A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

Overview

A city must surrender a young woman each year to a great cloud, explicitly identified as a fairy, or face lethal objects thrown into the city. The fisherman’s eldest son witnesses the royal victim being taken into the cloud’s lap and her finger placed in its mouth. After feeding on her blood, it carries her to a palace where earlier victims lie weakened in beds. They address their captor as Mamma, but the story identifies them as seized girls rather than biological daughters.

Pressed about death, the fairy reveals a seven-headed tigress on a distant mountain. A lion must defeat it, and the egg inside its body must strike her forehead. If she regains the egg, the tigress and her security will be restored. The youth’s acquired lion form defeats the tigress; a grateful dog-fish retrieves the egg after it falls into the sea. Before striking the fairy dead, he forces her to restore the girls’ health and send them home. Her two sisters subsequently seek revenge, a separate episode ending in their own destruction.

Cloud appearanceBlood-feeding from fingerCaptive maidens in palaceLife linked to tigress’s egg
01

Origins & earliest records

Crane, Italian Popular Tales (1885), VI: The Cloud, printed pp. 30–35. The story list identifies Domenico Comparetti, No.32, La Nuvolaccia, from Pisa. The full selected English tale has been used; no individual oral narrator is named in that presentation.

02

Records & interpretation

The selected tale provides this figure’s stated form, speech or supernatural action and its narrative outcome. Crane’s preface acknowledges changes of tense and omitted repetitions; this English presentation is distinguished from independently inspecting its underlying regional collection.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

  1. 01

    Italian Popular Tales, VI: The Cloud, pp. 30–35

    Thomas Frederick Crane, translator/compiler; source Domenico Comparetti, No.32, La Nuvolaccia, from Pisa · 1885 English edition

    Complete selected tale, including its final resolution; nearby editorial comparisons remain separate.

Family, evolution & connections

The Cloud’s three fairy sisters — Pisa account

Crane VI, pp. 30–35, a selected English presentation after Comparetti no. 32 from Pisa.

Explicit sibling identification on p. 34, following the complete tale. The two avenging sisters are unnamed. This is a sibling group, not an invented common-parent genealogy. The seven-headed tigress contains the external-life egg but is not called a relative. Captive maidens’ Mamma address is not biological parentage.

Thomas Frederick Crane, Italian Popular Tales (1885), VI, The Cloud, pp. 30–35; after Comparetti no. 32, Pisa
Comparison · motif comparison

Life-Egg Sisters of the Búkolla Tale

Both tellings make an egg broken against the antagonist’s face fatal. Crane’s fairy depends on an egg inside a seven-headed tigress; in the first Búkolla tale, two sisters share an egg kept under a pillow. These are distinct arrangements of an external-life motif, not evidence of borrowing or a shared family.

Crane, Italian Popular Tales (1885), VI, The Cloud, pp. 30–35 · Icelandic Legends, first Búkolla tale, pp. 511–519, especially 518

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

  1. Primary textCrane1885: VI: The Cloud, story list and prefaceResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.

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