Lady Featherflight is an American fairy tale first published in 1891, by W. W. Newell, and collected from an oral source in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[2] Author William McCarthy, "unchivalrously" deducing the ages of both women, supposes that the tale circulated in Massachusetts around the early to mid-19th century.
[3] Likewise, psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs, in his book The Creative Unconscious, claimed that this "old fairy-tale ... was well-known in Massachusetts".
That night, the giant comes to have dinner with them and, the next day, he notices that thatching the roof was not Reuben's doing and sets him another task: to separate a heap of seeds as tall as the barn.
Then, Reuben takes Featherflight to a town and tells her to climb up a tree and wait there, while he finds a suitable set of clothes.
As she waits at the top of the tree, all the women in the village, while going about their day, see the reflection of a beautiful woman in the water.
In the more common narrative sequence, the hero, on his way to a giant's house, meets the bird-maidens bathing in a lake and steals their garments.
[12] He also noted the resemblance of the episode of the heroine's reflection on the fountain with Italian tales where a slave or servant mistakes the heroine's face for her own,[13] a trait that appears in tale type ATU 408, "The Love for Three Oranges",[14] but also in some variants of type ATU 313, "The Magic Flight", in the sequence of "The Forgotten Fiancée".
[15][16] Newell also noticed the incident of the priest blessing the couple could be explained by other variants: in a Basque tale, the fairy maiden cannot enter the church for her marriage until she is baptised.
[17] W. W. Newell supported the idea that the tale type, also known as "Girl as helper in the hero's flight", was the basis for William Shakespeare's The Tempest.
[18] Psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs, in his book The Creative Unconscious, seemed to concur with the statement that Shakespeare's play contained "an old and genuine fairy-tale".