The Golden-Haired Children is a Turkish fairy tale collected by folklorist Ignác Kúnos.Kúnos, Ignaz. Turkish fairy tales and folk tales. Translated from the Hungarian version by R. Nisbet Bain. London: A. H. Bullen, 1901. pp. 53-74. It is related to the theme of the Calumniated Wife and is 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. According to scholars, despite the same classification as a form more commonly found across Europe, the tale and variants collected in Turkey differ in regards to the object of the quest: in the Turkish tales, the protagonists search for a beautiful maiden instead of a talking bird.
Sources The tale was first translated into Hungarian by Kúnos with the title Az aranyhajú gyermekek.Ignácz Kúnos. Török népmesék. Budapest: Hornyánszky Viktor Akadémiai Könyvkereskedése, 1899. pp. 46-63. It was later translated into German as Die goldhaarigen Kinder.In: Kúnos, Ignácz. Türkische Volksmärchen aus Stambul. Gesammelt, übersetzt und eingeleitet von Ignaz Kúnos. Leiden: Brill. 1905. pp. 63–75.
Summary In a kingdom, long ago, a woodcutter's three daughters work with sewing and stitching from morning till night, selling their work in the marketplace. One day, however, the padishah of the city bans lighting candles at night, for a period of three days and three nights. The sisters, trying to earn their living, continue their activities by candlelight and cover their house with a thick curtain.
On the third night, the padishah decides to check if his people are following the ban. He passes by the house of the three sisters, who are talking among themselves: the eldest wants to marry the royal cook to eat delicious dishes, and claims she can weave a large carpet for the padishah; the middle one the keeper of the royal wardrobe so she can wear fine clothes and claims can weave a large tent for the padishah, and the third sister to the padishah himself, for she promises to bear him twins with golden hair: the male with the symbol of a half-moon on the front, and the female with a bright star on the temples.
The padishah brings the first two sisters to prove their extraordinary claims to him, they fail, and are sent back to their poor house. The youngest sister marries him. The two sister stop by the palace gates and bribe an old woman ("the devil's own daughter") to interfere with the birth of their nephews.
The third sister gives birth to their wonder children with the astronomical birthmarks, "that darkness was turned to light when they were by". The old woman steals the babies, replace them for pups and casts the pair into a stream. They are washed away to another region. Meanwhile, an old man grazes with his she-goat, which returns milkless. The man notices and follows the she-goat, which leads him to the twins. The man takes them to his wife and adopts both as their children.
Years pass and the old couple dies. The girl spends her days at home while her brother goes hunting. One day, the boy, now a youth, meets the padishah on a hunt. The padishah feels an unexplained longing to embrace the boy as his son. He returns to the palace, growing ill with longing, and the old woman notices. She goes to the old couple's house and talks to the girl. The old woman convinces her to send her brother for the garden of the Queen of the Peris (Die Feekönigin or The Fairy Queen, in other translations) and find a branch.
The boy goes on the quest and meets the Mother of Devils, who advises him on how to get the branch. He finds the branch (a twig with little leaves, each leave with a little bird singing a song) and brings it home.
Seeing the boy's first success, the old woman returns and tells the girl of the Queen's magic mirror. He finds the Mother of Devils again and she tells him on how to enter the palace and get the mirror: he shall find two doors - open the closed one and shut the open one; he shall find a lion and a sheep - put the correct fodder in front of them; he shall find two furnaces - put out the burning one and heat up the furnace with ashes. The Boy follows the instructions, passes the garden and enters the palace. He steals the mirror, and a "mighty voice" alerts the Queen of the Peris. The Queen commands the furnaces, the animals and the doors to impede his escape, but since the boy has been kind to them, the objects and animals disobey their mistress.
The boy returns with the mirror. The old woman returns to the humble house and tells the girl to have the Queen of the Peris herself. The brother returns to the Mother of Devils, who tells him to cross a desert, pass by a large cypress wood with a tomb housing the petrified bodies of those who failed, go to her palace and shout at the top of his lungs for the Queen of the Peris. The boy follows her instructions, but the Queen of the Peris is victorious and petrifies the boy with her magic powers. However, the Queen takes pity on the boy, gets a saucer, fills with "diamond water" and sprinkles it on the boy, restoring him to life. The boy tells her he came to seek her, and she consents to return with him from "the Country of the Peris". The boy also convinces her to restore the petrified men in the tomb.
After his return, the boy marries the Queen of the Peris. She tells him the will find the padishah on his hunt and that he will invite the boy to his palace, but he should decline this invitation. It happens as she predicts. The next day, the Queen summons her Black lala and commands him to fetch her father's steed and give to her human husband, so that he can go to the palace and invite the padishah this time.
Meanwhile, the Queen of the Peris rescues her mother-in-law from her cruel punishment (being half-buried in the ground) and commands the house to be transformed into a palace. The padishah pays them a visit, sees the brother and the sister, the Queen of the Peris and his wife, and learns of the whole truth.
Analysis Tale type Folklorists and tale collectors Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Naili Boratav listed 41 variants in their joint work (Catalogue of Turkish Folktales), grouped under the banner Die Schöne or Güzel ("The Beautiful"), numbered 239 in the Typen Turkischer Volksmärchen (TTV).Eberhard, Wolfram; Boratav, Pertev Nailî. Typen türkischer Volksmärchen. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1953. pp. 287-291. Turkish type TTV 239 corresponds, in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, to tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children".Eberhard, Wolfram; Boratav, Pertev Nailî. Typen türkischer Volksmärchen. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1953. p. 422. As such, the tale was one of "the most frequent folktales" in Turkish sources.Dov Neuman (Noy). "Reviewed Work: Typen Tuerkischer Volksmaerchen by Wolfram Eberhard, Pertev Naili Boratav". In: Midwest Folklore 4, no. 4 (1954): 257. Accessed April 12, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4317494. A further study lists at least 55 versions of the story, with other ten variants collected and archived in Uysal–Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative.Walker, Barbara. (1996). "The Innocent Maligned Female in Turkish Oral Narrative". In: Erdem, ERDEM 26. SAYI, p. 825.
Motifs Quest for the supernatural maiden Part of the Turkish variants show two heroes and follow the Brother Quests for a Bride format: the aunts' helper (witch, maid, midwife, slave) suggests her brother brings home a woman of renowned beauty, who becomes his wife at the end of the story and, due to her supernatural powers, acquits her mother-in-law of any perceived wrongdoing in the king's eyes.Walker, Barbara. (1996). "The Innocent Maligned Female in Turkish Oral Narrative". In: Erdem, ERDEM 26. SAYI, p. 827. Retrieved from . In some variants, the maiden (named Gülükan or Dilaremcengi) accompanies the Brother; in others, a male character joins the twins and reveals the whole truth.Günay Türkeç, U. (2009). "Türk Masallarında Geleneksel ve Efsanevi Yaratıklar" [Traditional and Legendary Creatures in Turkish Tales]. In: Motif Akademi Halkbilimi Dergisi, 2 (3-4): 103-105. Retrieved from
In some of the Turkish variants, the name of the character may be Dilâlem-çengi, Dilâver-çengi, Dilâzar-çengi, Cengiz-Daughter, Çenginar.Eberhard, Wolfram; Boratav, Pertev Nailî. Typen türkischer Volksmärchen. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1953. p. 290. Regarding a tale he published, orientalist Otto Spies explained that the word Çengi means "female dancer", and dilaver "brave, valiant".
Variants Dilrukesch Kúnos published another Turkish tale which he titled Tündér-Dilrukes és a királyfi ("Fairy-Dilrukesh and the Prince"). Turkologist Georg Jacob later translated it to German with the title Dilrukesch. In this tale, three poor sisters live next to a dew and earn their living by spinning. One day, however, the king issues a proclamation and forbids lighting a candle at night. The three girls despair at the fact, and arrange for them to keep working by putting on heavy drapes to cover their illumniated house. The three poor spinner sisters disobey the ban and keep working by candlelight for three nights. The king goes to their house to investigate and listens to their conversation: the elder sister wants to marry the king's cook to eat the best dishes, the middle sister the king's dressmaker to wear the finest garments, and the youngest the king himself, for she will bear him children whose smiles will produce rosebuds and whose tears will produce pearls. The king marries the youngest, to the elder sisters' jealousy, and she bears twins, a boy and a girl. The elder sister and the midwife replace them for puppies and cast them in the water, but they are saved by the king's gardener. Learning of their survival, the midwife convinces the gardener's wife to abandon the twins in a cave the woods. A doe suckles the twins and they grow up. The boy sells the pearls his sister produces with her tears. One day, the midwife goes to the cave and tells the girl about the thistle (German: Distel) of a woman named Dilrukesch Hanym, her mirror that reflects the whole world, and lastly about Dilrukesch herself. The boy brings the objects to the cave and marries Dilrukesch, daughter of the Peri king. Dilrukesch reveals the truth during a banquet with the king.Jacob, Georg; Menzel, Theodor. Beiträge zur Märchenkunde des Morgenlandes. III. Band: Türkische Märchen II. Hannover: ORIENT-BUCHHANDLUNG HEINZ LAFAIRE, 1924. pp. 127-158.Дмитриев, Николай Константинович. "Турецкие народные сказки". Пер. с турец. Н.А. Цветинович-Грюнберг. Ред., вступит. статья, комм. Н.К. Дмитриева. Типологич. анализ сюжетов и библиогр. Исидора Левина. Moskva: Наука. 1967. pp. 247-260 (Tale nr. 43).
Dilalem's Fairy Garden