King: What is your father doing? Youth: Cuts wood which was burnt last year. (To pay old debts.) — Mythoi

Motif

King: What is your father doing? Youth: Cuts wood which was burnt last year. (To pay old debts.)

Tests. · Tests of cleverness. · Riddles. · Enigmatic statements. · view the constellation · filed as H583.2.4

Cited in the index

general *De Vries FFC LXXIII 116ff.

Within the index

Filed under King: What is your father doing? Youth: He is in the vineyard and is doing good and bad. (He prunes vines and sometimes cuts good and sometimes lets bad ones stay.)

Filed beside it

King: What is your father doing? Youth: Makes an evil greater. (Closes up a path; this causes another to be opened.) King: What is your father doing? Youth: Makes many out of few. (Sows grain.) King: What is your father doing? Youth: Makes better from good. (Hedges his field.) King: What is your father doing? Youth: He fences thorns with thorns. (Eggplant garden fenced with thorns.)

Travels with (Thompson’s cf.)

King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She is baking the bread we ate last week. (To pay back borrowed bread.) (Cf. H583.2.4.)

Carried in tale types

The King and the Farmer's Son · ATU 921 26 recorded variants

ask the rhapsode about this motif · search the shelf for “father” · wander