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 103
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-25
Record summary
In the first of the Esthonian stories, the cock that crows is a spy over the old woman.[429] In the third Esthonian story, a woman gives her husband three eggs of a black hen to eat in order to obtain three dwarf heroes
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 onlyIn the first of the Esthonian stories, the cock that crows is a spy over the old woman.[429] In the third Esthonian story, a woman gives her husband three eggs of a black hen to eat in order to obtain three dwarf heroes. In the twenty-second Esthonian story, the shepherds that watch over the son of the persecuted king, seeing the knowingness of the boy, recognise the truth of the proverb that "the egg is more cunning than the hen." In the ninth Esthonian story, a young man, after having made a compact with the devil, cheats him, giving him the blood of a cock instead of his own. In the fourth Esthonian story, when three strokes are given with a golden rod upon a rock, a large golden cock comes out and perches upon the top of it; it beats its wings and crows; at each crowing a marvel comes out of the stone, a tablecloth that spreads itself and a porringer that fills itself.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis 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 onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.