Koschei's Needle
Needle in which the Russian fairy-tale villain Koschei the Deathless hides his soul, so that he cannot be killed while it remains intact. In Afanasyev's collected tales the needle lies inside an egg, the egg inside a duck, the duck inside a hare, and the hare inside a chest locked on an island oak; the hero must open each container in turn and break the needle to destroy Koschei. The motif recurs across Slavic and wider folklore, and variants replace the needle with a flower, a spider or a bird's egg. Folklorists class it among the 'external soul' tales, in which a being stores its life force