This shepherd also told him to beware of the beasts he should next meet,
for they were of a very different kind from any he had yet seen.
So the young man went on, and by-and-by he saw a multitude of very
dreadful beasts, with two heads, and on every head four horns. And he
was sore frightened, and ran away from them as fast as he could; and
glad was he when he came to a castle that stood on a hillock, with the
door standing wide open to the wall. And he went into the castle for
shelter, and there he saw an old wife sitting beside the kitchen fire.
He asked the wife if he might stay for the night, as he was tired with
a long journey; and the wife said he might, but it was not a good
place for him to be in, as it belonged to the Red Ettin, who was a very
terrible beast, with three heads, that spared no living man it could get
hold of. The young man would have gone away, but he was afraid of the
beasts on the outside of the castle; so he beseeched the old woman to
hide him as best she could, and not tell the Ettin he was there. He
thought, if he could put over the night, he might get away in the
morning, without meeting with the beasts, and so escape. But he had not
been long in his hiding-hole, before the awful Ettin came in; and no
sooner was he in, than he was heard crying:
“Snouk but and snouk ben,
I find the smell of an earthly man,
Be he living, or be he dead,
His heart this night shall kitchen my bread.”
The monster soon found the poor young man, and pulled him from his hole.
And when he had got him out, he told him that if he could answer him
three questions his life should be spared. So the first head asked: “A
thing without an end, what's that?” But the young man knew not. Then the
second head said: “The smaller, the more dangerous, what's that?” But
the young man knew it not. And then the third head asked: “The dead
carrying the living; riddle me that?” But the young man had to give it
up. The lad not being able to answer one of these questions, the Red
Ettin took a mallet and knocked him on the head, and turned him into a
pillar of stone.
On the morning after this happened, the younger brother took out the
knife to look at it, and he was grieved to find it all brown with rust.
He told his mother that the time was now come for him to go away upon
his travels also; so she requested him to take the can to the well for
water, that she might make a cake for him. And he went, and as he was
bringing home the water, a raven over his head cried to him to look, and
he would see that the water was running out. And he was a young man of
sense, and seeing the water running out, he took some clay and patched
up the holes, so that he brought home enough water to bake a large cake.
When his mother put it to him to take the half cake with her blessing,
he took it in preference to having the whole with her malison; and yet
the half was bigger than what the other lad had got.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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