Senever is a Turkmen folktale. It is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 314, "Goldener". It deals with a friendship between a prince and a talking horse; both are later forced to flee for their lives due to the boy's stepmother, 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.
Summary In this tale, a sultan has two co-wives and no children. He goes to a doctor, who gives him an apple for him to share with his wives. He brings the apple home and places it on a table, while he goes to summon the second wife. The elder wife sees the apple, takes a knife to cut it and eats it whole. The sultan and the other wife returns and find no fruit, and the first wife tries to avoid trouble by saying she ate the apple which was there. The sultan goes back to talk to the doctor, who advises him to pour water over the knife and give the liquid to his other wife. It happens thus, and both women are pregnant. They each give birth to a son, an event that is celebrated by the monarch with a seven-day celebration. One day, the sultan gives a foal to his son with the younger wife. The prince and the foal grow up and become good friends. The elder co-wife begins to despise her stepson's happiness in his playtime with the horse and decides to get rid of them: she feigns illness and tells the sultan a doctor prescribed the meat of a foal. Planning to eliminate the horse first, she moans and whines so much, the sultan relents and agrees to sacrifice his son's foal. The foal, which was intelligent and could talk, begins to cry and tells the prince they plan to kill it on a certain day, so it will neigh three times to alert the prince; if his teacher forbids him from leaving school, he is to hit him with a mallet and rush to help the foal.
On the designated day, while the prince is at school, he hears the foal neigh for him, so he tries to excuse himself, but his teacher forbids him. The second time, the teacher holds him back. Lastly, the prince hears the third neigh, takes a mallet and hits the teacher's head with it, and goes back home to help his foal friend. He sees that the foal is nearly being killed, when he asks the sultan to ride the horse one last time before it is killed. The sultan indulges his son, and the prince mounts the horse. The foal realizes that they cannot live in that realm any longer, and bids the prince gather some clothes and ride on the horse. The horse then takes the prince away through the sky and both land in another country. The foal tells the prince to disguise himself as a laborer and find some work nearby, then bids him burn the sword he got from the horse to summon it.
The boy leaves his clothes with the foal and goes to the nearby city to find work. He is hired as a helper in the vineyard of a rich man. One day, he goes to cut wood before going to the vineyard, when he finds three girls, the princesses, on the way. The girls mock him, and he harasses them in return. For this, the girls beat him. A shoemaker intervenes on his behalf and says that he only wanted a comb. The elder two refuse the boy, but the youngest gives him a comb. He takes the comb, hides in a corner and summons his horse, then dons his royal clothes. The youngest girl goes to retrieve her comb, when she sees the prince and faints. The prince dismisses the horse, returns to his lowly disguise and returns the comb, and helps her back to consciousness.
The princess and the servant return to the others, who are talking to the vineyard owner about how to convince their father to marry them off. The vineyard owner suggests the princesses send three lemons of varying ripeness and quality to their father to represent their marriageability, and their father will understand that the elder's is nearly rotten, the middle one's is ripe, and the youngest's is starting to ripen, which means that the elder's time to marry is already passing, the middle one is almost on time, and the youngest's is starting to come. The princesses do as instructed and the sultan correctly interprets their intention, then sends for young suitors to come and pass before the palace. The suitors gather and the princesses throw an apple to their suitors of choice: the elder to the white minister's son and the middle one to the black minister's son, but the cadette withholds hers. The sultan asks if there is any other available suitor in the city, and they mention the gardener's adopted son. The sultan orders the soldiers to bring in the gardener's son, and the princess throws the apple to him. The people say she made a mistake and walk the boy past her again, and again she throws her apple to him, and whenever they walk him past her. The sultan accepts this outcome and lets his elder daughters live with him in the palace, but banishes his cadette, named Gülcemal, to live with the gardener's assistant in the stables.
Gülcemal is beautiful and intelligent. One day, the prince tells her he will herd all the animals of the region to a place, for her to see what will happen. The prince does as he planned, and locks the animals in a cave. Meanwhile, the prince's brothers-in-law want to invite the sultan and go hunting. They have no luck finding any game and find the prince, whom they do not recognize, in front of the cave and ask them for some game. The prince agrees to a deal: some deer in exchange for branding a seal on their backs. The duo make a deal, believing that no one will ever know of their agreement. The prince moves the animals to a pen near the stables. The princesses cook the meal for their father, and Gülcemal prepares a dish that the sultan enjoys and asks for more. For the second dish, Gülcemal places some horse manure in the meal which her father notices. Gülcemal explains that the manure is due to her and her husband living in the stables. The sultan goes to visit his youngest daughter and finds the many animals in the pen, then asks the gardener's assistant about it. The prince says that the animals are his, and he is in search of his two slaves that have his seal on their backs. The sultan investigates every person in the kingdom, even his two other sons-in-law. For this, the sultan recognizes his cadette's intelligence, regrets expelling her from the palace and builds a palace of gold and silver for her.
Months and years later, the prince tells Gülcemal he will seek fairy Dilaram, but makes a detour back home. He returns home and notices that his half-brother, born of his stepmother who once tried to kill him, has married a beautiful maiden. To avoid confusion, he places a sword between themselves in bed. The next morning, Senever (the prince's name) departs and meets a dev with seven sons. The dev welcomes Senever, who tells him about his quest for the fairy Dilaram, and dev takes the prince to the fairy's lair. Dilaram tells the boy that, in order to have her, Senever is to find grapes in the middle of winter, carry a bowl of water up a tree without spilling a drop, and separate forty camel loads of lice mixed with hair in three days, lift a heavy stone and carry it up and down a tree forty times, and finally defeat her in chess.
The dev and his family help Senever in fulfilling the tasks, with the king of the ants and its army separaing the lice from the hair, while Senever busies himself with playing chess with fairy Dilaram. Senever plays against the fairy and appears to be beating her, but she begins to flirt with him for three matches and defeats the prince. She announces that the prince is now her prisoner along with many others that came before. Suddenly, a flock of cranes fly down next to him, and Senever writes a letter that a crane carries to his half-brother. The other prince receives the letter and questions his mother, Senever's stepmother who once tried to kill him, about the brother he never knew he had. The co-queen spins a story that he ran away years ago, and the half-brother decides to rescue Senever.
Senever's half-brother meets the same dev and his family that helped Senever, and they form an alliance to defeat Dilaram and rescue Senever, with the devs defeating her challenges. Senever's half-brother meets Dilaram, hears her terms and conditions, then returns to the dev, asking him to bring a mouse and a cat from the mouse field. The second prince and Dilaram play chess, but, on almost losing, he releases a mouse in the room. The cat jumps after the mouse, which distracts Dilaram and she loses three matches. The dev-helpers them shout for her to release Senever, which she does. The devs find Senever in an emaciated state and bring him some rosewater to restore him. The devs take hold of Dilaram's possessions, and Senever, his half-brother, his sister-in-law and Dilaram all return to Senever's father's palace. They find that their father, the sultan, has gone blind, so they pour some Zamzam water to restore his sight. Senever's half-brother learns that his mother tried to kill Senever and issues an ultimatum: either they hang his mother, or he leaves with Senever. Their father accepts his other son's departure, and the quartet leaves for Gülcemal's land.
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.
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