La planta de albahaca is an Argentinian folktale. It is related to the motif of the calumniated wife and classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as 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. Variants are widely collected across Latin America and in Argentina.
Source Folklorist and researcher Berta Elena Vidal de Battini collected the tale from an informant named María Elsa Salas de Várela, in La Quiaca, Jujuy, with the title La planta de albahaca. However, Vidal de Bettini gave it the title El árbol que canta, la fuente maravillosa y el pájaro adivino ("The Singing Tree, The Wonderful Fountain and the Wise Bird").Vidal de Battini, Berta Elena. Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina. Tomo 6. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1980. Versión digitalizada por Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. 2010. p. 252.
Summary In this tale, three seamstresses live together, their only inheritance a plant of albahaca (basil) which they water every morning. One day, the king is passing by their house when the elder sister is watering the plant, and the king asks her how many leaves it has. Unable to answer, the elder sister blushes and rushes back home. The next day, the same thing happens to the middle sister, who also runs away blushing. The third morning, the youngest sister is watering the plant, when the king appears and repeats his question. The youngest sister replies to him with a similar question; how many stars are there in Heaven? Unable to answer it, the king goes away in defeat.
Some time later, the three sisters gather to talk about the dreams they had: the eldest dreamed that she married the king's baker to eat the best bread, the middle one to the king's cook to eat the best meals, and the youngest to the king himself. Suddenly, they hear a knock on the door: it is the king's, who was listening to their conversation and wants to fulfill their dreams. The king marries the elder sisters off to their respective husbands, the baker and the cook, and takes the third sister as his queen.
The elder sisters begin to envy their cadette, for she has become the queen and they are mere servants, and plot her downfall. One day, the king goes on a hunt with a neighbouring king and leaves his wife under her sisters' care. When the queen gives birth to her first son, they cast him in a stream in a box and replace him for a cat. The second year, the king is away on a hunt again, when the queen gives birth to a second son, who is cast in the water in a box and replaced for a puppy. The third year, the king is away on diplomatic reasons, and the queen gives birth to a girl that is cast in the water in a basket and replaces for a piece of rotten flesh. The king, tricked by the elder sisters' lies, orders the queen to be walled up inside a prison and for people to mock and spit on her.
As for the children, they are rescued by the king's old gardener, who raises them. When they are older, the gardener asks the king for a plot of land and builds a larger house for his family. After the gardener dies, the three siblings live in the house and cultivate a beautiful garden. One day, while the girl is in their garden, a voice tells her they lack the singing tree, the wonderful fountain and the wise bird. The girl asks where they can find such treasures, and the voice tells them to take a pair of scissors with them, to cut an old man's beard.
The elder male sibling offers to quest for the treasures, meets the old man and is instructed how to proceed: throw a ball of yarn and follow it to a mountain, then climb it paying no heed to the voices insulting him. The elder brother reaches the mountain and then starts to climb, but turns around to face the voices and turns to stone. Learning their brother is in peril, the middle male sibling rides to the same location to get the treasures, but fails and is also turned to stone.
At last, the girl notices her brothers are not returning, and decides to journey herself to find the treasures. She meets the old man and is instructed to pay no heed to the voices, to reach for the bird's cage, cut of a branch of the tree and draw some of the water with a drinking horn. The girl does as instructed and captures the bird, fetches the branch and bottles the water, when her brothers and many more that have come to seek the treasures appear to her.
The three siblings return home and plant the branch in their garden, empty the horn on the ground and hang the bird's cage. Later, the bird advises the siblings to invite the king to their house and serve them the fruits from the singing tree, which are all gems and jewels. The king is invited to the gardener's house and admires the three marvels in their garden. When he sits to eat the dish of jewels, he wonder how he can eat them, to which the bird replies how the king fell for the sisters-in-law's trickery, since the three siblings are his children.
The king kneels and asks for their forgiveness, when the bird tells them to hurry and rescue the queen from her prison. However, the queen, after all these years, is on the brink of dying, but she has enough strength to forgive her elder sisters and meet her grown children. After she dies, the king takes the children back to the castle.Vidal de Battini, Berta Elena. Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina. Tomo 6. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1980. Versión digitalizada por Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. 2010. pp. 245-252.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children":Vidal de Battini, Berta Elena. Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina. Tomo 6. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1980. Versión digitalizada por Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. 2010. pp. 288–289 (classification). three sisters converse among themselves about their plans to marry the king, the youngest promising to bear children with wondrous aspect; the king decides to marry the youngest (or all three), and the youngest bears the wondrous children, who are taken from her and cast in the water by the jealous aunts; years later, the children, after many adventures, reunite the family, which leads to the aunts being punished.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. pp. 242–243.
The tale type, according to William Bernard McCarthy, is "widely collected" in Ibero-American tradition."Tales from the Hispanic Southwest." In: Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales. Edited by McCarthy, William Bernard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 2007. p. 97. doi:10.2307/j.ctt2tv86j.8. In the same vein, Stith Thompson noted that the Latin American variants represent one of three traditions of tale type 707 that occur in America, the others being the Portuguese and Franco-Canadian,Thompson, Stith (1977). The Folktale. University of California Press. p. 121. . and German ethnologue located variants in California and New Mexico.Bierhorst, John. Latin American Folktales: Stories from Hispanic and Indian Traditions. New York: Pantheon Books. 2002. p. 340. .
Variants Folklorist and researcher Berta Elena Vidal de Battini collected eight variants all over Argentina, throughout the years, and published them as part of an extensive compilation of Argentinian folk-tales. She grouped these tales under the banner Los hijos con el sol y la luna ("The children with the sun and the moon").Vidal de Battini, Berta Elena. Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina. Tomo 6. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1980. Versión digitalizada por Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. 2010. pp. 243–289.
The Three Children with the Sun, the Moon and the Morningstar In the second tale in de Bettini's compilation, collected from an informant named Rosario Pastrana de Gómez, in Catamarca, with the title Los tres hijos con el sol, la luna y el lucero ("The Three Children with the Sun, the Moon and the Morningstar"), three poor sisters live together, and one of them has a "virtue". One day, she declares to her sisters she will marry the king and bear him a son with the Sun on the front, a girl with the Moon and a third child, a boy, with a "lucero" (the morning star). The king, who was interested in the girl, decides to marry the maiden to check if what she said will become true. The maiden takes her sisters to be her companions at the palace, but they are secretly harbouring ill-will toward her and are interested in the king himself. The queen gives birth to a boy with the Sun, who they cast in a stream and replace for a piece of liver. The following year, the queen bears a girl with the Moon, who is also cast in the water and replaced by a piece of material. In the third year, the queen bears the boy with the lucero, who the sisters cast in the water and replace for a third object. The king is angry at his wife's false promises and orders her to be walled up, but still fed. As for the children, a garden-keeper finds the babies and raises them. As they grow up, the garden-keeper asks them to hide their astral birthmarks with a kerchief. When they are older, a wise bird that the siblings have advises them to invite the king for a meal. It happens thus, and the king attends a dinner at the garden-keeper's house. The king notices the children's veiled heads, and is given a plate with three stones: one white, one black and the other of a bay colour. The king says he cannot eat such a dish, to which the bird retorts with a question, asking him how he could be fooled by his sisters-in-law. The bird then flies to the children and removes their kerchief, revealing their birthmarks that prove the queen was true to her word. The king then embraces his children and rescues his wife from her prison.Vidal de Battini, Berta Elena. Cuentos y leyendas populares de la Argentina. Tomo 6. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1980. Versión digitalizada por Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. 2010. pp. 253–255.
The Children with the Sun and the Moon