Household Tales · Chapter
The Shepherd Boy explained
A shepherd boy renowned for his wise answers is summoned by a skeptical king, who promises to adopt him as his own child if he can answer three impossible questions.
What happens
A shepherd boy renowned for his wise answers is summoned by a skeptical king, who promises to adopt him as his own child if he can answer three impossible questions. The boy cleverly responds to each: the number of drops in the ocean, stars in the sky, and seconds in eternity, using ingenious logic. Impressed, the king honors his word and welcomes the boy into his palace.
Themes in this chapter
Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished
The shepherd boy's wisdom is rewarded with royal adoption, while the king's skepticism is overcome through cleverness.
Characters to notice
- the boy
The shepherd boy who answers the king's three questions with wisdom and is adopted as the king's child.
- the young King
The king who tests the shepherd boy with three questions and later regards him as his own child.
Key passages
“Lord King, if you will have all the rivers on earth dammed up so that not a single drop runs from them into the sea until I have counted it, I will tell you how many drops there are in the sea.”
The boy says that if the king stops all rivers from flowing into the ocean, he will count the drops.
The boy uses a conditional impossibility to answer the first question.
“Give me a great sheet of white paper, and then he made so many fine points on it with a pen that they could scarcely be seen, and it was all but impossible to count them; anyone who looked at them would have lost his sight.”
The boy covers a paper with tiny dots, claiming the stars are as numerous as those dots.
He answers the second question by creating an uncountable visual analogy.
“In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”
The boy describes a mountain that a bird wears down over eons, marking the first second of eternity.
He uses an immense timescale to illustrate the concept of eternity.