The Boys with the Golden Stars () is a Romanian fairy tale collected in . Andrew Lang included it in The Violet Fairy Book. An alternate title to the tale is The Twins with the Golden Star.
The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", albeit following a specific narrative that is found in Romania, Moldova, and Hungary, as well as in other Eastern European and Balkanic countries. These tales refer to stories where a girl promises a king she will bear a child or children with wonderful attributes, but her jealous relatives or the king's wives plot against the babies and their mother.
Origins The Romanian tale was first published in the Romanian magazine , in October, 1874, and signed by Romanian author Ioan Slavici.
Synopsis
A herdsman had three daughters, Ana, Stana and Laptița. The youngest was the most beautiful. One day, the emperor was passing with attendants. The oldest daughter said that if he married her, she would bake him a loaf of bread that would make him young and brave forever; the second one said, if one married her, she would make him a shirt that would protect him in any fight, even with a dragon, and against heat and water; the youngest one said that she would bear him twin sons with stars on their foreheads. The emperor married the youngest, and two of his friends married the other two.
The emperor's stepmother had wanted him to marry her daughter and so hated his new wife. She got her brother to declare war on him, to get him away from her, and when the empress gave birth in his absence, killed and buried the twins in the corner of the garden and put puppies in their place. The emperor punished his wife to show what happened to those who deceived the emperor.
Two aspens grew from the grave, putting on years' growth in hours. The stepmother wanted to chop them down, but the emperor forbade it. Finally, she convinced him, on the condition that she had beds made from the wood, one for him and one for her. In the night, the beds began to talk to each other. The stepmother had two new beds made, and burned the originals. While they were burning, the two brightest sparks flew off and fell into the river. They became two golden fish. When fishermen caught them, they wanted to take them alive to the emperor. The fish told them to let them swim in dew instead, and then dry them out in the sun. When they did this, the fish turned back into babies, maturing in days.
Wearing lambskin caps that covered their hair and stars, they went to their father's castle and forced their way in. Despite their refusal to take off their caps, the emperor listened to their story, only then removing their caps. The emperor executed his stepmother and took back his wife.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children".Lang, Andrew; Philip, Neil. A World of fairy tales. New York: Dial Books, 1994. p. 254. Despite being classified as type 707, the narrative differs in its intermediate part: the twin children are buried and go through a cycle of incarnations, from trees (firs, walnut trees, apple trees, etc.), to objects, to animals (lambs, rams or birds) to human children again.
Folklorist Corneliu Barbulescu studied the Romanian variants of tale type 707 and discerned two narratives: one that matches the international tale type (youngest of three sisters gives birth to three children who are cast in water; siblings go on quest for marvellous objects), which only registers 18 variants in Romania, and another with 44 texts, involving twin children being buried and undergoing a cycle of reincarnations. Barbulescu termed the second cycle, unlisted in the international index,Petre Ispirescu: Opere. Volume 1. Ed. Minerva, 1971. p. lxviii (in Romanian). as type 707C*, Însiră-te mărgăritar, after a tale published by Petre Ispirescu. In this cycle, the king marries a woman that promises wonder children, but they are buried in the garden; from their graves, two trees with golden leaves or golden fruits sprout which bend down respectfully for the king; the trees are made into beds which talk at night, and are burned; two sparks escape and are eaten by a goat, which gives birth to two golden-fleeced lambs that are killed; its entrails are washed in the river, but wash away and are carried away by the river to a willow tree, where the twins regain human form; they later are found by a shepherd, go to their father's court and tell the whole story.
Motifs The birth of the wonder-children
Most versions of The Boys With Golden StarsA Companion to the Fairy Tale. Edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudhri. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. 2003. p. 43. begin with the birth of male twins, but very rarely there are fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. When they transform into human babies again, the siblings grow up at an impossibly fast rate and hide their supernatural trait under a hood or a cap. Soon after, they show up in their father's court or house to reveal the truth through a riddle or through a ballad."The Golden Twins". Ispirescu, Petre. The foundling prince, & other tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1917. pp. 65-84.
The motif of a woman's babies, born with wonderful attributes after she claimed she could bear such children, but stolen from her, is a common fairy tale motif; see "The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird", "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", "The Three Little Birds", "The Wicked Sisters", "Ancilotto, King of Provino", and "Princess Belle-Etoile". Some of these variants feature an evil stepmother.
The reincarnation motif Daiva Vaitkevičienė suggested that the transformation sequence in the tale format (from human babies, to trees, to lambs/goats and finally to humans again) may be underlying a theme of reincarnation, metempsychosis or related to a life-death-rebirth cycle. This motif is shared by other tale types, and does not belong exclusively to the ATU 707.
French scholar Gédeon Huet noted the "striking" (frappantes, in the original) similarities between these versions of ATU 707 and the Ancient Egyptian story of The Tale of Two Brothers - "far too great to be coincidental", as he put it.Huet, Gédeon. "Le Conte des soeurs jalouses". In: Revue d'ethnographie et de sociologie. Deuxiême Volume. Paris: E. Leroux, 1910. Gr. in-8°, pp. 189-191.
India-born author Maive Stokes noted the resurrective motif of the murdered children, and found parallels among European tales published during that time.Stokes, Maive. Indian fairy tales, collected and tr. by M. Stokes; with notes by Mary Stokes. London: Ellis and White. 1880. pp. 250-251. Austrian consul Johann Georg von Hahn also remarked on a similar transformation sequence present in a Greek tale from Asia Minor, Die Zederzitrone, a variant of The Love for Three Oranges (ATU 408).Hahn, Johann Georg von. Griechische und Albanesische Märchen 1-2. München/Berlin: Georg Müller. 1918 . pp. 404. Bulgarian folklorist noted the resemblance between the twins' cycle of reincarnations to the heroine's of Bulgarian tale type ATU 408, "Неродена мома" ("The Maiden Who Was Never Born").
Asian parallels A similar occurrence of the tree reincarnation is attested in the Bengali folktale The Seven Brothers who were turned into Champa TreesBradley-Birt, Francis Bradley; and Abanindranath Tagore. Bengal Fairy Tales. London: John Lane, 1920. pp. 150–152. (Sat Bhai Chompa, first published in 1907)Roy, Arnab Dutta (2015). "Deconstructing Universalism: Tagore's Vision of Humanity". In: South Asian Review, 36:2, 193 (footnote nr. 22). DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2015.11933024 and in the tale The Real Mother, collected in Simla.Dracott, Alice Elizabeth. Simla Village Tales, or Folk Tales from the Himalayas. England, London: John Murray. 1906. pp. 6-12.
In a Thai tale, Champa Si Ton or The Four Princes (Thai: สี่ยอดกุมาร), king Phaya Chulanee, ruler of the City of Panja, is already married to a woman named Queen Akkee. He travels abroad and reaches the deserted ruins of a kingdom (City of Chakkheen). He saves a princess named Pathumma from inside a drum she was hiding in when some terrifying creatures attacked her kingdom, leaving her as the sole survivor. They return to Panja and marry. Queen Pathumma is pregnant with four sons, to the envy of the first wife. She replaces the sons for dogs to humiliate the second queen, and throws the babies in the river.Thanapol (Lamduan) Chadchaidee. Fascinating Folktales of Thailand. BangkokBooks, 2011. 121ff (tale nr. 25) A version of the tale is also preserved in palm-leaf manuscript form. The tale continues as the four princes are rescued from the water and buried in the garden, only to become champa trees and later regaining their human shapes.
In a Laotian version of Champa Si Ton, or The Four Champa Trees, King Maha Suvi is married to two queens, Mahesi and Mahesi Noi. Queen Mahesi gives birth to the four princes, who are taken to the water in a basket. When they are young, they are poisoned by the second queen and buried in the village, four champa trees sprouting on their graves. The second queen learns of their survival and orders the trees to be felled down and thrown in the river. A monk sees their branches with flowers and takes them off the river.Sasorith, Issara Katay; Lucas, Alice. Four Champa Trees. A Traditional Laotian Folktale Told in English and Lao and Teacher Discussion Guide. San Francisco, CA: Voices of Liberty, 1990. pp. 5-15.
A similar series of transformations is found in "Beauty and Pock Face" and "The Story of Tam and Cam".
In a Burmese tale titled The Big Tortoise, at the end of the tale, after she was replaced by her ugly stepsister, the heroine goes through two physical transformations: the heroine, Mistress Youngest, visits her stepfamily, who drops a cauldron of boiling water over her and she becomes a white paddy-bird. Later, the false bride kills her bird form and asks the cook to roast it. The cook buries the bird's remains behind the kitchen, where a quince tree sprouts. An old couple passes by the quince tree and a large fruit falls on their lap that they take home and put in an earthen jar. The fruit contains the true princess and, when the old couple leaves their cottage, the princess goes out of the earthen jar to tidy up the place.Aung Maung Htin. Burmese Folk-Tales. Oxford University Press. 1948. pp. 112-124.
In a Chinese tale from Fujian, Da Jie (also a Cinderella variant), after Da Jie marries a rich scholar, her stepfamily devises a plan to replace her with Da Jie's smallpox-riddled stepsister, Xia Mei. Xia Mei shoves Da Jie into a well, but she turns into a sparrow, which communicates with her husband to alert him of the substitution. Xia Mei kills the sparrow and buries it in the garden. In that spot a bamboo tree grows, which soothes her husband and annoys the false spouse. Xia Mei decides to have the bamboo tree made into a bed. If the scholar sleeps on it, he feels refreshed; if the stepsister sleeps on it, she feels awful, so she notices it is Da Jie's doing. She orders the bed to be burnt down, but an old woman discovers its charred remains and brings them home. When she goes out and returns at night, she notices someone has prepared her dinner. On the third night, she senses the presence of Da Jie and helps her regain human form and later reunite her with the husband.Classic Folk Tales from Around the World. Vol. 2. DC Books. pp. 37-45. .
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