Nix Nought Nothing - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Nix Nought Nothing is an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

fairy tale

Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

collected by Joseph Jacobs

Joseph Jacobs

Joseph Jacobs was a folklorist, literary critic and historian. His works included contributions to the Jewish Encyclopaedia, translations of European works, and critical editions of early English literature...

in his English Fairy Tales. A similar tale was collected by Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang was a Scots poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.- Biography :Lang was born in Selkirk...

in Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. The story, in various guises, is very widely distributed, and also has close similarities to the Greek myth of Jason and Medea.

Synopsis

A queen gave birth to a son while the king was away, and not wanting to christen him until his father returned, decreed that he should be called Nix Nought Nothing until that time. The king was gone for a long time, and Nix Nought Nothing grew into a boy. As the king journeyed home, a giant

Giant (mythology)

The mythology and legends of many different cultures include monsters of human appearance but prodigious size and strength. "Giant" is the English word commonly used for such beings, derived from one of the most famed examples: the gigantes of Greek mythology.In various Indo-European mythologies,...

offered to help him over a river in return for "Nix Nought Nothing," and the king, not knowing that he had a son by this name, agreed. When he learned what he had done, the king tried to give the Giant the hen-wife's son, and then the gardener's son, but both of the boys betrayed their origin, and the Giant killed them. In the end the royal couple had to give the prince to the Giant.

The Giant had a daughter, and she and the prince grew very fond of each other. When the prince was grown and the Giant sent him to clean the stables, she summoned animals to clean it for him. When the Giant sent him to empty a lake, she summoned fish to drink it. When the Giant commanded him to bring down a bird's nest from a tall tree without breaking any of the eggs, she cut off her fingers and toes to make a stairway, but during that adventure one egg broke. The prince and the Giant's daughter decided to flee. The Giant chased after them. The girl had Nix Nought Nothing throw down her comb, which became a brier, and then her hair dagger, which became a hedge of razors, and then she dashed a magic flask, which produce a wave that drowned the Giant.

They set off toward the King's castle, but the Giant's daughter was too weary to go on. Nix Nought Nothing went without her. When he arrived the hen-wife whose son had died cursed him, so he fell asleep without giving his name, and could not be wakened. The Giant's daughter had climbed a tree to wait for the prince, and a gardener's daughter, coming to fetch water, saw her reflection in a pond and took it for her own. She decided, since she was so beautiful, that she

False hero

The false hero is a stock character in fairy tales, and sometimes also in ballads. The character appears near the end of a story in order to claim to be the hero or heroine and is, therefore, always of the same sex as the hero or heroine. The false hero presents some claim to the position. By...

would try to marry the sleeping stranger. The hen-wife taught the gardener's daughter how to remove the spell off for as long as she wished. She woke the prince for a time, and they agreed to marry.

Then the gardener went to get water and saw the Giant's daughter, and brought her down, telling her the news. She went up to the castle and implored the prince to wake, telling him all that she had done for him; it was to no avail. But she called him Nix Nought Nothing, and the king and queen learned that he was their own son. They made the gardener's daughter remove the spell, burned the hen-wife, and married Nix Nought Nothing to the Giant's daughter.

Mythic resonances and parallels

A Scottish

Scottish people

The Scottish people , or Scots, are a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland. Historically they emerged from an amalgamation of the Picts and Gaels, incorporating neighbouring Britons to the south as well as invading Germanic peoples such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse.In modern use,...

story entitled Nicht Nought Nothing was collected by Andrew Lang in Morayshire and published in Revue Celtique. In an essay entitled A Far-travelled Tale Lang theorizes that Nix Nought Nothing is related to the classical myth of Jason

Jason

Jason was a late ancient Greek mythological hero from the late 10th Century BC, famous as the leader of the Argonauts and their quest for the Golden Fleece. He was the son of Aeson, the rightful king of Iolcus...

and Medea

Medea

Medea is a woman in Greek mythology. She was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides's play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of...

; an American English variant was read by Mr Newell before the Folk-Lore Congress entitled Lady Feather Flight. Mr Newell suggests that Shakespeare's Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

has mythic resonances with this tale.

External links

SurLaLune Fairy Tale site Nix Nought Nothing
English Fairy Tales: Notes. http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/eft/eft46.htm

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Synopsis

Mythic resonances and parallels

See also

External links