μῦθοι Mythoi
Motif

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.)

Tests. · Tests of cleverness. · Riddles. · Enigmatic statements. · view the constellation · filed as H583.2

Cited in the index
  • general *Köhler-Bolte I 84, 87.
Within the index

Filed under Clever youth (maiden) answers king's inquiry in riddles. (Cf. H561.4.)

5 finer motifs beneath 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: Cuts wood which was burnt last year. (To pay old debts.) King: What is your father doing? Youth: He fences thorns with thorns. (Eggplant garden fenced with thorns.)
Filed beside it
King: What do you see? Youth: One and a half men and a horse's head. (Himself, the legs of the king on horseback in the door, and the horse's head.) King: What is your brother doing? Youth: He hunts; he throws away what he catches and what he does not catch he carries with him. (Hunts for lice on his body.) King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She does for another what the latter cannot do for her. (Lays out a corpse.) King: What is your sister doing? Youth: She is mourning last year's laughter. (Nurses child, the fruit of last year's love affair.) King: What are you doing? Youth: I boil those which come and go. (Beans which keep rising and falling in water.) King: Where shall I tie my horse? Maiden: Between summer and winter. (Between wagon and sleigh.) Maiden (to king): The house has neither eyes nor ears. (No child at window nor dog in yard to announce king's approach: he therefore finds her not dressed to receive him.) Maiden (to king): Shall I feed you with loss or gain. (A slaughtered hen or milk.) Girl to king: Should it (the flood) come I shall not come; should it not come, I shall come
Carried in tale types

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