Impossible Task: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 9 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.1
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* [[Child Ballad]] #2 ("The Elfin Knight"), and its folk-processed descendant "Scarborough Fair." See page quote.
* The horde of chores heaped upon Cinderella by her [[Wicked Stepmother]] were of this nature. Not impossible in and of themselves, but all heaped together they make an insurmountable task.
** In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130824062133/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/cinderella/stories/german.html Aschenputtel]'' (the German version of Cinderella), the [[Wicked Stepmother]] set such a task to let her go to the ball:
{{quote|''"I have emptied a dish of lentils into the ashes for thee, if thou hast picked them out again in two hours, thou shalt go with us."''}}
* The Russian fairy tale of [[Vasilisa The Beautiful]] involves many of these. Vasilisa's [[Wicked Stepmother]] sends her to fetch fire from Baba Yaga, expecting the girl to be eaten alive. Baba Yaga instead sets her to work on tasks that include threshing a roomful of wheat, stripping 10,000 ears of corn, and picking out a wagonload of poppy seeds from black flour dust, each in a single night. With the help of her magic doll she completes all the tasks and retrieves the magic fire, and when she brings it home, its light burns her wicked stepmother and stepsisters to ashes.
* A Jewish Fairy Tale: the king told some guy to tell him the number of hairs on his head, the number of stars in the sky, and the center of the earth. The guy plucks a hair from the king's head and says "one fewer than there were before", the number of stars in the sky is equal to the number of hairs in his donkey's tail, and the center of the earth is where his donkey stamps its foot. When the king gets upset with those answers, the guy basically says "if you're so smart, then you tell me." He gets to go free.
* The stepmother in ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130906231232/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/frogking/stories/wellworld.html The Well At the World's End]'' sends her stepdaughter to the title well with a sieve.
* The stepmother sends her stepdaughter into the winter woods to get strawberries in ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20140324190359/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/13threemenforest.html The Three Little Men In the Wood].''
* One story of the peasant's clever daughter is Grimms' ''[http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/94peasantcleverdaughter.html The Peasant's Clever Daughter]''
* In ''[http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/116.htm The Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen]'' the stepmother plays a game of cards with her stepsons so she can force them on an impossible quest.
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* From the [[Arabian Nights]]: Aladdin gives the sultan a bunch of large jewels in exchange for the sultan's daughter's hand in marriage. The sultan tells Aladdin to bring 40 slaves carrying 40 trays all filled with those kinds of jewels and then he will consider. The sultan considers this impossible. Aladdin of course has a genie, so problem solved.
* [[wikipedia:The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter|Princess Kaguya's impossible tasks]]
* In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20131104152714/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/cinderella/stories/birch.html The Wonderful Birch]'', the [[Wicked Witch]] takes her daughter to the feast, and orders her [[Wicked Stepmother|stepdaughter]] to pick barleycorns from the cinders while she's gone.
* In [https://web.archive.org/web/20171112142905/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/jacobs/english/fishring.html The Fish and the Ring], [https://web.archive.org/web/20130326131857/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/russian/russianwondertales/vasiliiunlucky.html Vasilii the Unlucky], [https://web.archive.org/web/20131217180139/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/29devilgoldhairs.html The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs], [http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/260.htm The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate], and many other fairy tales, a man who discovers finds his child [[Self Fulfilling Prophecies|doomed]] to marry a poor child tries to kill them with many tasks, before and after the wedding; in the end, he fails.
* In ''[http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/038.htm The Grateful Beasts]'', Ferko is cut all the corn in a single night, gather it all into barns the next night, and summon all the wolves in the land. It stops with the wolves because, well, they're [[Big Badass Wolf|wolves]].
* The fairy tale type Kind and Unkind Girls often features this.
** In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20140324190359/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/13threemenforest.html The Three Little Men in the Wood]'', the stepdaughter is sent out to gather strawberries in the snow. She meets and is polite to the title men, and they send her to a place with strawberries and give her more blessings. So the [[Wicked Stepmother]] sends her own daughter, who is rude and so finds nothing
** In ''[http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/diamondstoads/stories/holle.html Frau Holle]'', when the girl drops her shuttle in the well, her [[Wicked Stepmother]] orders her to fetch it out again.
** In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130718151010/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/diamondstoads/stories/caskets.html The Two Caskets]'', the [[Wicked Stepmother]] sets a spinning competition between her daughter and her stepdaughter, with the first getting good flax and the second coarse stuff that no one would spin.
* [[Seen It a Million Times|Many, many]] folktales of both European and Chinese origin feature a number of brothers with improbable talents given impossible tasks for fame, fortune, the Emperor's service or the [[Standard Hero Reward|hand of a princess]]. Sometimes they resemble each other closely enough to pass for the same person capable of a wide range of miracles.
* The third classic example is from a Swedish saga, in which the full list of conditions is that the heroine cannot visit the king by foot, by horse, in a wagon, nor in a boat. She could not visit him either dressed or undressed. It could not be day or night, a month or a year, and the moon couldn't be waxing or waning. As described above, she wore a fishing-net, balanced one foot on a sledge and the other on a goat, and went at dusk. She also went on the third day of Yule, which was considered to lie outside the normal count of the year.
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