Amatores
The Three Lovers
Three different men observe a woman singing at her window, and all fall in love with her. One by one, they approach her and proposition her, and she tells each of them that in order to win her affections, they must pay her a sum of gold, and arrive at a specific time the following day. Then she tells her husband to wait behind the door, and as each lover arrives, she takes their gold, then they are killed by the husband. However, the pair must now dispose of three corpses. The wife calls her brother, a night watchman, to ask for his help, and tells him that her husband argued with a man, and accidentally killed him. The brother agrees to help dispose of the body, carries one of the corpses away in a sack, and throws it into the sea. However, when he returns to his sister's home to tell her that he has done the deed, he finds her wailing that the dead man has somehow returned - the corpse of the man has reappeared. Puzzled, the brother takes the second corpse away in a sack, and adds a heavy stone to the bag before throwing it into the sea. But when he arrives back at his sister's home, the woman once again cries that the dead man has again returned. Tired of this eerie corpse, the brother carries away the (third) body, takes it into the woods, builds a pyre, and burns it. As he prepares to leave, however, he turns around, and suddenly sees a traveller - a knight who had wandered toward the fire from the road. Seeing this mysterious figure next to the pyre, the brother believes it is the stubbornly returning dead man, and kills him and pushes him into the flames. When he returns, his sister and her husband understand that they are responsible for the deaths of four men. Eventually, in a public argument, their crimes are revealed.
Nishimura (2001) notes the connections of this text to broader folktale motifs, e.g.: Thompson Motif Index K433.2 ('Clever wife gets money from those who attempt to seduce her') and K2151 ('The corpse handed around' or 'the thrice-killed corpse'). The second of these tale-types is also analogous to Thompson Motif Index K2322 ('The three hunchback brothers drowned'), titled 'Gibbosi' in the Seven Sages text; Amatores and Gibbosi are closely related.
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