The Son of the Padishah and the Horse (Turkish: Padişahın Oğlu ile Atı) is a Turkish tale collected from a source in Afyon. It is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 314, "Goldener". 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 mother, and reach another kingdom, where the boy adopts another identity.
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.
Source The tale was collected from informant Emine Cengelci, from Afyon.
Summary In this tale, a king has a son who likes to hunt. One day, he captures a sea horse on the beach and brings it to the stables, despite his father's objections, feeding it hay whenever he returns from school. The prince's mother falls in love with a foreign king and conspires with him: her lover advises her to feign illness and ask for the sea horse's liver a cure, that way they can get rid of the horse and the prince. The queen follows his instructions and asks her husband, the sultan, to sacrifice their son's horse for its liver. The sea horse talks to the prince, reveals the queen's deceit and plots a counterplan with the prince, who is to ask for a last ride on the sea horse on a gold saddle. The following morning, the prince agrees to sacrifice the horse, but asks his father for one last ride on the equine. The sultan agrees to indulge his son, who rides around the palace three times, then the horse flies away from the palace into the wilderness. The prince and the horse reach another land, where the prince trades clothes with a shepherd on the road and puts on a sheep's bladder on his head. The sea horse gives some hairs of its mane to the prince and gallops away.
The prince ventures into the new country and finds work with the local king's gardener. One day, the gardener asks his bald assistant to look after the garden while he is away, and the prince summons his sea horse to ride around the king's garden - an event witnessed by the youngest princess. The head gardener returns and complains to Keloglan about the destroyed garden, but the princess comes in the latter's defense and lies that a white horse stomped the flowers. This happens a second time, and a third time. The princess goes to talk to Keloglan and gives him some roast turkey stuffed with gold coins and a roast chicken to the head gardener, but Keloglan gives the stuffed turkey to the gardener.
Later, while the local sultan is meeting with his viziers, the third princess sends for Keloglan to deliver her father a plate with three watermelons. The Keloglan delivers the fruits to the king and the viziers, and the Grand Vizier correctly interprets it as analogy for the princesses' marriageability and their wishes to be married at once. Thus, the sultan sends the howler to call for suitors to gather at the palace for the princesses to throw an apple to their husband of choice. The elder princess chooses the Grand Vizier's son and the middle one the middle vizier, save for the youngest. The king sends for the missing bachelors, one of which the KEloglan, and the third princess throws her apple to the Keloglan. The king refuses to marry his daughter to the lowly gardener's assistant, and asks her to throw again, which she also tosses to Keloglan. The king relents and accepts his daughter's choice.
Then, the sultan is at war against the Rus king, and Keloglan asks his wife if her father can give him a mount and a sword. The princess says that Keloglan has his own horse, but Keloglan insists to be given a horse by her father. The princess asks the sultan for the equipment, and he says there is a lame mule and a single rifle for him. Keloglan dons the meagre equipment and goes to join the war. At a distance, he rubs the horse's hairs and summons it, and meets an old man on the road. The old man asks where Keloglan is going, then spits at the horse's mouth with a blessing for God not to strike him down, and explains that he is to make a salutation; whichever side salutes him back is the side he is to fight on. It happens thus and the prince joins with the sultan's army, then waits for the arrival of the Rus troops. He strikes down the troops, then returns to his lowly disguise as Keloglan, as his brothers-in-law pass by him and mention the mysterious youth who fought with them.
The following morning, Keloglan leaves his henhouse mounted on the lame mule, but summons his horse and rides to the battlefield. He promises to take the enemy Rus king by the beard. It happens thus, and the sultan beheads the Rus king, but accidentally injures the knight. The king dresses his wound with a kerchief the princess has sown, and he leaves the battlefield to return to the Keloglan disguise. The sultan passes by Keloglan trying to pull his mule from the swamp.
Later, the sultan loses his sight, and a doctor prescribes lion's milk as cure. The sons-in-law ride into the wilderness to find it. Keloglan asks his wife if the sultan can provide a horse, and the princess replies Keloglan has his own, but he insists on a mount given by the sultan. Thus, a lame mule is given to Keloglan. Out of sight, he summons his loyal horse and meets the same old man, who divines in a mirror the location of a lion that can provide the milk, if Keloglan removes the thorn from its paw. Keloglan rides to the lion's location and shoots an arrow at its paw. Realizing it has been helped, the lion promises to deliver its milk. The lioness's cubes appear and agree to let the human have its mother's milk, so Keloglan bottle some, then sets up tent to wait for his brothers-in-law.
The brothers-in-law arrive and recognize the man at the tent as the knight who saved their army, and ask for some lion's milk. The stranger, who they do not recognize as Keloglan, the gardener, agrees to a deal: the milk in exchange for marking their hips with his sea horse's hooves. A deal is made, but Keloglan gives them goat's milk instead, and rushes to the lame mule stuck in the mud to keep up appearances as his brothers-in-law pass him by. Keloglan sends his wife to the sultaness with a cup of lion's milk, which the princess gives to her father, the sultan. Despite some reservations, the sultaness dips the milk on the sultan's eyes, which improve a little. This occurs for the following two days, until the milk restores the sultan's sight.
The princess notices the kerchief with the royal seal with she sew on her husband's arm and asks the sultan where is the kerchief she made. The sultan says he has tied it around the knight's arm, and the princess admits her husband, Keloglan, is wearing it. The sultan goes to check for himself and realizes Keloglan was the knight who saved the kingdom, and orders some guards to take the asleep Keloglan to the palace. Keloglan wakes up in the palace, doffs his disguise and summons his horse to present himself before the sultan. He points to the hoof marks on the other sons-in-law hips, which match his horse's hooves. The sultan understand everything, and nominates Keloglan as his successor.
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. 57).
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 hero and his heroic mount According to Turkish scholarship, in Turkic mythology horses can originate from the sky, from the wind, from a cave in the earth, or from the water.
Birth of hero and horse through apple