Read the fairy tale Tobia loves
The Husband Who Was to Mind the House
A farmer who’s sure housework must be easy gets exactly one day to prove it — and learns, hour by hour, just how wrong he was.
There once was a farmer who was convinced his wife never did a single thing right around the house. Every evening he came home from the fields with some new complaint — the butter wasn’t churned properly, the cow wasn’t milked on time, dinner was late again.
One evening, after yet another grumbling speech, his wife had finally had enough. “If you think it’s so easy,” she said, “then tomorrow, you stay home and mind the house, and I’ll go out and mow the field instead. Let’s see how well YOU manage.”
The farmer, quite sure he could do it without any trouble at all, agreed at once.
A morning of confidence
The next morning, his wife took the scythe and headed out to the field, and the farmer set about his new list of chores: churn the butter, milk the cow, brew the beer, and mind the baby — nothing that seemed, to him, like it should take much skill at all.
He decided to start with the beer. But halfway through brewing it, he remembered the cow still needed milking, and thinking he could do two things at once, he carried the milk pail down to the cellar — right past the beer barrel, whose tap he’d forgotten to close.
One disaster after another
By the time he noticed, beer was flooding across the cellar floor. He rushed to fix it, forgetting entirely about the cow, who had wandered off while he wasn’t watching, climbing up onto the roof of the house — which, in the old turf-roofed farmhouses of Norway, was covered in grass, exactly the kind of thing a hungry cow finds impossible to resist.
Worried the cow might fall, the farmer tied a rope around her and lowered the other end down the chimney, planning to hold it steady from inside. But just then, the baby began to cry for milk, and the farmer, torn between the rope and the baby, tied the rope to his own leg instead so his hands would be free — and turned to the porridge pot on the fire.
At that exact moment, the cow slipped on the roof. She didn’t fall far — but her weight on the rope was more than enough to yank the farmer clean up the chimney by his leg, where he hung, stuck fast, unable to do a single thing, while below him, the porridge burned black.
What his wife found
When his wife came home that evening, she found her husband hanging from the chimney by one leg, the cellar flooded with beer, the porridge ruined, and the baby still hungry. She helped him down without a word of triumph — she didn’t need to say anything at all. From that day forward, the farmer never once complained about how his wife spent her days.
Lofoten Lullaby
Play this softly while you read this tale aloud — a traditional handplayed lullaby from the Lofoten Islands, Norway.
More stories, more lullabies
This is one tale in a growing collection of traditional stories from around the world — each one paired, where we can, with a real lullaby from the same culture.