered Child as Bird E613.0.1·Relative's Flesh Eaten Unwittingly G61·Punishment: Millstone Dropped on Guilty Person Q412·Murder by Slamming Down Chest-Lid S121
Combines with: ATU 433B King Lindorm·ATU 711 The Beautiful and the Ugly Twinsisters·ATU 780 The Singing Bone
Example tales
English example tales of this type in the Trilogy folktale corpus; their texts can be read in the ATU tale-type index.
- The Crow's Nest · Hungary · W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf, The Folk-Tales of the Magyars (London: Published for the Folk-Lore Society by Elliot Stock, 1889), pp. 298-301.
- The Girl and the Boy · Austria · Ignaz and Joseph Zingerle, 'Mädchen und Bübchen' Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner'schen Buchhandlung, 1852), no. 12, pp. 64-68.
- The Juniper Tree · Germany · Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Von dem Machandelboom, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales -- Grimms' Fairy Tales), no. 47.
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.
Example tales: the Trilogy folktale corpus; each tale’s own source is named beside it.
The plot summary, the notes and the arrangement of this page are RunoVerse’s own.