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Overview

A woman wearing silver ornaments lives among brothers whom Basset’s French narrative calls ogres. A king demands that his hunter Hamed ben Çeggad bring her to him, on the advice of townspeople jealous of the hunter’s successes. At the brothers’ house Hamed asks that they give him the woman. They agree conditionally through tests: shifting a rack loaded with a slaughtered ox, consuming its meat and couscous, bringing a branch from a distant snowy mountain, and killing a partridge flying overhead. These tasks disclose the brothers’ method of controlling access to their sister. Hamed’s extraordinary companions solve the first three, and Hamed shoots the bird.

After the trials, the brothers give their sister to the visitors and supply a feather before departure. It is a means of calling them if something happens against her wishes. Back in the city, inhabitants tell her that the old sultan will marry her. She refuses that outcome and casts the feather into the fire. Her brothers arrive and kill both the king and all the city’s inhabitants, then give the woman to Hamed. The ending combines the sister’s express refusal, supernatural intervention and mass killing; their earlier hospitality does not make them harmless helpers.

The feather connects the distant household with an immediate armed response, but the text does not describe the brothers themselves taking bird form. Their number, exact stature and diet are also unspecified in this episode. The earlier banquet is a test involving an ox, rather than an explicit scene of human flesh being served. The accompanying millstone-bearer, snow traveler and enormous-eared man belong to Hamed’s separate company and are not additional ogre brothers.

Ogre brotherhoodSequential guest trialsFeather-mediated summonsSister’s refusalCity and ruler destroyed
01

Origins & earliest records

René Basset, Contes populaires berbères (Paris, 1887), no. 27, complete pp. 56–59. Basset’s Preface xiii lists no. 27 among translations from Bibliothèque nationale fonds berbère manuscript no. 17, assembled by P. Rivière and other Kabylia missionaries. An individual oral narrator is not identified in that passage.

02

Records & interpretation

Entire French episode inspected in actual original-edition DjVu pages 94–97, printed pp. 56–59, including the complete ending. Preface xiii–xiv original images checked; written collection and direct dictation contexts are distinguished.

Selected bibliography

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

  1. 01

    Contes populaires berbères

    René Basset, French translator and editor; source contributors identified in preface and notes · 1887

    No. 27, complete pp. 56–59; Preface xiii–xiv. Basset’s Preface xiii lists no. 27 among translations from Bibliothèque nationale fonds berbère manuscript no. 17, assembled by P. Rivière and other Kabylia missionaries. An individual oral narrator is not identified in that passage.

Family & connections

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References

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  1. Primary collected narrative; original facsimile inspectedOriginal edition, complete narrative 27Research access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

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