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THE CUCKOO, THE HERON, THE HEATHCOCK, THE PARTRIDGE, THE NIGHTINGALE, THE SWALLOW, THE SPARROW, AND

Date of account
English edition published 1872
Source
Zoological Mythology; or, The Legends of Animals, Volume 2 (of 2)
Reference
Zoological Mythology; or, The Legends of Animals, Volume 2 (of 2) · selected passage 12
Rights
public_domain
Language
English
Record updated
2026-08-25

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Record summary

The Petropolitan Dictionary interprets it only as she who has a eunuch, or one who is castrated, for her husband, but the proper sense of the word is she who has something cut off, she who has, that is, the maimed arm, as in the fairy tale, for which reason she is given a golden hand

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

The Petropolitan Dictionary interprets it only as she who has a eunuch, or one who is castrated, for her husband, but the proper sense of the word is she who has something cut off, she who has, that is, the maimed arm, as in the fairy tale, for which reason she is given a golden hand. As the wife of a eunuch, the Vedic woman, therefore, receives from the Açvinâu a son with a golden hand; as having an imperfect arm, she receives only a golden hand, as in the 116th hymn of the first book, the same Açvinâu give to Viçpalâ, who had lost his own in battle, an iron leg.[62] The _Rigvedas_, therefore, already contains in its germ the very popular subject of the man or woman without hands, in same way as we have already found in it, in embryo, the legends of the lame man, the blind man or woman, the ugly and the disguised woman.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.

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