μῦθοι Mythoi
Motif

Fire stolen in hollow reed.

Mythological motifs. · Creation and ordering of human life. · Acquisition of culture. · Acquisition of livable environment. · view the constellation · filed as A1415.1

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Attested across traditions
On our shelf — the index’s citations, resolved to served chapters
The motif on our shelf — written from the served texts; every claim cited  receipt

This sub-address is about the container, and on our shelf the container gets more scholarship than the theft. The served text spends six words on it: Prometheus gave men fire "hidden in a stalk of fennel" [The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK I, ch. VII]. Frazer's note is a small botany of fire-carriage: the giant fennel's dry pith "catches fire just like a wick", so that Greeks still "use this plant to carry fire from one place to another" — Tournefort's sailors laid in a supply of it [ibid., editor's note]. The note even adjudicates the label's "hollow reed": Bent saw Lesbians carrying coals in what he took for a reed, still called nartheka, "a survival of the old word for the reed" — and Frazer adds drily, "Perhaps Bent mistook fennel for a reed" [ibid., editor's note]. The theft and its penalty belong to the parent address, written in the pilot; what this sub-address contributes is the credible object — a real plant, in living use, whose slow-burning pith makes the divine smuggling merely practical. A page where the editorial apparatus is the dossier: the motif's realism is a footnote's discovery.

Witnesses: The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK I, ch. VII

Scholars’ trail — 3references

The index’s own references — the collections where scholars sighted this story-shape, tradition by tradition. Titles on our shelf are live links; the rest is the frontier, not yet shelved.

  • GreekFox 13, *Frazer Apollodorus I 51 n. 6 → on our shelf: The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK I, ch. VII
  • general *Hdwb. d. Märch. II 109b nn. 9–13. – N. Am. Indian: Thompson Tales 290 n. 64
  • general S. Am. Indian (Jivaro, Eastern Ecuador): Karsten Myths of the Jibaros (reviewed JAFL XXXII 446) (fire preserved in bark of tree), (Tenetehara): Wagley-Galvao BBAE CXLIII (3) 147.
Within the index

Filed under Theft of fire. Mankind is without fire. A culture hero steals it from the owner.

1 finer motif beneath it
Fire carried from heaven in fingernails
Filed beside it
Fire witheld from men as punishmentOriginal fire property of one person (animal)Theft of fire by animalsTheft of fire – trick exchange. Child of fire-owner is stolen and then given back in exchange for fireVain attempts to circumvent theft of fire
Keeps company with — shares receipted episodes
Theft of fire. Mankind is without fire. A culture hero steals it from the ownerMoon as wooer. The moon is enamored of a mortalDeluge. Inundation of whole world or sectionMan made from clay (earth)Man created from stonesNew race from stones thrown over head after deluge. (Cf. A1254.1.)

wander