The Prince and the Foal (German: Vom Prinzen und seinem Fohlen; ) is a Greek folktale from Epirus, first collected by Austrian consul, Johann Georg von Hahn and published in the mid-19th century. It deals with a friendship between a king's son and a magic horse that are forced to flee for their lives due to the boy's own mother, and reach another kingdom, where the prince adopts another identity.
It is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 314, "Goldener." Although it differs from variants wherein a hero acquires golden hair, its starting sequence (persecution by the hero's own mother) is considered by scholarship as an alternate opening to the same tale type.
Summary In this tale, a king has no son, so a Jew comes and gives him an apple for the queen, which she eats and becomes pregnant, eventually giving birth to a boy. A mare also eats it and foals. The foal and the prince become great friends and ride together. While the king is away at war, the Jew seduces the queen and convinces her to poison her son, so he cannot stand in their way. One day, after the boy comes home from school, he sees his foal crying in the stables. The foal reveals the queen, his mother, poisoned his food, so he should not eat it. After the first attempt is foiled, the queen tries to kill him by poisoning his wine and placing poisoned needles on his bed, but the horse warns the prince on both occasions.
After the king returns, the queen - once again, convinced by the Jew - feigns illness and the Jew tells the king that, by using the boy's liver, the queen can be cured. The horse learns of this and tells the prince. The boy, then, asks his father to give him three suits, one with the stars and its skies, the second with the springtime and its flowers, and the third with the sea and its waves, and allow him to ride around the palace three times with the suits, before he is killed. The king indulges his son one last time and gives him the suits, but the prince, cunningly, rides around the palace three times and rides away on the horse to another regions.
At a safe distance, he wears a smock and a raggedy cap over his suit, takes some hairs from the horse and tells the animal to come whenever he burns them, and dismisses it. The prince finds work in a city as a king's gardener. One day, while everyone is asleep, the prince rides the horse around the garden in secret, but he is spied on by the king's youngest daughter. Some time later, the king tells his three daughters to take a melon in the garden; the princess do and explain the melons as analogy for their marriageability (one overripe, another a bit overripe, the last ripe enough), so the king summons all available men in the kingdom for a suitor selection test: the princesses are to throw golden apples at their desired husbands. The youngest princess throws hers to the gardener. Despite the king's protests, the third princess marries the gardener and is expelled from the palace to live with the poor youth.
Time passes, and the king falls ill. The royal doctors order the water of life ("deathless water", in Garnett's translation) as his only remedy. The king's two sons-in-law ride away in gallant horses, while the gardener rides in a lame mule. At a hiding spot, the gardener summons his faithful horse and gallops to the fountain of water of life to fetch some in a flask. He waits for hie brothers-in-law and says he can give some of the water to them, provided they allow his horse to strike their bodies. The brothers-in-law consent and returns to the king. The gardener returns home and gives his wife the flask to take to her father. The king is healed and embraces the gardener as his son-in-law, but the youth orders the king to pave a golden path between the castle and the gardener's hut. The king obeys, and the gardener doffs the raggedy clothes, and rides to the castle in the suit of armor with the sea with its waves. The prince then orders his brothers-in-law to show the horseshoe prints on their bodies.Hahn, Johann Georg von. Griechische und albanesische Märchen. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1864. pp. 90-97.Hahn, Johann Georg von. Griechische und Albanesische Märchen 1-2. München/Berlin: Georg Müller, 1918 . pp. 30-39.Garnett, Lucy Mary Jane. The women of Turkey and their folk-lore. Vol. 1: The Christian Women of Turkey. London: D. Nutt, 1893. pp. 178-185.
Publication The tale was first collected by Austrian consul, Johann Georg von Hahn with a source in Epirus, and translated to German with the title Vom Prinzen und seinem Fohlen. Danish linguist published Hahn's tale in the original Greek with the title Το βασιλόπουλο καὶ τὸ πουλάρι ("The King's Son and the Foal"), which was later published in Spanish as El hijo del rey y el potro.Pio, Jean (A.); GARRIGA Y NOGUÉS, Ramón Manuel (trad.); PAPADOPOULOU, Panagiota (reed. y texto intr.). Cuentos populares griegos. Granada: Centro de Estudios Bizantinos, Neogriegos y Chipriotas, 2017. pp. 29-34. Author and folklorist Lucy Garnett translated it as The Prince and the Foal.
Author and folklorist Frances Carpenter adapted the tale as The Prince's Foal and sourced it from Turkey. In her version, there is no Jew, the queen has her own son (who is the prince's half-brother); the king simply banishes the prince, and the prince wears one robe, instead of three.Carpenter, Frances; Hayes, William D. (ill.). Wonder Tales of Horses & Heroes. Garden City; New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1952. pp. 35-46.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the Greek Folktale Catalogue as type AT 532, Μπιλμέμ (Bilmem, "I Don't Know").Angelopoulou, Anna; Kapanoglou, Marianthi; Katrinaki, Emmanuela. "ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΠΑΡΑΜΥΘΙΩΝ-4: ΕΠΕΞΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ ΤΥΠΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΡΑΛΛΑΓΩΝ AT 500-559". Athena: ΚΕΝΤΡΟ ΝΕΟΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΕΡΕΥΝΩΝ, 2004. p. 379 (entry nr. 7). (In Greek). In the Greek type, which registers 62 variants across the Greek territory,Angelopoulou, Anna; Kapanoglou, Marianthi; Katrinaki, Emmanuela. "ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΠΑΡΑΜΥΘΙΩΝ-4: ΕΠΕΞΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ ΤΥΠΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΡΑΛΛΑΓΩΝ AT 500-559". Athena: ΚΕΝΤΡΟ ΝΕΟΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΕΡΕΥΝΩΝ, 2004. pp. 378-387. (In Greek). the childless queen is given an apple by a hermit or old man to cure her infertility, and the peels are thrown to a mare. Due to this, a boy is born to the queen, and a foal to the mare, which becomes the prince's friend and protects him from the queen's attempts.Angelopoulou, Anna; Kapanoglou, Marianthi; Katrinaki, Emmanuela. "ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΠΑΡΑΜΥΘΙΩΝ-4: ΕΠΕΞΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ ΤΥΠΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΡΑΛΛΑΓΩΝ AT 500-559". Athena: ΚΕΝΤΡΟ ΝΕΟΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΕΡΕΥΝΩΝ, 2004. pp. 376, 388. (In Greek).
Folklorist Stith Thompson questioned the existence of type AT 532 in the international index as an independent tale type, since, barring a different introduction, its main narrative becomes "the same as in the Goldener tale [tale type 314]". This prompted him to suppose the tale type was a "variety" of "Goldener". In the same vein, Greek folklorists Anna Angelopoulou, Marianthi Kapanoglou and Emmanuela Katrinaki, editors of the Greek Folktale Catalogue: although they classified the Greek variants under type 532 (Greek: Ο Μπιλμέμ), they still recognized that they should be indexed as type 314 (Greek: Ο Κασίδης), since their only difference seems to lie in the introductory episodes. They state that the Greek variants of type 532 reinforce the idea that Bilmem is a "particular form" of type 314, known in Greece as Κασίδη (Kasides).Angelopoulou, Anna; Kapanoglou, Marianthi; Katrinaki, Emmanuela. "ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΠΑΡΑΜΥΘΙΩΝ-4: ΕΠΕΞΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ ΤΥΠΩΝ ΚΑΙ ΠΑΡΑΛΛΑΓΩΝ AT 500-559". Athena: ΚΕΝΤΡΟ ΝΕΟΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΕΡΕΥΝΩΝ, 2004. pp. 15, 388-389. (In Greek).
Furthermore, German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther, in his 2004 revision of the international tale type index (henceforth, ATU), subsumed type AaTh 532 under a new tale type, ATU 314, "Goldener", due to "its similar structure and content".
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.
The suitor selection test The motif of the princess throwing an apple to her suitor is indexed as motif H316, "Suitor test: apple thrown indicates princess' choice (often golden apple)". According to mythologist Yuri Berezkin and other Russian researchers, the motif is "popular" in Iran, and is also attested "in Central Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Near East, and Central Asia".