Der Hengst Houssan (English: "The Stallion Houssan") is a Sudanese folktale from Kordofan, first collected in German by ethnologist Leo Frobenius and published in 1923. 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 step-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 stepmother) is considered by scholarship as an alternate opening to the same tale type. Variants have been collected from oral sources in Sudan.
Publication The tale was also translated to Serbo-Croatian as "Султанов син и његов ждребац" ("The Sultan's Son and His Foal").
Summary A sultan has a wife who gives birth to a son, while a mare in the stables gives birth to a male foal. The sultan's son and the foal grow up as best friends and companions. One day, the sultan's wife dies and he marries another woman. The second wife gives birth to her son and decides to get rid of her step-son. The sultan's first son, named Schatr Mohammed, comes home after school and pets his horse. One day, the horse, named Houssan, cries and warns the boy that his step-mother intends to kill him. She first tries to poison the boy's food, then gives him a new clothe laced with magic, but he declines the offer on both occasions. A slave tells the step-mother of the deep affection there is between the boy and his horse, and deduces the horse is helping him. With a trusted doctor's aid, she feigns illness and demands the horse be put down and its liver given to her as cure. Schatr Mohammed learns of his stepmother's ploy from his horse, and tells his father he wants to ride it one last time.
The next day, the sultan allows his son to saddle and ride Houssan, while the stepmother secretly orders her slaves to attack the boy. Houssan takes its riders beyond his father's city gates, and rides through the desert to another city. They stop before the gates; the horse tells the boy to take off his rich garments and find shabby ones, and take seven hairs from its mane, which he can use to summon the horse whenever he wishes. Schatr Mohammed enters the city in his new identity, and finds work with the royal gardener as his assistant. One day, while there is a festival in the city, Schatr Mohammed seizes the opportunity to ride Houssan in secret, since everyone has gone to the festival. What he does not know, however, is that the sultan's seventh daughter watches him undress, take a bath and ride the horse. She begins to be fond of the gardener, and goes down to the garden to give him some food. After three years, the sultan's eldest daughter announces her plans to marry, and the sultan organizes a festival where his seven daughters are to select their husbands by throwing a kerchief to them. The sultan's six elder daughters choose respectable suitors, but the seventh does not throw her kerchief to any one the passing men. The sultan brings the gardener and the apprentice, and the princess gives him the kerchief. The sultan becomes enraged and exiles his daughter and her lowborn husband to the slaves' quarters.
One day, an enemy sultan arrives with his army and prepares to invade the city. The sultan summons his six sons-in-law to lead the army and protect the city. The battle is fierce and they barely resist, when Schatr Muhammed comes in riding his horse Houssan and makes the enemy army retreat. He then rides back to his wife, changes his clothes and feigns ignorance about recent events. The next day, the princess tells her husband that the sultan, her father, will go to the battlefield to discover the identity of their mysterious knight (Faris) and lead their army to victory. This becomes a fallible strategy, as the enemy king's troops close in on him to take him prisoner, but once more Schatr Mohammed appears in the nick of time to ward off the enemy army and defend his father-in-law. He is hurt in his arm, and the sultan closes the wound with a cloth. Schatr Mohammed races back to his wife in the city, now that the threat is over.
Later, the sultan announces that the Faris will inherit the kingdom, whoever he is. Schatr Mohammed goes to sleep in his shabby room, and his arm begins to bleed. His wife, the princess, notices the bleeding and rushes to her mother. The princess's mother goes to the slaves' quarters to heal him, and sees that the sultan's cloth is wrapped in his arm. His identity discovered, the princess's mother alerts the sultan, who summons him to his chambers as soon as he awakes. Schater Mohammed awakes, learns of this, and goes to his father-in-law's palace riding on Houssan.
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.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. 70).
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 (kerchief) 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".
According to Turkologist , types ATU 314 and ATU 502 contain this motif: the princess chooses her own husband (of lowly appearance) in a gathering of potential suitors, by giving him an object (e.g., an apple). However, he also remarks that the motif is "spread in folk literature" and may appear in other tale types.Reichl, Karl. Turkic Oral Epic Poetry: Traditions, Forms, Poetic Structure. Routledge Revivals. Routledge. 1992. p. 136. .
Germanist , in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, argued that Subtype 2 (see above) represented the oldest form of the Goldener narrative, since the golden apple motif in the suitor selection roughly appears in the geographic distribution of the same subtype.Dammann, Günter. "Goldener (AaTh 314)" [Goldener (ATU 314)]. In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Online, edited by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Heidrun Alzheimer, Hermann Bausinger, Wolfgang Brückner, Daniel Drascek, Helge Gerndt, Ines Köhler-Zülch, Klaus Roth and Hans-Jörg Uther. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 . pp. 1379-1380. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.5.211/html. Accessed 2023-06-22.
The gardener hero Swedish scholar drew attention to a possible ancient parallel to the gardener hero of the tale type: in an account of the story of king Sargon of Akkad, he, in his youth, works as a gardener in a palace and attracts the attention of goddess Ishtar.Liungman, Waldemar. Traditionswanderungen: Euphrat-Rhein; Studien zur Geschichte der Volksbräuche. Folklore Fellows Communications Volume 118. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1937. pp. 75-77. According to scholars Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Naili Boratav, this would mean that the motif is "very old" ("sehr alt") in the Near East.Eberhard, Wolfram; Boratav, Pertev Nailî. Typen türkischer Volksmärchen. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1953. p. 313.
According to Richard MacGillivray Dawkins, in the tale type, the hero as gardener destroys and restores the garden after he finds work, and, later, fights in the war. During the battle, he is injured, and the king dresses his wound with a kerchief, which will serve as token of recognition.Dawkins, Richard McGillivray. Modern Greek folktales. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1953. p. 249.
Quest for the remedy