The Son of Seven Mothers or The Son of Seven Queens is an Indian folktale, first published in the late 19th century by author Flora Annie Steel. In the tale, a king with many wives marries a demoness who tricks him into banishing his previous wives and cutting out their eyes; they survive and one of the queens gives birth to a son that returns to his father's kingdom, kills the demoness and restores the eyes of the fallen queens.
The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as ATU 462, "The Outcast Queens and the Ogress Queen". Variants are registered mostly from India, West Asia, and North Africa, with some tales from Hispanic tradition.
Sources According to R. C. Temple, the tale was collected by author Flora Annie Steel from a Purbia boy who lived in Firozpur, and published in the magazine Indian Antiquary.Indian Antiquary. Vol. X. May, 1881. pp. 147-151.Steel, F. Annie Webster; Temple, R. Carnac. Wide-awake stories: a collection of tales told by little children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Panjab and Kashmir. Bombay: Education Society's Press, 1884. p. 360.
Publication The tale, as Steel had published it, was titled The Son of Seven Mothers.Steel, F. Annie Webster; Temple, R. Carnac. Wide-awake stories: a collection of tales told by little children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Panjab and Kashmir. Bombay: Education Society's Press, 1884. pp. 98-110. Folklorist Joseph Jacobs republished it in his book Indian Fairy Tales, with the title The Son of Seven Queens.Jacobs, Joseph. Indian Fairy Tales. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons; London: D. Nutt, 1892. pp. 115-129.
Summary
A king has seven wives, but no son yet. A fakir comes to him and predicts that one of his queens shall bear him a son. The king orders preparations for a grand festivity. While everything is being set up, the king goes on a hunt, despite the warnings of one of his wives. He sights a white deer in the woods and becomes transfixed with capturing it. He gallops after it and reaches a miserable hut in the forest.
The king enters the hut and sees an old woman working at the spinning wheel. She calls for her daughter, and a beautiful white-skinned and golden-haired woman. She goes for a drink of water, and, by looking into her eyes, the king realizes she is the white hind. He becomes entranced by her beauty, and wishes to take her as his next wife. She agrees, with the condition that he takes out the eyes of the other queens.
The white hind woman's cruel wish is carried out, and her eyes are given to her mother. The seven queens are cast into prison. While in captivity, one of the queens gives birth to a son, to the jealousy of the others. But soon enough, their jealousy subsides and gives way to care and affection, and the seven women regard the son as their own child.
The boy scrapes the walls of the prison to dig out a hole large enough for him to pass through to the outside and fetch sweetmeats for the imprisoned women. One day, when he is old enough, he begins to hunt bigger game for them with bow and arrow, and meets the wicked queen. She realizes the boy is the son of one of the other queens and tells him she can direct him to get their eyes back. The boy accepts and gets from her a letter, with a command to kill him as soon as he delivers the letter to her mother.
During his journey, the boy arrives at a kingdom whose princess has refused to marry any suitor. When this princess sees the boy, she decides he is the one. The princess reads the letter and alters it with a request for the boy to be treated right. The boy goes to the queen's mother's hut and gets from her the garland of eyes, albeit lacking one. The boy returns home and restores the eyes of the seven queens.
Seeing that her stratagem failed, the white hind queen tells him he can get the "Jogi's wonderful cow, whose milk flows all day long, and makes a pond as big as a kingdom". She also gives him another letter with a command to kill him.
The son of seven queens goes to his bride's kingdom, who alters the second letter. The boy meets the white hind queen's mother, who directs him to follow a road of 18,000 demons, but assuages him to have no fear. The boy takes the Jogi's cow and gives it to his mother and her co-queens.
Lastly, the white hind queen then suggests the boy brings the million-fold rice, that only ripens at night, and gives him a third letter. The boy passes by the princess's kingdom once again, and once again she alter the letter. The boy goes to the witch's hut and she directs him to the field, after a road swarming with 18 million demons. She warns him to get only the tallest ear, and to not look back. The boy walks to the rice fields, plucks the tallest ear, but looks behind him and becomes a pile of ashes.
The witch's mother goes to check on the boy and finds only a pile of ashes. She works to revive the boy back to life and scolds him. The boy returns with the million-fold rice to his seven mothers. With the million-fold rice, he and his seven mothers become the richest people in the kingdom, which expedites his marriage to the princess.
The princess asks her husband, the son of seven mothers, to build a replica of his father's palace, and invite the king. The king comes to his son's palace with the white hind queen and sees the seven queens sat on thrones. The princess, his daughter-in-law, throws herself at his feet and tells the whole story. The white hind's spell on him is broken and, back to sanity, the king orders the execution of the white hind queen, and restores the seven queens to his palace.Steel, F. Annie Webster; Kipling, J. Lockwood. Tales of the Punjab told by the people. London: Macmillan, 1894. pp. 89-101.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 462, "The Outcast Queens and the Ogress Queen": a king with multiple wives finds a beautiful young woman (who is an ogress or demoness in disguise) on a hunt and takes her as his newest wife; the demoness convinces the king to get rid of the previous co-wives, blind them and throw them in a well or pit; the queens each give birth to their respective children, whom they sacrifice to feed the group, save for the youngest queen, whose son she spares; the son they spared grows up, returns to his father's kingdom and meets the demoness queen, who tries to kill him by sending the prince on dangerous quests, but he prevails; he discovers the secret of the demoness queen's life (a bird or a parrot), destroys it and restores his mother and the other queens.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Third Printing. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1973 . p. 158.Thompson, Stith; Roberts, Warren Everett. Types of Indic Oral Tales: India, Pakistan, and Ceylon. Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1960. p. 67.
Motifs The tale contains the motif Z213, "Hero 'son of seven mothers'",Thompson, Stith; Balys, Jonas. The Oral Tales of India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. p. 447. as well as motifs G72.2, "Starving woman abandoned in cave eats newborn child", and L71, "Only youngest of a group of imprisoned women refuses to eat her newborn child".Muhawi, Ibrahim, and Sharif Kanaana. Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1989. p. 360. .
Variants According to German ethnologue , Czech folklorist and anthropologist Kirin Narayan, this tale type is "widespread in India", but variants are recorded from China, Chile, Sri Lanka and Herat, Afghanistan.Bierhorst, John. Latin American Folktales: Stories from Hispanic and Indian Traditions. New York: Pantheon Books. 2002. p. 344. .Narayan, Kirin. Mondays on the dark night of the moon: Himalayan foothill folktales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. p. 247. French folklorist Margaret Low reported three versions from Spain, two from Italy, one from Chile, and thirty-four French-Canadian versions.
Asia India Author Henry Parker noted that variants of the tale of the ogress queen were "well-known" across India, save for Southern India, and that in all tales the Rakshasa Queen is vanquished.Parker, Henry. Village folk-tales of Ceylon. Volume 1. London: Luzac & Co., 1910. pp. 275-276. In his second revision of the ATU index, folklorist Stith Thompson located 24 variants of the tale type in India.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Third Printing. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1973 . p. 159. Scholar located a Punjabi variant of the tale type in her 1989 supplement to Thompson and Warren Roberts's Types of Indic Oral Tales.Jason, Heda. Types of Indic Oral Tales: Supplement. Acad. Scientiarum Fennica, 1989. p. 28. . Indian scholar A. K. Ramanujan located variants of the tale type in Bengali, Gondi, Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, and Telugu.Ramanujan, A. K. Folktales from India: a selection of oral tales from twenty-two languages. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. p. 331. . In addition, according to Kannada scholars, tale type 462 ("ವರ್ಗ ೪೬೨", in the original), called "ಧೀರಕುಮಾರ ಕಥೆ" ("Dhīrakumāra kathe"; "Story of Dhirakumara"), is "very popular" in Kannada, being "common" all over Karnataka, from north to the south.