One for Sorrow, Two For Joy: Difference between revisions

''Three for a girl, four for a boy,''

''Five for silver, six for gold,''

 

{{quote|''Other birds collect twigs for their nests. Magpies collect jewels for theirs.''|Flavor Text for the ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' card [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=129764 Thieving Magpie]}}

 

One popular [[Any Torment You Can Walk Away From]] [[Happy Ending]] is for accusations of theft to be cleared up by the revelation that a magpie stole the item in question.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* Invoked in ''[[Sandman]]''

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* There's a book called ''One For Sorrow, Two For Joy'', by Clive Woodall, about more-or-less-anthropomorphic birds. It's a little like ''[[Watership Down]]'', but with birds. The villains are magpies.

* Tom McCaughren's ''Run with the Wind'' series about a group of Irish foxes has a flock of magpies as minor villains.

* In [[J. R. R. Tolkien]]'s ''Unfinished Tales'', one of the tales after ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'' includes going through Saruman's tower and discovering he had become not a dragon but a magpie with what he hoarded. They still find a treasure there.

 

* ''Magpie'' was the name of a kids' TV show on [[ITV]] in the 1970s (which was pretty much a ''[[Blue Peter]]'' lookalike). The theme tune used a version of the rhyme as its lyrics, and the show's mascot was a cartoon magpie named Murgatroyd, who looked too fat to fly.

* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "Boom Town", the Slitheen Margaret Blaine described the Doctor as having a "magpie mind", i.e. one that's always collecting bits of information.

* Richard Hammond on ''[[Top Gear]]'' once went on about how dangerous Magpies are while driving, because of all the gestures you have to preform. Seems Hammond got a bit confused, and rather than picking one of the many variations to ward off bad luck, chose them all.

 

* The rhyme itself appears in the song "A Murder of One" by [[Counting Crows]]. As corvids, magpies are part of a family of birds known as crows. The rhyme is also the origin of the band's name.

* Seanan McGuire's [[Filk Song]] [http://seananmcguire.com/songbook.php?id=143 "Counting Crows"] opens with a version of the rhyme, and continues on the theme. Chorus:

* A magpie appears in the artwork to some early albums by [[Marillion]], and is referred to in the lyrics of ''Misplaced Childhood''. One of the band's live albums is titled ''La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie)'' after the Rossini opera (see below).

* [[Patrick Wolf]] has a song that quotes the aforementioned rhyme as the last stanza. Unsurprisingly the song itself is named [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mLhqJMy_WA Magpie]

 

== [[Oral Tradition]] ==

** '-eight's a wish, and nine a kiss; ten is a bird you must not miss.'

** ... eight for heaven, nine for hell, And ten for the devil's own sel'.

* The "Freedom City" setting for ''[[Mutants and Masterminds]]'' has a [[Gentleman Thief]] named Magpie who can [[Transporters and Teleporters|teleport]], but ''never'' would he teleport ''into'' a building—he [[Self-Imposed Challenge|savors the challenge of breaking in the hard way]]. His power is used ''only'' for last-second escapes, and even then only if he can't vanish any other way.

* Both normal and giant magpies were described in the ''Creature Catalog'', a monster book for Basic/Expert/etc D&D. Their stats made them weak in combat, but excellent filchers of unattended shiny objects; in effect, they were a potential hook for the DM to lure parties into other encounters, by having a magic item snatched up by this trope's embodiment and forcing them to pursue it.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Avian Tropes]]

[[Category:Fate and Prophecy Tropes]]