The Battle of the Birds
He recorded it in 1859 from a fisherman near Inverary, John Mackenzie[2] and was, at the time, building dykes on the Ardkinglas estate.
[3][4] The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 313, "The Magic Flight" ("Girl Helps the Hero Flee") or "The Devil's (Ogre's/Giant's) Daughter".
It offered to put it back if the prince gave him his first son, when he reached seven years of age.
When the giant nearly caught them, the daughter had the prince take a twig from the filly's ear and throw it behind them: it became a forest.
[8] The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 313, "The Magic Flight" (previously, "Girl helps the hero flee").
[10][11] This combination usually marks the tale type ATU 313B, "Girl helps in hero's flight" with introduction "The Forbidden Box".
[13] Moreover, Norwegian folklorist Reidar Thoralf Christiansen remarked that this ending motif was "very common".
[17] Similarly, according to Russian folklorist Lev Barag [ru], type 313B, with the starting episode of the quarrel between animals and the hero's father rescuing the bird, only appears in "East Slavic, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French, Scottish and Irish" variants.
[19] According to him, the Irish Folklore Commission catalogued 66 manuscripts as of 1943, and he supposed that a complete archive should yield "several hundred [variants], at least".
[22] Norwegian folklorist Reidar Thoralf Christiansen remarked that the opening motif of The Battle of the Birds "is better known in Scottish-Gaelic versions".
[14] François-Marie Luzel collected a variant from informant Marguerite Phillipe, from Lower Brittany, in 1868, and published it with the title L'hiver et le Roitelet ("Winter and the Kinglet").
However, a mouse, already living in the mousehole, quarrels with the kinglet and both summon all flying animals and quadrupeds for a war.
Later, the prince takes the eagle's sister as his wife back to his kingdom, and breaks his ring in two to give the maiden one half, to always remember him by.
[16] Professor Jack V. Haney stated that the combination of AT 222* and AT 313 was more common in the East Slavic area (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus).
[24] Nisbet Bain translated a Cossack (Ukrainian) variant titled The Magic Egg: a lark and a shrew-mouse quarrel over the crop yields and then go to war against each other.
Out of these variants, tales number 219-221 and 224 begin with the hero's father (soldier, hunter, archer) meeting the eagle, flying on its wings and receiving a magical casket that he cannot close.
Very soon, the antagonist of the tale appears to help the man close the box in exchange for his son.
