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 a trip and sells him into slavery. On his return, he explains to his wife that the boy melted in the heat.[3]
The tale first appears in the 11th-century Cambridge Songs.[2][4] It also appears in Medieval fabliaux,[3] and was used in school exercises of rhetoric.[2] A Medieval play about the Virgin Mary has characters disbelieving her story of her pregnancy citing the tale.[2]
It contrasts to Aarne-Thompson type 703*, Snow Maiden, where a child really has a magical snow-related origin.[5]
^Jan M. Ziolkowski, (ed. and trans.), The Cambridge Songs (‘Carmina Cantabrigensia’), The Garland Library of Medieval Literature, Series A, 66 (Garland: New York, 1994), no. 14.
