The Snow-child is a widespread European folktale, found in many medieval tellings.

It is Aarne-Thompson type 1362.

Synopsis

A merchant returns home after an absence of two years to find his wife with a newborn son. She explains one snowy day she swallowed a snowflake while thinking about her husband which caused her to conceive. Pretending to believe, he raises the boy with her until he takes the boy on and sells him into slavery

Slavery

Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

. On his return, he explains to his wife that the boy melted in the heat.

Variants

The tale appears in medieval fabliau

Fabliau

A fabliau is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by an excessiveness of sexual and scatological obscenity. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decamerone and by Geoffrey Chaucer...

x, and was used in school exercise of rhetoric. It first appears in the 11-century Cambridge Songs

Cambridge Songs

The Cambridge Songs are a collection of Goliardic medieval Latin poems found on ten leaves of the Codex Cantabrigiensis , now at the Cambridge University Library. The songs as they survive are copies made shortly before or after the Norman Conquest...

. A medieval play about the Virgin Mary has characters disbelieving her story of her pregnancy citing the tale.

It contrast to Aarne-Thompson type 703*, Snow Maiden, where a child really has a magical snow-related origin.