The Princess from the Fruit is an Indian folktale from Goa. The tale is a local form of 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 in a fruit, who is replaced by a false bride and goes through a cycle of incarnations, until she regains physical form again. Variants are known across India with other species of fruits.
Summary In this tale, a king has an only son who is very fond of hunting. One day, he is joined with the chief minister's son and both venture into a deep forest. They go their separate ways, but promise to meet again at a certain spot. On a path, the prince sights a gold-feathered bird and chases after it, but the animal flies away. The prince follows after it and decides to listen to its sweet voice. The bird suddenly talks and says that, if the bird's beauty impresses the prince, much more beautiful is the princess from the fruit, then vanishes. The prince is moved by the bird's words and decides to search for the princess from the fruit. The prince returns to his father's stables and a black servant reports to the king. The prince tells his parents he wishes to find and marry this girl, but the monarchs say the journey is dangerous. Still, the prince goes on a journey and reaches the hut of an old woman. He explains the reason for his quest and spends the night there. The old woman reiterates the perils of the journey, but the prince insists and rewards the old woman with two gold coins.
The old woman then agrees to help the prince: she will turn him into a crow so he can fly over the pertrified victims who failed in the quest, fly up to the tree where the fruit it and steal it with his beak, then he is to fly back to her hut without looking back. It happens thus, and the prince, in crow form, steals the fruit and returns to the old woman's hut. She turns him back to human form and tells him to open the fruit only when he is near home. The prince rides back home, but decides to stop by a lake to rest and open the fruit to see the princess. He opens the fruit and out comes a golden-haired princess that dazzles the prince he faints. The fruit princess tries to help the prince and rushes to the lake to draw some water to revive him. She finds a dark servant grazing her master's horse. The dark servant shoves the princess down in the lake and goes to wake up the prince herself. The prince mistakes the servant for the princess and takes her home. His parents look at the girl and doubt if she is the princess from the fruit, but they are glad with their son's return and go through with their marriage. As for the true fruit princess, she becomes a lotus flower in the lake that only the prince can pluck it. The prince takes the lotus with him, which his parents admire, but the dark servant fears it will reveal her deed, boils it in water and throws it away. On the place it falls, a capsicum tree sprouts which the false bride cuts down and flings out the gate. However, another tree sprouts in its place, yielding a unique fruit that sates people's hunger. The false bride asks the prince to cut it down, so people flock the palace to plucks its fruits before the tree is cut down. An old woman that lives in the palace sends her grandson to fetch some fruits, but there is none, for people have plucked them all. The boy informs his grandmother, who sends him again to the palace, this time to get the tree trunk to their house. While the old woman is busy with some other task, she sends her grandson to look after their paddy, but he plays with other boys and a buffalo eats their paddy. Suddenly, the fruit princess emerges from the tree trunk and shoos away the buffalo.
The prince's false bride sights the princess and orders some guards to cut down the tree trunk, kill the princess and bring back her heart and liver. The workmen go to carry out her orders, but the fruit princess gives them her necklace as bribe and is spared, then hides in the forest, while the workmen trick the prince's wife. The fruit princess makes a house for herself in a dangerous part of the forest and keeps a parrot as her pet, to which she teaches her life story. Later, the prince loses his way in the forest and finds the princess's house, asking its owner for shelter from the lions and tigers. The princess does not let him in, but allows him to stay in her verandah. The prince then asks the voice on the other side of the door how she came to be in the forest, and the princess tells him everything. The prince recognizes the princess by her story and shows himself to her, then both return to his palace. The prince beheads the dark servant that tricked him, introduces the true fruit princess to his parents, and marries her.
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 the Indian variants, the protagonist goes in search of the fairy princess on his sisters-in-law's mocking, finds her and brings her home, but an ugly woman of low social standing kills and replaces her. The fairy princess, then, goes through a cycle of transformations until she regains physical form.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. p. 537.
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. In Stith Thompson and 's Oral Tales of India, this motif is indexed as "D211. Transformation: man to fruit"..
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. Christine Shojaei-Kawan notes that variants of Indian tradition lack the motif of the false bride mistaking the fruit maiden's reflection in the well for her own. Instead, generally in these tales the hero faints and the fruit princess goes to fetch water to awake him, when a girl of lower caste notices the fruit princess and trades clothes with her, then drowns her in water.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 . pp. 350-351. https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/database/EMO/entry/emo.10.063/html. Accessed 2024-07-03.
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. 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. In this light, researcher Noriko Mayeda and Indologist W. Norman Brown noted that the fruit maiden "generally" goes from human to flower, then to tree, to fruit again, and finally regains human form.Mayeda, Noriko; Brown, W. Norman. Tawi Tales; Folk Tales From Jammu. American Oriental Society New Haven, Connecticut, 1974. p. 537.
Variants India While organizing the Indic index, Stith Thompson and Warren Roberts noted the close proximity between types 403, "The Black and the White Bride", and 408, "The Three Oranges" - types that deal with the theme of the "Substituted Bride". To better differentiate between them, both scholars remarked that the heroine must be replaced by a female antagonist that is unrelated to her. Thompson's second revision of the international type index listed 17 variants of tale type 408 in India and South Asia.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. 137. In some of the Indian tales, the heroine does not come out of a fruit, but she is still replaced by the false bride and goes through a cycle of transformations. Despite this, these stories are indexed as the same tale type.
Examples of stories that lack the heroine's birth from the fruit, but keep the cycle of transformations, include Indian tales Phúlmati Rání, The Apple Princess and Raní Jhajhaní (or Rani Jajhani),Bruyere, Loys. "Contes Arabes et Orientaux III: Les Contes de Miss Putlibai Vadia". In: Revue de Traditions Populaires. Année 4, Tome 4, Numéro 10. Paris: Société des traditions populaires, 1889. pp. 534-536. and Sri Lankan The Maehiyallē-gama Princess. Other tales of the same narrative encompass Sema Naga stories Muchüpile and Tseipu and Kawulipu, Lhota Naga Hunchibili, Zeme Kirumbe, Mizo story Tumchhingi leh Raldawna ("The Story of Tumchhingi & Raldawna"), Thadou Kuki Ashijoul, Lushai The Story of Tlumtea and his Brothers (also called Vanchungnula or Vanchungnula (The maiden of heaven)), and Khasi A Tale of the Takalong Cucumber.
Princess Fireflower