The story from India is related, but doesn't actually involve marrow bones. And Jim's one from Mikeen McCarthy is a different one, related to Get Up and Bar the Door.

I have heard a version that does involve bones, years ago on a TV programme. It comes from Tibet. I had been wondering about writing it out to post here. It involves talking animals: a fox, a yak and a wolf.

I can't be bothered to write it out at length, but here's an outline.

The fox and the yak are friends, but whereas the yak only has to crop grass, the fox has to go off and hunt. The yak is worried about the wolf coming to eat him, so they agree that, if the wolf appears, the yak will bellow and the fox will come back to rescue him.

The fox is just about to pounce on a tasty rabbit when he hears a bellow, so he runs back; to find no wolf, only the yak getting lonely and worried. This happens two or three times, so eventually the fox ignores the bellow, and when he eventually does come back the wolf has been and all that remains of the yak is a pile of bones.

SO -- thus far we have the tale known in Europe as The Boy Who Cried "Wolf".

But it goes on.

The fox gets hold of a big pot (you know, the kind the cannibals used to boil the missionaries in), puts in the bones and starts to stew them. After a while the wolf smells the stew and comes to investigate.

The wolf puts his nose in the pot, but the boiled bones have made a thick sticky jelly and it's still too hot. The more he tries to wipe it off his snout, the more it gets in his eyes, until he can't see at all -- whereupon the fox kills him.

And that's how marrow bones in particular, rather than anything else, could make someone blind.