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In 19th century CE Germany we find a story about a small bird who flies in the air with a millstone which it drops on the evil stepmother. In 9 century CE Iran there is an account of winged snakes which also drop millstones on people. And in ca. 10 century BCE India there is a hymn in which a small bird, intoxicated with soma imagines that it can manipulate the earth. Both the German and Indian accounts have a nearly identical onomatopoetic refrain, imitative of a quail. The present article explores the interconnectedness of these themes.
In the collection of Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the brothers Grimm, there is one particularly grisly story, no. 47 "Von dem Machandelboom" (Grimm 1957: 165-172).1 It is a long tale in a north German dialect about a rich man and wife who were childless. One winter the wife stands under the juniper tree in the yard paring an apple. She cuts herself and the blood falls on the snow. She wishes: "hadd ik doch en Kind, so rood as Blood un so witt as Snee" ("If only I had a child as red as blood and as white a snow").2 And as it happens she becomes pregnant and in the ninth month gives birth to a boy as red as blood and white as snow. Overcome with joy, however, she dies. After an appropriate time has passed, the husband remarries and with the new wife has a girl named Marlenichen. As so often the case in these Märchen, the wicked stepmother despises the boy. She brutally murders him, chops him up, cooks him and feeds him to the father. Distraught, little Marlenichen gathers the bones in a silk cloth and places them under the juniper. There then appears a bird who flies to the goldsmith and in exchange for his singing acquires a golden necklace. On to the cobbler, he acquires a shoe and then to the miller a millstone. With the necklace in one claw and the shoe in the other and the millstone around his neck he flies home.3 In succession he drops the necklace on the father, the shoe on the sister and the millstone on the stepmother.4 The enchanting song that the bird...