Not all folktales are designed to teach or explain. Some, like this one, were popular for their entertainment value. In this story, a rich young man finds that the woman he loves and her family are not very clever. He decides that he will only marry the girl if he can find three people sillier than they are. A woman trying to push her cow up a ladder, a man who can’t get his trousers on, and a whole village trying to rescue a shadow from a pond prove that there certainly are sillier people in the world.
Our source for the story was a children’s book called English Fairy Tales by folktale collector Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1890. There are so many folktales about people who do foolish things that in 1888 a book was devoted to them: The Book of Noodles: Stories of Simpletons, or Fools and their Follies by W. A. Clouston. This story is mentioned in Chapter 7.
A variation of the story is Clever Elsie by the Grimm Brothers (Household Tales No. 34, Die kluge Else). This story continues beyond the point that the couple get married and ends when not-so-clever Elsie runs out of her village, never to be seen again.
Original Text / PDF (1,332 words)