Corpus Delicti
The Murdered Man's Dog
The young wife of an elderly Modenese man wishes to marry her young lover instead. She attempts to poison her husband in order to have it appear like a natural death, but he survives the poison. At last, she convinces her lover to murder her husband, but the lover drops the dagger. She picks it up, and cuts the man's throat herself, stabbing him in the heart for good measure. The two decide to bury the body together outside of the city walls. One day, the dead man's dog passes the place where he is buried, and pulls a bloody piece of cloth from the shallow grave; the alarm is raised, the man's body is exhumed and eventually identified, and his wife is caught and executed.
Adapted from Wikeley's (1983) discussion of Erasto by Ava Byrne, edited by Jane Bonsall.
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Nishimura notes the following: Motifs: TMI B134.2: Dog betrays murder. B153.1: Dog indicates other hidden object. J1145.1: Murderer detected by actions of murdered man’s dog. Analogues: Hagen, Gesamtabenteuer, 8 ‘Die Königin von Frankreich und der ungetreue Marschalk’ (a dog leads a person to where his murdered master is buried, resulting in revenge on the murderer). Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, 434 ‘Der Hund verriet ein Mörder’ (the victim’s dog attacks the murderer whenever he meets him). Zen-Aku-Mukui-Banashi, 1.6. Seikyu Yadan, 6. A story similar to this one is told in Okamoto Kido’s ‘Giken’ (The Righteous Dog), pp. 213-214 of Chinese Mysterious Stories. Reference stories, etc.: Aristophanes, The Festival of the Women only, (p. 260.). Hagen, ‘Von begrabene Ehemann’, in Gesamtabenteuer, 45. Bandello, Le Novelle, 1.9, 2.33. Zen-Aku-Mukui-Banashi, 1.3 ‘The stepmother kills her daughter-in-law’. Bibliography: Chauvin VIII 242. Hagen, I, pp. civ-cxii. |
| Critical Literature |
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| Wikeley (1983), Nishimura (2001) |
| Corpus Delicti appears in the following versions and secondary versions |
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| Corpus Delicti is narrated in the following occurrences |
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| No recorded narrations available. |
| Corpus Delicti appears in the following manuscripts |
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| This inset story appears in no manuscripts of the database |