King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She cuts off the heads of the well to cure the sick. (Kills chickens to feed her sick mother.) — Mythoi

Motif

King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She cuts off the heads of the well to cure the sick. (Kills chickens to feed her sick mother.)

Tests. · Tests of cleverness. · Riddles. · Enigmatic statements. · view the constellation · filed as H583.4.3

Cited in the index

general Köhler-Bolte I 85, 87.

Within the index

Filed under King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She does for another what the latter cannot do for her. (Lays out a corpse.)

Filed beside it

King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She shows the light of the world to one who has not yet seen it. (Assists at a birth.) 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.) King: What is your mother doing? Youth: She drives away the hungry and compels the filled to eat. (Drives away the hungry hens and stuffs the geese.) King: What are your mother and father doing? Girl: Mother is separating earth (being a midwife), and father is mixing earth (at a funeral) King: What is your mother doing? Girl: She has gone to turn one into two (to split peas)

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 “chickens” · wander