The Boy with the Moon on his Forehead

The Boy with a Moon on his Forehead is a Bengali folktale collected by Maive Stokes and Lal Behari Day.

These tales are classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children". 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. Many variants of the tale type are registered in India, although they comprise specific cycles in this country.

Summary Stokes's version In Maive Stokes's version, later republished by folklorist Joseph Jacobs, titled The Boy who had a Moon on his Forehead and a Star on his Chin, a gardener's daughter says out loud, to her friends' mockery, that when she marries she will give birth to a boy with a moon on the forehead and a star on the chin. Her friends think she is only jesting, but her words draw the king's attention, who makes her his fifth cowife.

A year later, the king's other four queens convince the newly crowned one that the king may give her a kettle drum to inform the time of labour is approaching. The fifth queen sounds the kettle-drum three times to see if the king comes to her. He does on the first two occasions, but on the third he is absent, which creates a window of opportunity for the other queens to replace her son for a stone and deliver the baby to a nurse to kill him.

The nurse takes the boy in a box and buries it in the jungle, but the king's royal hound, named Shankar, goes to the hole and swallows the boy (but does not eat him). The dog takes the boy and rears him for a time. His master, the king's dogkeeper, sees the boy after the dog spits him out and marvels at the boy's beauty. The four queens learn that the boy is still alive and demand the dog to be killed come morning. The dog, however, saves the boy by giving him to the king's cow Suri, who swallows the boy in its belly.

The four queens once again learn of the boy's survival and order the cow to be sacrificed, but the boy is saved by the cow, who delivers him to the king's horse, Katar. The news of his survival reach the four queens' ears, who beg the king to sacrifice the horse. When a cadre of the king's sepoys surround the barn, the horse tells the prince to get some princely clothes, a bridle, a saddle, a sword and a gun from the stable, and ride it to escape execution.

The boy and Katar reach another country and exchange their clothes for common disguises, and the horse becomes a donkey. The prince with a moon takes up a job as a grain merchant's apprentice. On one hot day, the boy begins to sing to pass the time, and the local king's seventh daughter listens to the song. The princess goes to the royal garden, located neat the grain merchant's shop, and inquires the youth about his origins. He evades her questions. The princess insists on knowing about him, and this time he answers he is only a poor boy.

Some time later, the princess tells her father she wants to get married, and she must choose her husband. The king gathers a royal assemblage in the royal gardens, where the princess is to select her betrothed by placing a golden necklace around their neck, and she chooses the grain merchant's apprentice. The princes and rajás protest her choice, but the king accepts his new son-in-law

After their marriage, the princess feels a bit saddened that her intended does not join with her sisters' husbands in hunting game around the palace. The prince consults with the magic horse Katar (shaped like a donkey), and they transform back into a gallant prince and a horse. The duo hunt birds and deer, and stop to rest under a tree. The other six brothers-in-law come and see him in the guise of the prince with a moon and a star, and beg him for food and drink. The prince agrees, so long as the six other men suffer a red-hot iron scar on their backs.

The prince returns to the palace in his true form, to everyone's surprise. He tells the truth to his wife, who accepts him as her husband. Some time later, the prince tells Katar he wants to return to his own country to check on his father and mother. The youth and the princess visit his father's kingdom.

After the couple arrive and pitch their tents, the king pays him a visit. The youth introduces himself as a foreign prince, who wants to hold a grand banquet for the king and the whole kingdom is to be invited. Everyone comes to the celebration, except his mother, the gardener's daughter. The youth insists she is to be present too at the event. The youth greets her as a queen, to the other queens's anger.

Some days after, the prince asks the king if he has any sons. The prince reveals the whole truth to his father, and shows him the magic horse Katar, who has helped the prince so far. The king asks his son to live with him in the palace, but he will only consent if his father kills the other four queens. The king does, and restores his former queen to her proper place.Stokes, Maive S. H. Indian fairy tales. National Library of Scotland. Calcutta: Privately printed. 1879. pp. 119-137.Jacobs, Joseph. Indian Fairy Tales. New York: G. P. Putnam Sons. 1892. pp. 156–177.

Day's version In another Bengali folk tale collected by Lal Behari Dey in his Folk-Tales of Bengal with the title The Boy with the Moon on his forehead, a king has not yet fathered a son, even though he has six cowives. So he decides to marry a seventh queen. In his wanderings, he finds a cow-dung seller's beautiful daughter. In a conversation with other girls (daughter of the king's minister, daughter of a wealthy merchant, and the daughter of the royal priest), she tells them that to whoever marries her, she will bear him a boy and a girl (the girl "divinely fair"; the boy with "the moon on his forehead and stars on the palms of his hands").

The king decides to marry the girl who promises the wonder children, to her mother's surprise and to the anger and jealousy of the other six queens. The king gives her a bell and tells her he will be travelling for the next six months. The other queens convince the girl to ring the bell to prove that the king will return to her side. After three times, the king grows impatient and will not returns after a fourth ringing.

The six queens take the seventh queen and a midwife to a hut in the stables, replace the twins for puppies and give them to be disposed by the midwife. She puts both babies in an earthenware pot and takes the vessel to a poor potter's wheel, so that he burns all vessels clays the next morning along with the infants. However, the potter and his wife wake up the next morning and discover the clay vessels have been prepared overnight. The couple also find the twins "of unearthly beauty" and raises them as their own children.

After the potter and his wife die, the twin children move to the king's city. When they enter a bazaar, the whole place illuminates all of a sudden. Fascinated by their beauty, the men at the bazaar promise to build a house for them, which they do. The boy hires a horse and hunts game in the nearby forests. One day, the king, also on a hunt, sees the mysterious boy. The youth shoots an arrow at a deer, but the force of the maneuver lets loose his turban, and the king can see his lunar birthmark.

The king returns to the six queens and tells them the incident, thinking about the son he might have had. The queens notice the youth is the boy they tried to kill in the past, and send the midwife to talk to both twins. The youth's sister is paid a visit by the midwife, who tells her her house need the kataki flower, guarded by 700 rakshasas.

The boy travels far across the ocean and finds a maiden named Pushpavati sleeping in a death-like state controlled by a golden and a silver baton. The maidens bids him to hide, as a rakshasa comes to wake up the girl. Pushpavati asks the demoness what may happen when she dies, and the creature answer that fate ordained that only the man with a moon on his forehead and stars on his palms can get a wooden box in a deep tank of water which contains the death of all rakshasas.

The boy follows the rakshasas' instructions, gets the wooden box, crushes the two bees that were inside and kills the demons. He takes a bunch of kataki flowers to his sister, along with the maiden. They return home safe and sound. One day, the youth invites the king to his house, where the whole truth is revealed by Lady Pushpavati. The king buries the six queens in the ground and reinstates the twins' mother to her rightful place.Day, Rev. Lal Behari (1883). Folk-Tales of Bengal. London: MacMillan and Co. 1883. pp. 227-247.

Analysis Tale type Both tales are classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children".Ashliman, D. L. A Guide to Folktales in the English Language: Based on the Aarne-Thompson Classification System. Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature, vol. 11. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987. p. 143. .

Late 19-century and early 20th-century scholarship noted the great similarities between the Bengali tales and European fairy tales with a similar narrative. Scholar Francis Hindes Groome already saw a parallel between this tale with the Romani tale he collected, and Brothers Grimm's The Three Little Birds.Groome, Francis Hindes. Gypsy folk-tales. London: Hurst and Blackett. 1899. pp. lxviii–lxix.

In their commentaries to the Grimm's fairy tales, folklorists Johannes Bolte and Jiří Polívka listed the Indian tales as related to the German tale The Three Little Birds.Bolte, Johannes; Polívka, Jiri. Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- u. hausmärchen der brüder Grimm. Zweiter Band (NR. 61-120). Germany, Leipzig: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. 1913. p. 390.

According to Stith Thompson' and Jonas Balys's index of Indian tales, the tale type ATU 707 shows 44 variants across Indian sources.Crowley, Daniel J. "Haring's Herring: Theoretical Implications of the "Malagasy Tale Index"." In: Journal of Folklore Research 23, no. 1 (1986): 46, 48. Accessed November 19, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3814480. Stuart Blackburn also studied Tamilian variants of the tale type, which he claimed was "one of the most frequently told Tamil tales".Blackburn, Stuart. Moral Fictions: Tamil Folktales from Oral Tradition. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2001. pp. 279-281. As for Stokes's version, it is also classified as type AaTh 532, "The Helpful Horse", in Stith Thompson and Warren Roberts's Types of Indic Oral Tales.Thompson, Stith; Roberts, Warren Everett. Types of Indic Oral Tales: India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1960. p. 79.

Motifs Folklorist Christine Goldberg, in the entry of the tale type in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, noted that in Indian variants of tale type 707, the children may entice their father to the truth by trying to feed a wooden horse. In others, the children die and are reborn as plants, and only their mother may pluck fruits or flowers from the trees. Likewise, researcher Noriko Mayeda and Indologist W. Norman Brown divided Indian variants of type 707 in five groups: (1) quest for wonderful items; (2) reincarnation into flowers; (3) use of wooden horses; (4) children sing a song; (5) miscellaneous.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. pp. 543-544.

Dutch author Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje noted that the motif of the hero branding his brothers-in-law (or other suitors) also occurs in Indonesian literature, namely, in Banta Ali or Banta Peureudan ("Prince Ape"), and in the Hikayat Indra Bangsawan.

Variants India Folklorist Ashraf Siddiqui argued that variants of the tale type were "borrowed" into the oral corpus of the Santals, the Hos and the Birhors from the Hindus.

Quest for objects