[192] Oral. See the Young Piper and the Brewery of Egg-shells in the Irish Fairy Legends, with the notes
- Date of account
- Nineteenth-century comparative survey
- Source
- The Fairy Mythology Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries
- Reference
- The Fairy Mythology Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries · selected passage 156
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English with translated traditional material
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
[192] Oral. See the Young Piper and the Brewery of Egg-shells in the Irish Fairy Legends, with the notes
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[192] _Oral._ See the Young Piper and the Brewery of Egg-shells in the Irish Fairy Legends, with the notes. The same story is also to be found in Germany where the object is to make the changeling laugh. The mother breaks an egg in two and sets water down to boil in each half shell. The imp then cries out: "Well! I'm as old as the Westerwald, but never before saw I any one cooking in egg-shells," and burst out laughing at it. Instantly the true child was returned.--Kinder and Haus-Märchen, iii. 39. Grose also tells the story in his Provincial Glossary. The mother there breaks a dozen of eggs and sets the shells before the child, who says, "I was seven years old when I came to nurse, and I have lived four since, and yet I never saw so many milkpans." See also Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and below, _Wales_, _Brittany_, _France_.
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.
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