What is it really about? In the original, everything is very strange.
One of the earliest fairy tales that parents tell children in Russia is the tale about the turnip. You all know her well, of course. The grandfather there can not pull a huge repishka out of the ground, he calls his grandmother, granddaughter, etc.
Who would have thought that because of this fairy tale so many copies break, people have fierce disputes and consider it an insoluble riddle? Not all, of course, but those who read the original version.
The fact is that the text that we know is a late processing of the tale. And in its original form it was recorded by Russian folklorists in the Arkhangelsk province and published in 1863 by Alexander Afanasyev in the collection "Russian folk tales".
She looks in this collection very strange and unusual for today's eye. Here is the full text:
What do we see? There is no cat and mouse here. But there are some strange legs that actually solve the problem of the grandfather. But why do five of them come one after another?
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Literary critics, folklorists, journalists and Internet users have been fighting over the mystery of the fifth leg for quite a long time. The most different versions are expressed - here they see references to the days of the week, to the Slavic calendar, to astronomy.
One of the most original explanations points to the peculiarities of Slavic architecture. Allegedly, the Slavs called the "fifth leg" an angle of 60-70 degrees, under which the rafters were to be placed to support the roof.
But recent studies have found analogues of the turnip tale among Russian tongue twister songs. There, too, the grandfather sows a turnip, and then the turmoil begins - legs come, etc. But there can be five, or six, and seven legs here - up to ten!
The conclusion is simple - there is no sacredness in the fifth leg. It's just that a grandmother from the Arkhangelsk province, who was telling this tale to a folklorist, stopped on her fifth leg. Or it could be at the eighth or tenth. The fairy tale itself is one of the so-called boring and can be told to children endlessly until they fall asleep. It's like counting sheep.