The Sharp Grey Sheep
Scottish fairy tale
The Sharp Grey Sheep or The Sharp-Horned Grey Sheep is a Scottish fairy tale collected by John Francis Campbell in Popular Tales of the West Highlands, listing his informant as John Dewar, labourer, from Glendaruail, Cowal.
It is Aarne-Thompson type 510A “the persecuted heroine”, and another Scottish variant is Rushen Coatie.
Synopsis
A king and queen had a daughter, but the queen died and the king married another. The stepmother was cruel to the princess and sent her to watch the sheep while not sending her enough food to survive. A sharp (horned) grey sheep helped her by bringing her food. The stepmother, knowing she could not be getting enough food to survive from her, went to a henwife, and the henwife set her daughter to spy. The princess told the henwife's daughter to set her head on her knee, and she would dress her hair; the henwife's daughter slept, and the sheep came to help her. The henwife's daughter had an eye on the back of her head that was not asleep; she watched through it and told her mother.
On learning that the sheep was helping her, the stepmother ordered the sheep killed. The sheep told the princess to gather her bones and hooves in the hide and it would return to her.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Sharp Grey Sheep” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.