F is for Fingers (Body Folktales)

This year, my A to Z Challenge theme is Body Folktales. Enjoy!

(Sorry, this image was low hanging fruit. Explanation here.)

Fingers, surprisingly, play a very dominant role in folktales. I had an abundance of stories to choose from, so here is a selection of the most interesting ones:

The Finger (Jewish tale)

If you have seen Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, this story will be familiar to you. You might even know it from Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women who run with the wolves, although she has changed the story significantly from its folklore versions.

Joking around with his friends in the woods, a young man puts an engagement ring on a finger sticking out of the ground. Later on, when he is preparing for his wedding, a demon woman (or a corpse) suddenly appears with the ring on her finger, claiming to be his first bride. The case is brought before a rabbi, who proclaims that the demon can't claim a mortal as her husband, and declares a divorce.

There also a lesser known version of this tale, called The demon in the tree. In this one, a boy puts a ring on a finger sticking out of a tree's trunk, and unwittingly marries a demon. The demon kills all his brides, until the third one manages to survive. Not only that, but she comes to an agreement with the demon, first appeasing her with food, and then sharing her husband with her for one hour each day. After seven years, the demon leaves them alone for good.

(You can find other versions of this story here and here.)

The legend of Raja Nala (India)

Raja Nala makes the mistake of declaring that Truth is more important than Luck - and the goddess of luck, Lakshmi, abandons him. He loses everything in short order, and goes through many adventures until he is restored to his kingdom. Along the way, his son becomes engaged to a princess, but when he grows up, Raja Nala decides to marry him to two nymphs instead. The true bride tries everything she can to get her betrothed back, and the prince finally decides to elope with her. However, his wives are so jealous that they sleep every night holding his fingers in their mouth. The prince tricks them by making sheaths out of bark for his fingers, and he manages to quietly slip away.

(Other source here.)

The queen and the cobra (India)

A dog gives birth to two human girls, and raises them in the jungle. In time, the girls meet two princes and marry them, moving into the city. When the dog-mother comes visiting, one daughter is happy to receive her but the other is not. They get tangled in a web of lies and mistakes, until the kind princess wants to kill herself by sticking her finger in a cobra's mouth. Her finger dislodges a splinter in the snake's throat, and the grateful animal rewards her greatly for the help.

The ring (Spain)

This is a folktale version of Odysseus' adventure with the cyclops, but with a girl as the hero. At the end of the story the blinded giant tricks her into wearing a ring that always tells him where she is; to save her life and get away, the girl cuts off her own finger and throws it off a mountain.

Abram and Nimrod (Iran)

This legend is a Persian variant of some stories that may be familiar from the Bible. King Nimrod is told by fortune-tellers that a child will eclipse his own power, so he orders all newborns to be killed. A woman, Adna, hides her child in a cave. Whenever she visits to nurse him, she finds him suckling on his own fingers - one of which produces milk, and the other produces honey. The boy named Abram grows up fast, and soon faces King Nimrod himself.

A ladder of fingers

This is a motif (F848.2), rather than a single tale. There are many fairy tales and fairy tale variants where someone (usually a girl) cuts off her fingers to make a ladder to reach her goal. In a German tale, a girl seeking her brothers on top of a glass mountain cuts off her little finger to create the last step on her climb. In the Grimm version of the same, she uses her little finger to open the door. In a tale from Silesia, it's a boy looking for his sister who cuts off his finger to climb the mountain.

The other tale type that often contains this motif is the Magic Flight, where the hero has to complete impossible tasks with the help of his bride. In the Breton folktale of The Maiden in White, the hero has to climb a slippery tower and retrieve a dove. His bride tells him to cut her into pieces and boil her bones, which he then uses as a ladder. After, he puts her together again, but misses her little toe. Later on, de recognizes her in a challenge by looking at her foot. In The Green Man of Eggum from Newfoundland, the hero has to gt a golden ring off a glass pole fifty feet high. His bride tells him to hit her with an ax, and her bones turn into a ladder. On the way down he steps on a rung too hard, and her little finger breaks, becoming crooked. In the Welsh Traveler version of the same (The Green Man of Noman's Land), the girl wishes her fingers to become a ladder, and the hero breaks her little finger by stepping over it. The motif is very common in Celtic cultures, and has traveled over to America as well.

The same motif also appears in a German variant of East of the Sun, West of the Moon. The woman seeking her enchanted husband (a white wolf instead of a white bear) cuts off her finger to scale the glass mountain.

There are also many Christian legends about saints lighting things up with their fingers.

There are more stories that I could think of, but it's time to move on to the next letter.

Do any other examples come to mind?