Shooting an apple off one's child's head

[2] The earliest known occurrence of the motif is from the 12th century, in Saxo Grammaticus' version of the story of Palnatoki, whom he calls Toko (Gesta Danorum Book 10, chapter 7).

One day, when he had drunk rather much, he boasted to those who were at table with him, that his skill in archery was such that he could hit, with the first shot of an arrow, ever so small an apple set on the top of a wand at a considerable distance.

When the youth was led forth, Toko carefully admonished him to receive the whiz of the coming arrow as steadily as possible, with attentive ears, and without moving his head, lest by a slight motion of his body he should frustrate the experience of his well-tried skill.

Toko then being asked by the king why he had taken so many arrows out of his quiver, when he was to make but one trial with the bow, "That I might avenge on thee," said he, "the error of the first by the points of the others, lest my innocence might hap to be afflicted and thy injustice to go unpunished!

The best-known version of the story is in the legend of William Tell, supposedly happening to start off the Swiss revolution, written first in the 15th-century White Book of Sarnen, then in Aegidius Tschudi's 16th-century Chronicon Helveticum, and later the basis for Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play.

[12][13] In Hemings þáttr Áslákssonar in the Orkneyinga saga (about 1200), Harald Hardrada challenges the archer Hemingr to shoot a hazelnut off his younger brother Björn's head, which he does.

[25] He also adduces parallels in folktales among the Finns and the Lapps (Sami), and also from Norse mythology compares Ullr, called the "bow-god", Heimdall, and also Óðinn, who according to the Gesta Danorum Book 1, chapter 8.16, is said to have assisted Haddingus by shooting ten arrows from a crossbow in one shot, killing as many foes.

[26][27] Further comparing Indo-European and Oriental traditions, Rochholz concludes that the legend of the master marksman shooting an apple (or similar small target) was known outside the Germanic sphere and the adjacent regions (Finland and the Baltic) in India, Arabia, Persia and the Balkans (Serbia).