The Three Sillies

Once upon a time there was a farmer, who lived with his wife and beautiful daughter. One day a traveller came to the farm. It won’t surprise you one bit to hear that he fell in love with the beautiful girl the second he laid eyes on her. The girl fell for the young lad as well, and the happy family invited him for dinner.

When the table was set and dinner was ready, the farmer sent his daughter with a jug to the cellar to fetch some beer. The girl opened the heavy wooden door and went downstairs into the cold room.

While she was drawing the beer into a jug, she looked up at the ceiling and noticed an axe wedged into a ceiling beam above her. How long has that axe been there? She thought. I’ve never seen it before. Who could have left it here?

Suddenly it struck her how dangerous it was to have an axe stuck in a ceiling.

If I married the traveller and then we had a son, one day when he is older, we would send him to the cellar for beer, and the axe would fall and kill him!

Her parents and the young man began to wonder what had been taking her so long. Finally, her mother went into the cellar to look for her. She found her daughter sitting on a wooden bench, weeping silently while the beer flowed from the barrel and splashed all over the floor. Her worried mother asked what had happened and the girl pointed at the axe in the wooden beam. She didn’t need to say another word; immediately, her mother pictured all the terrible things that could happen and began to weep.

The men upstairs found it odd that…