ATU 958 The Shepherd Youth in the Robbers' Power

Realistic Tales (Novelle) › Robbers and Murderers (ATU 950–969)

The tale in brief

Robbers seize a shepherd boy in the pasture; he sings or blows a call on his horn whose words the robbers do not understand but the villagers do, and they come to save him. In the Finnish and Karelian songs the call itself is sung: robbers are in the herd, the dog has been hanged, the black ox killed, and the shepherd is condemned to die.

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:

Paimenen hätä Shepherd's Distress · SKVR · 66 poems

Finnic sources cited in the catalogue

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

Finnish Rausmaa 1982ff. II, Nos. 184, 185

Estonian Aarne 1918, No. 958*, Loorits 1959, No. 199

Full references:

Rausmaa 1982ff.: Rausmaa, Pirkko-Liisa (ed.): Suomalaiset kansansadut 1–6. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1982–2000.
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 1959: Loorits, Oskar: Estnische Volkserzählungen. Fabula, Supplement-Serie A: Texte 1. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1959.

Motifs and related tale types

Motifs: Respite from Death Until Victim Has Blown on a Horn (Three Times) K551.3

Combines with: ATU 875 The Clever Farmgirl [J1111.4]

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.