Cele trei rodii aurite (English: The Three Golden Pomegranates; Three Gilded Pomegranates) is a Romanian folktale, first collected by author Petre Ispirescu. It is classified as tale type ATU 408, "The Love for Three Oranges", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. As with The Three Oranges, the tale deals with a prince's search for a bride that lives inside a fruit, who is replaced by a false bride and goes through a cycle of incarnations, until she regains physical form again.
Source According to Ispirescu, the tale was provided by his wife Sebastica, from recollections of her childhood in 1858, when she heard it from a servant named Joița.
Summary In this tale, a prince is feeling downcast. He spots an old woman coming to their garden and throws a stone at a jug she is carrying, breaking it. Annoyed, she curses him to never marry until he finds the three golden pomegranates. Wondering about the old woman's words, he decides to venture into the world and seek such fruits. He passes by three hermit women who direct him to a garden guarded by its guardians: a dragon (which he greets), a baker woman cleaning an oven (to whom he gives a rag), a dirty and slimy well (which he cleans off) and a gate covered with cobwebs (which he cleans). He steals the three pomegranates and rushes back to the hermit woman, and the garden trembles to alert its guardians to stop him, but, due to the prince's kind actions, he leaves unscathed. The prince returns home and opens each of the fruits on the way: from each a woman comes out and asks for water; he cannot give water to the first two, who die of thirst. The third girl survives for the prince gives her water, and guides her up a tree, while he goes to the castle to bring his father to meet her.
While he is away, a gypsy girl comes in to draw water in the well and finds the fairy maiden's visage in water, mistaking it for her own. She returns home to complain to her mistress about doing chores if she has such beauty, and is humiliated. So she returns to the well and notices the fairy maiden up the tree. The fairy maiden commands the tree to raise her to the treetop, and the fairy maiden falls asleep on her lap. The gypsy woman then sticks a poisoned pin in the fairy's hair and turns her into a golden bird, then takes her place. As the bird flies around the tree, the gypsy woman promises to kill it, and waits for the prince. After a few days, the prince returns with an army and musicians and notices the girl atop the tree does not look like the one he released, but the gypsy woman lies that the Sun darkened her skin and the wind swept her hair. Still, the prince takes her as his bride, despite suspecting something about her.
After the marriage, the golden bird flies near the prince's garden and asks the cook about the prince and his bride, wishing a restful sleep for him and an restless, furious sleep for her. The bird's words also cause some trees to rot, and a gardener alerts the prince. The prince orders for tar to be places on some branches and the bird perches atop one, being glued to it. The prince captures the bird and places it in a cage, but the false bride feigns illness and wishes to have the bird killed and cooked. It happens thus, but a fir tree sprouts from its blood. Still in danger, the false bride feigns another illness and orders the tree to be felled so she could bathe in its ashes. It happens thus. A beggar woman watches the fir tree being chopped down and takes with her a splinter to her home to use as pot lid. The fairy maiden comes out of the splinter to do chores for the beggar woman, is found out by the beggar and adopted as her daughter. One day, the fairy maiden asks the beggar woman to buy some linen, which she uses to sew scarves with images of her story. The scarves are given to the prince, who realizes the gypsy girl's deception and executes her. He then takes the fairy maiden to the castle and marries her.Ispirescu, Petre. Roumanian folk tales. Retold from the original by Jacob Bernard Segall. Orono, Me.: Printed at the University Press, 1925. pp. 11-22 (Tale nr. 1).
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 408, "The Three Oranges".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. 135-137. In an article in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, scholar Christine Shojaei Kawan separated the tale type into six sections, and stated that parts 3 to 5 represented the "core" of the story:Kawan, Christine Shojaei. "Orangen: Die drei Orangen (AaTh 408)" [Three Oranges (ATU 408)]. 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 . p. 347. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.063/html. Accessed 2023-06-20.
A prince is cursed by an old woman to seek the fruit princess; The prince finds helpers that guide him to the princess's location; The prince finds the fruits (usually three), releases the maidens inside, but only the third survives; The prince leaves the princess up a tree near a spring or stream, and a slave or servant sees the princess's reflection in the water; The slave or servant replaces the princess (transformation sequence); The fruit princess and the prince reunite, and the false bride is punished.
Motifs The maiden's appearance According to the tale description in the international index, the maiden may appear out of the titular citrus fruits, like oranges and lemons. However, she may also come out of pomegranates or other species of fruits, and even eggs.Aarne, Antti; Thompson, Stith. The types of the folktale: a classification and bibliography. Folklore Fellows Communications FFC no. 184. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961. p. 135. According to Walter Anderson's unpublished manuscript, variants with eggs instead of fruits appear in Southeastern Europe.Ranke, Kurt. Folktales of Germany. Routledge & K. Paul. 1966. p. 209. . In addition, Christine Shojaei-Kawan located the motif of the heroine emerging from the eggs in Slavic texts.Kawan, Christine Shojaei. "Orangen: Die drei Orangen (AaTh 408)" [Three Oranges (ATU 408)]. 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 . p. 350. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.063/html. Accessed 2024-07-03.
The transformations and the false bride The tale type is characterized by the substitution of the fairy wife for a false bride. The usual occurrence is when the false bride (a witch or a slave) sticks a magical pin into the maiden's head or hair and she becomes a dove. In some tales, the fruit maiden regains her human form and must bribe the false bride for three nights with her beloved.Gulyás Judit (2010). "Henszlmann Imre bírálata Arany János Rózsa és Ibolya című művéről". In: Balogh Balázs (főszerk). Ethno-Lore XXVII. Az MTA Neprajzi Kutatóintezetenek évkönyve. Budapest, MTA Neprajzi Kutatóintezete (Sajtó aatt). pp. 250-253.
In other variants, the maiden goes through a series of transformations after her liberation from the fruit and regains a physical body. In that regard, according to Christine Shojaei-Kawan's article, Christine Goldberg divided the tale type into two forms. In the first subtype, indexed as AaTh 408A, the fruit maiden suffers the cycle of metamorphosis (fish-tree-human) - a motif Goldberg locates "from the Middle East to Italy and France"Goldberg, Christine. "Imagery and Cohesion in the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folk-Narrative and World View. Vortage des 10. Kongresses der Internationalen Gesellschaft fur Volkserzahlungsforschung (ISFNR) - Innsbruck 1992. I. Schneider and P. Streng (ed.). Vol. I, 1996. p. 211. (especifically, it appears in Greece and Eastern Europe). In the second subtype, AaTh 408B, the girl is transformed into a dove by the needle.Shojaei-Kawan, Christine (2004). "Reflections on International Narrative Research on the Example of the Tale of the Three Oranges (AT 408)". In: Folklore (Electronic Journal of Folklore), XXVII, p. 35.
Separated from her husband, she goes to the palace (alone or with other maidens) to tell tales to the king. She shares her story with the audience and is recognized by him.Angelopoulos, Anna and Kaplanoglou, Marianthi. "Greek Magic Tales: aspects of research in Folklore Studies and Anthropology". In: FF Network. 2013; Vol. 43. p. 15.
Variants According to ethnologue , the tale is "widespread" in Wallachia (Muntenia), but appears sporadically in Moldova and Banat. Writer and folklorist Cristea Sandu Timoc noted that Romanian variants of the tale type were found in Southern Romania, where the type was also known as Fata din Dafin ("The Bay-Tree Maiden").Sandu Timoc, Cristea. Poveşti populare româneşti. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1988. p. viii. In the Romanian texts, the fruit maiden comes out of apples, and, more rarely, from lemons and pomegranates, and may turn into a bird (dove) or a basil. In variants from Muntenia, the heroine and her sisters live in a laurel tree (Romanian: dafin). Folklorist Elena Niculiță-Voronca also mentioned the existence of a variant with a "fata citroanei" (girl from the lemon), from Ardeal, and a "fata de perj" (girl from the plum tree), from Moldova (ro).
The Unborn, Never-Seen In a Romanian variant collected by Arthur and Albert Schott from the Banat region, Die Ungeborene, Niegesehene ("The Unborn, Never Seen [Woman]"), a farmer couple prays to God for a son. He is born. Whenever he cries, his mother rocks his sleep by saying he will marry "a woman that was not born nor any man has ever seen". When he comes of age, he decides to seek her. He meets Mother Midweek (Wednesday), Mother Friday and Mother Sunday. They each give him a golden apple and tell him to go near a water source and wait until a maiden appears; she will ask for a drink of water and after he must give her the apple. He fails the first two times, but meets a third maiden; he asks her to wait on top of a tree until he returns with some clothes. Some time later, a "gypsy girl" comes and sees the girl. She puts a magic pin on her hair and turns her into a dove. The tale was also translated to French as Celle qui n'est pas née et qu'on n'a jamais vue ("The One who was never born, nor never seen").
The Three Golden Fruits