Brothers With A Sister
In tales where the brothers had a sister, she is usually the heroine of the tale, as in The Seven Ravens, The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird (in the second generation), The Fair Fiorita, The Death of Koschei the Deathless, or The Twelve Wild Ducks. Even in these tales, the youngest son may be set out: in The Seven Ravens, he is the first to guess that their sister has found them; in The Twelve Wild Ducks, he argues against his oldest brother, who wants to kill their sister as the cause of their misery.
Sibling rivalry in fairy tales is, in general, a trait of same-sex siblings.
Read more about this topic: Youngest Son
Famous quotes containing the words brothers and/or sister:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Surely a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the wife comes after.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)