The King's Son with the Star on the Front (Albanian: Djali i Mbretit me Yll në Ballë) is an Albanian tale collected in Tërstenik, Drenicë. 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 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.
Source The tale was collected from an informant named Ramadan Gjoka, from Tërstenik, Drenicë.
Summary
In this tale, a king has a son with a star on his forehead, and a foal with a moon on the body. The prince and the foal are friends and treat each other as brothers. One day, the king remarries to give the prince a new mother, but the new queen despises her stepson and tries to kill him by poisoning his food with iron. The prince goes to meet his foal friend, which can talk, before his meals, and the foal warns the prince about the danger in the food, so he is to throw it to a cat to see it for himself. It happens thus, and the cat eats it and dies. The queen tries to poison the prince's food a few times more, but is foiled by the foal's intervention. She discovers the animal is helping the stepson prince, feigns illness and asks for the foal's heart as remedy. The prince learns of this and goes to talk to the foal, which hatches a counterplan: the prince is to ask the king to buy some clothes, a cloak, a saddle, a bridle, shoes and ducats, then he is to request for a last ride on the foal before its killing. The following morning, the king prepares to sacrifice the foal, when the prince puts the equine's plan in action. After being properly equipped, the prince rides the horse away from his father's kingdom.
Further away, the prince alights the horse near a village where an old man works as the local king's gardener. The foal advises the prince to put on other clothes and the princely garments on his back, and burn some hairs of its mane to summon it should the need arise, then departs. The prince takes shelter with the old man gardener and learns to make wreaths and bouquets for the princesses. The girls take notice of the gardener's handsome new assistant and pay him some liras, which he gives to the old gardener. One night, the old man asks his new assistant to look after the garden, while he takes some flowers to his wife. In his absence, the prince summons his horse friend for a ride around the garden. The king's third daughter sees a light coming from the garden and finds the gardener's assistant in kingly garments, riding on the horse, then donning the lowly garments and dismissing his mount. The old gardener returns and finds the garden destroyed, which his assistant attributes to some escaping horses from the king's barns.
Some time later, the king organizes a suitor selection for the princesses: they are to ride around the village on a horse with an apple in hand and throw it to their suitors of choice. The elder two princesses choose the sadriezim, while the third princess withholds hers. The people take notice of the absent gardener and his assistant, and the third princess rides her horse towards them, throwing her apple at the young assistant's direction, who picks it up. The king is dissatisfied with this turn of events and asks her to throw it again, and again she throws it at the lowly assistant, and a third time, falling on him again. The king is unhappy with this arrangement, but marries his cadette and places her in a humble hut out of his sight. The cadette princess confesses to her lowly husband she chose to be with him, to which he replies he is no bridegroom suitable for a princess, but the princess remains steadfast in her decision.
Some time later, the king grows blind, and the doctors cannot force him to open his eyes. The king's sons-in-law, the sadriezins and the gardener's assistant, are summoned to find him a remedy. The lowly gardener is given a lame horse from the stables, while his brothers-in-law take stronger mounts and almost run him over. Out of their sight, the prince summons his loyal foal and rides to the wilderness with a bottle to fetch the cure. The prince enters a meadow of wild mares and their protector, a stallion, which his foal battles against. The prince takes a bottle of the milk and returns with his loyal foal next to the place where he left his lame mount, just in time to see his brothers-in-law returning from a failed quest. The sadriezins spot the bottle on the gardener's assistant's hands and deduce he has the king's remedy, so they move to kill him. However, the prince makes a deal with them: he will surrender the bottle in exchange for marking their shoulders with a knife. A deal is made and the two sadriezins return to the king's palace with the cure, which they apply on his eyes. The king is surprised to regain his sight and thanks his two sons-in-law, then thinks of killing his cadette and her poor husband. He confronts his daughter and her husband, who points to the saziedrins and mentions the scars he left on their bodies when he gave them the medicine. The king confirms the gardener's assistant's story, orders the execution of the two sons-in-law and nominates the gardener's assistant as his new saziedrim. The prince then doffs his lowly disguise, summons his horse and takes a ride around the city.
Analysis Tale type The collector described the tale as belonging "partially" to type ATU 303, "The Twins or Blood Brothers". It is classified in the international 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.
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.
According to Germanist Gunter Dammann, tale type 314 with the opening of hero and horse fleeing home extends from Western Himalaya and South Siberia, to Iran and the Arab-speaking countries in the Eastern Mediterranean.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. 1376-1377. . In addition, scholar Hasan El-Shamy stated that type 314 is "widely spread throughout north Africa", among Arabs and Berbers; in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in Arabia and South Arabia.
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.
Quest for the remedy A motif that appears in tale type 314 is the hero having to find a cure for the ailing king, often the milk of a certain animal (e.g., a lioness). According to scholar Erika Taube, this motif occurs in tales from North Africa to East Asia, even among Persian- and Arabic-speaking peoples.Taube, Erika. "Löwenmilch" [Lion's Milk]. 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. 1232-1233. Similarly, Hasan M. El-Shamy noted that the quest for the king's remedy appears as a subsidiary event "in the Arab-Berber culture area". In addition, Germanist Gunter Dammann, in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, noted that the motif of the quest for the remedy appeared "with relative frequency" in over half of the variants that start with the Subtype 2 opening (stepmother's persecution of hero and horse).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. 1374-1375, 1377. .
Branding the brothers-in-law