Histoire du prince et de son cheval (English: "Story of the prince and his horse") is a modern Egyptian folktale first collected by author Guillaume Spitta-Bey in the late-19th century. Orientalist E. A. Wallis Budge translated it as The Story of the Prince and his Horse.Budge, Ernest Alfred Wallis, Sir. Egyptian Tales And Romances: Pagan, Christian And Muslim. London: T. Butterworth, 1931. pp. 404–410. Orientalist J. C. Mardrus included the tale as The Eleventh Captain's Tale in his translation of The Arabian Nights,Mardrus, Joseph Charles; Mathers, Edward Powys. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Volume IV. Taylor & Francis, 2005. pp. 394-397. . despite it not being part of the original text of the compilation.; van Leewen, Richard. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Vol. I. California: ABC-Clio. 2004. p. 141. (e-book).
The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 314, "Goldener", with an alternate introductory episode: evil stepmother persecutes hero and his horse. Similar tales are known across North Africa and the Middle East.
Source According to Guillaume Spitta-Bey, the tale was provided by one cheik Mohammed ˤAsalyje.
Summary A sultan's son and a mare's foal are born at the same time, and their respective mothers die. The foal is given to the prince, who pets and feeds it whenever he comes back from school. To abate his sorrow, the sultan remarries. The sultan's new wife (originally a slave girl), however, has a lover, a Jew, and both conspire to kill her step-son. One day, the horse cries and confesses to the prince, named Mohammed L'Avisé (Arabic: ˀśśâțir Meḥammed; English: "Clever Mohammed", or "Muhammad the Clever One", in Wallis Budge's translation), about his stepmother's devious plan to kill him by adding poison to his food. Warned by the horse, however, the prince gives the poisoned food to a cat, which eats it and dies.
Failing that, the Jew tells the sultan's wife to feign illness and demand the foal's heart as a cure for her. She follows his instructions and tricks her husband into killing his son's pet horse. Clever Mohammed convinces his father to let him take a last ride on the animal before its execution. The next morning, the prince mounts the horse and gallops away from his family, away from his kingdom and into another realm. Clever Mohammed buys a poor man's shabby garments. His horse then gives him a hair of its mane and a firestone to summon him.
Clever Mohammed enters the kingdom and talks to the local king's royal gardener, who hires him as his assistant. Clever Mohammed works driving the oxen in the garden to turn the water wheel to irrigate the royal gardens. One day, Clever Mohammed summons his horse, wears his princely garments and rides around the garden, trampling the ground - an event witnessed by the king's youngest princess. The boy then dismisses his horse and goes back to his shabby disguise. The royal gardener appears soon after and, seeing the destruction around the garden, threatens to punish him, but the youngest princess orders him to rest his hand and not harm the boy.
Some time later, the king's seven daughters throw their kerchiefs to choose their husbands as a retinue passes under the window of the princesses' castle. The six elder princesses throw theirs to noble men, but the youngest withholds hers since she cannot see the gardener's assistant in the crowd. The king then orders the boy to the brought to the assemblage. As soon as she sees him, she throws her kerchief to him, signifying her choice, much to her father's disgust. The king marries his six elder daughters, but orders his youngest to be locked up in a room with her low-born husband.
The king's disappointment makes him ill, and only the milk of a she-bear brought in the skin of a she-bear can cure him. He orders his six sons-in-law to search for the she-bear's milk. The king sends his sons-in-law to get the cure for him and gives Clever Mohammed a lame horse to join in the quest. While his brothers-in-law depart ahead of him, Clever Mohammed summons his loyal horse and asks for a tent and a pen filled with bears. His brothers-in-law arrive and ask Clever Mohammed - which they do not recognize - for some of the bears' milk. Clever Mohammed agrees to give some to them, in exchange for him branding their backs with his ring and a circle. The brothers-in-law agree to it and are give old bear's milk to give to the king, while Clever Mohammed keeps the real cure to himself. The six sons-in-law's remedy is useless, while Clever Mohammed gives his father-in-law the correct one, much to the latter's annoyance.
Later, war breaks out, and the king has to fight for the kingdom. Clever Mohammed is given another lame mule to join with his father-in-law's troops, but dismisses his mount and summons his magic horse to ride into battle. Clever Mohammed vanquishes the king's enemies for the first day, to the king's surprise, then goes back home to rest. The second day, he rides his own horse again and defeats another part of the enemy army, and is given a ring by the king. On the third day, Claver Mohammed finally defeats the entire enemy army, but is injured in the arm. The king bandages Mohammed's injury with his handkerchief, and he departs.
After the war, the king complains that his six sons-in-law did nothing to defend the kingdom, and his youngest daughter suggests he finds his ring and his handkerchief. The king then pays a visit to Clever Mohammed and sees the ring and the handkerchief on him, and realizes the truth. Clever Mohammed wakes up and explains to his father-in-law that he is a prince, exiled from home, and says he was after his own father's six slaves, branded on their backs with his father's sigil. The king warms up to him and celebrates a proper wedding for his youngest daughter. At the end of the tale, Clever Mohammed returns to his homeland and, succeeding his now deceased father, orders the execution of his stepmother and her Jew lover.Marzolph, Ulrich; van Leewen, Richard. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Vol. I. California: ABC-Clio. 2004. p. 141. (e-book).Burton, Richard Francis, Sir. The book of the thousand nights and a night; translated from the Arabic. Volume 12. London: H.S. Nichols, 1897. pp. 309-310.Cox, Marian Roalfe. Cinderella; three hundred and forty-five variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o'Rushes. London: The Folk-lore Society. 1893. pp. 443-444.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 314, "The Goldener": a youth with golden hair works as the king's gardener. The type may also open with the prince for some reason being the servant of an evil being, where he gains the same gifts, and the tale proceeds as in this variant.Stith Thompson, The Folktale, pp. 59-60, University of California Press, Berkeley Los Angeles London, 1977.Marzolph, Ulrich; van Leewen, Richard. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Vol. I. California: ABC-Clio. 2004. p. 141. (e-book).El-Shamy, Hasan (2004). Types of the Folktale in the Arab World: A Demographically Oriented Tale-Type Index. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 138 (entry nr. 57).
American folklorist D. L. Ashliman classified The Eleventh Captain's Tale in the Aarne-Thompson Index as type AaTh 314, "The Golden-Haired Boy and His Magic Horse".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. 64. .
Introductory episodes Scholarship notes three different opening episodes to the tale type: (1) the hero becomes a magician's servant and is forbidden to open a certain door, but he does and dips his hair in a pool of gold; (2) the hero is persecuted by his stepmother, but his loyal horse warns him and later they both flee; (3) the hero is given to the magician as payment for the magician's help with his parents' infertility problem.Bolte, Johannes; Polívka, Jiri. Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- u. hausmärchen der brüder Grimm. Dritter Band (NR. 121–225). Germany, Leipzig: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1918. p. 97.Uther, Hans-Jörg (2004). The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica. p. 198. .Dammann, Günter. "Goldener (AaTh 314)". In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Band 5: Fortuna – Gott ist auferstanden. Edited by Rudolf Wilhelm Brednich; Hermann Bausinger; Wolfgang Brückner; Helge Gerndt; Lutz Röhrich; Klaus Roth. De Gruyter, 2016 . pp. 1373-1374. . Folklorist Christine Goldberg, in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, related the second opening to former tale type AaTh 532, "The Helpful Horse (I Don't Know)", wherein the hero is persecuted by his stepmother and flees from home with his horse.Goldberg, Christine. "Pferd: Das hilfreiche Pferd (AaTh 532)". In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Band 10: Nibelungenlied – Prozeßmotive. Edited by Rudolf Wilhelm Brednich; Hermann Bausinger; Wolfgang Brückner; Helge Gerndt; Lutz Röhrich; Klaus Roth. De Gruyter, 2016 . p. 933. . https://www.degruyter.com/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.177/html
American folklorist Barre Toelken recognized the spread of the tale type across Northern, Eastern and Southern Europe, but identified three subtypes: one that appears in Europe (Subtype 1), wherein the protagonist becomes the servant to a magical person, finds the talking horse and discovers his benefactor's true evil nature, and acquires a golden colour on some part of his body; a second narrative (Subtype 3), found in Greece, Turkey, Caucasus, Uzbekistan and Northern India, where the protagonist is born through the use of a magical fruit; and a third one (Subtype 2). According to Toelken, this Subtype 2 is "the oldest", being found "in Southern Siberia, Iran, the Arabian countries, Mediterranean, Hungary and Poland". In this subtype, the hero (who may be a prince) and the foal are born at the same time and become friends, but their lives are at stake when the hero's mother asks for the horse's vital organ (or tries to kill the boy to hide her affair), which motivates their flight from their homeland to another kingdom.Toelken, Barre. "The Icebergs of Folktale: Misconception, Misuse, Abuse". In: Carol L. Birch and Melissa A. Heckler, eds. Who Says? – Essays on Pivotal Issues in Contemporary Storytelling. Little Rock, Arkansas: August House Publishers, 1996. pp. 42-43.
Motifs Professor Anna Birgitta Rooth stated that the motif of the stepmother's persecution of the hero appears in tale type 314 in variants from Slavonic, Eastern European and Near Eastern regions. She also connected this motif to part of the Cinderella cycle, in a variation involving a male hero and his cow.Rooth, Anna Birgitta. The Cinderella Cycle. Lund, 1951. pp. 138-139.
Quest for the remedy