7:31am June 20, 2014

The Herdsman and the Owl-Headed Man

Once on a summer’s evening on a remote high alp in the southern mountains, a herdsman was sitting outside his townland’s dairy house, eating a nice supper of polenta and milk from the day’s last milking. While he was eating, he noticed a big owl that flew into a tree nearby. It stared at him and started screaming, “Orok, orok!” The herdsman started laughing at it, and the bird just kept shrieking more loudly, “Orok, orok!”

The herdsman thought this was funny. “What’s the problem,” he said to himself, “is the thing jealous because I’ve got food and it hasn’t?” So as he sat there, he made up a little song and sang it to the owl. And the song went like this:

“You’re screaming ‘Orok!”
and you are quite near;
so if you want a snack,
then come on down here!”

And no sooner had the last word fallen from his lips than before the herdsman appeared a huge big man with an owl’s head — all fluffed-out feathers and terrible glaring eyes. And the man said to the herdsman in an imperious tone, “Fine, you called me and so I’m here. What will you give me to eat?”

The herdsman had not exactly been expecting this result. Nonetheless, he did his best to look casual about it, and he said to the owl-headed man, “If you really want to eat with me, well, there’s a bowl of milk from the evening milking here and there’s good hot polenta in the kettle; take what you like and eat!”

And immediately the man with the owl’s head fell on the food as ravenously as any bird of prey and gobbled it all up, so that the polenta kettle didn’t have so much as a spoon’s scraping left in it when he was done. “I’m still hungry,” he shouted. “What are you going to give me to eat?”

Fear was getting down into the herdsman’s bones now. “There’s a nice firkin of soft fresh cheese from this morning’s milking over there,” the herdsman said; “you’re welcome to that!” And in the blink of an eye, it seemed, the firkin was empty and all that nice cheese gone. “This isn’t nearly enough,” growled the man with the owl’s head; “you’re the one who invited me, what kind of shoddy hospitality is this? What are you going to give me to eat?”

“There are the two big wheels of cheese up on the shelf,” said the herdsman, trembling all over, “have those!” But he had hardly time to take another breath before those were gone as well.

Terrified, the herdsman threw open the doors of his store-cupboard, hoping there would be enough in there to satisfy his guest. “Here!” he said, The owl-headed man dove straight in and ate all his bread and all his flour, all the salt and all the sugar, all the coffee and all the rice—everything that was there.

But still the owl headed man’s hunger was not satisfied. “What else will you give me to eat?” he yelled.

“Here’s the key to the dairy parlor,” the herdsman said, throwing it at his guest in desperation. “Go on in, drink all the milk, eat all the cheese, eat all the butter, take everything you like right to the bare walls!”

And about five minutes later, all the cheeses on the shelves were eaten and all the milk in the buckets and in the big cheesemaking kettle was drunk. The owl headed man rounded on the herdsman, stalking toward him, and shrieked, “You invited me, here I am, I’m still hungry! What else will you give me to eat?”

The poor scared herdsman was at his wits’ end. “If you’re still so hungry, go into the house-stall and eat the animals there!”

No sooner had he said it than the owl-headed man was in the stable in the next room of the house, and he ate the pigs and he ate the goats and he ate the cows that were there, and the only thing he didn’t eat was one cow that was wearing a bell with a cross carved on. In a fury, the man with the owl’s head turned back again to the herdsman and screamed, “Fine, I’m still hungry, what else will you give me to eat?”

The poor herdsman fell to his knees and sobbed, “There’s nothing else to give you, I have nothing else!”

“All right,” said the owl headed man, “I suppose, then, I’m just going to have to eat you!”

The herdsman couldn’t think of anything to do but jump up and grab the cross that was nailed up over the stable door, crying “Jesumaria, help! Help me, Mother of God!” And even as the owl headed man was reaching out horrible taloned fingers to seize him, there came a clap of thunder and a swirl of hot light like the fires of doom, and the herdsman fell to the floor and swooned away with terror.

When he woke up a little while later, he looked around and to his astonishment found everything in its place; the polenta in the kettle, the milk in its bowl, the soft cheese in its firkin, the round cheeses on their kitchen shelves. The day’s milk was back in the cheesemaking kettle, the butter and curing cheeses all back on their shelves in the dairy, the bread and the flour and the coffee back in the cupboard. And all the animals were once more standing in their stall— the pigs and the goats and the cows, and of course the one wearing the bell with the cross carved on… who frankly looked a little bit amused.

So all things were as they had been again, with one exception:

Never again did the herdsman invite any owl to supper.

***

(Very lightly adapted from the title story in Eule Du, Eule Ich: die schönsten Märchen aus der Schweiz (Verlag Huber Frauenfeld, Stuttgart, 1976.)

A couple of notes: The poem of invitation to the owl, like many such things in fairy tales, is in dialect and doesn’t translate well, so I’ve fiddled with it a little. The original — in Surselvan, I think — is:

Orok ti,
Orok mi:
Se tö majaa
Vegu scià in sèma a mi.

— “orok” meant to be an imitation of its call. The owl in question is the Eurasian Eagle Owl, Bubo bubo… a bird way better heard at a distance than seen up close if it’s annoyed with you. When full grown it has a two-meter wingspan and is capable of killing small deer. Its normal call gives it one of its names in German — Uhu — but its alarm/aggression call is way more freaky, almost like nasty laughter.

As regards classification: in terms of the Aarne Thompson Motif Index this probably winds up somewhere in the 300s (supernatural opponents). In the older Stith Thompson letter-and-number taxonomy it would have split fairly cleanly between B50 (“bird men”) and someplace in C12 (“devil invoked appears unexpectedly”).