"The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird" is a Sicilian fairy tale collected by Giuseppe Pitrè, Pitrè lists his informant for this story as [Rosalia] Varrica. and translated by Thomas Frederick Crane for his Italian Popular Tales. Joseph Jacobs included a reconstruction of the story in his European Folk and Fairy Tales. The original title is "", for which Crane gives a literal translation of "The Herb-gatherer's Daughters".See the in Italian Popular Tales. The tale was also translated to Italian as "".
The story is the prototypical example of Aarne–Thompson–Uther tale-type 707, to which it gives its name. Alternate names for the tale type are "The Three Golden Sons", "The Three Golden Children", "The Bird of Truth", , , or .
According to folklorist Stith Thompson, the tale is "one of the eight or ten best known plots in the world".
Synopsis The following is a summary of the tale as it was collected by Giuseppe Pitrè and translated by Thomas Frederick Crane.
A king walking the streets heard three poor sisters talk. The oldest said that if she married the royal butler, she would give the entire court a drink out of one glass, with water left over. The second said that if she married the keeper of the royal wardrobe, she would dress the entire court in one piece of cloth, and have some left over. The youngest said that if she married the king, she would bear two sons with apples in their hands, and a daughter with a star on her forehead.
The next morning, the king ordered the older two sisters to do as they said, and then married them to the butler and the keeper of the royal wardrobe, and the youngest to himself. The queen became pregnant, and the king had to go to war, leaving behind news that he was to hear of the birth of his children. The queen gave birth to the children she had promised, but her sisters, jealous, put three puppies in their place, sent word to the king, and handed over the children to be abandoned. The king ordered that his wife be put in a treadwheel crane.
Three fairies saw the abandoned children and gave them a deer to nurse them, a purse full of money, and a ring that changed color when misfortune befell one of them. When they were grown, they left for the city and took a house.
Their aunts saw them and were terror-struck. They sent their nurse to visit the daughter and tell her that the house needed the Dancing Water to be perfect and her brothers should get it for her. The oldest son left and found three hermits in turn. The first two could not help him, but the third told him how to retrieve the Dancing Water, and he brought it back to the house. On seeing it, the aunts sent their nurse to tell the girl that the house needed the Singing Apple as well, but the brother got it, as he had the Dancing Water. The third time, they sent him after the Speaking Bird, but as one of the conditions was that he not respond to the bird, and it told him that his aunts were trying to kill him and his mother was in the treadmill, it shocked him into speech, and he was turned to stone. The ring changed colors. His brother came after him, but suffered the same fate. Their sister came after them both, said nothing, and transformed her brother and many other statues back to life.
They returned home, where the king saw them and thought that if he did not know his wife had given birth to three puppies, he would think these were his children. They invited him to dinner, and the Speaking Bird told the king all that had happened. The king executed the aunts and their nurse and took his wife and children back to the palace.
Analysis Tale type The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children".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. 242–243.
According to Folklore scholar Christine Goldberg, the form the tale type appears "throughout Europe" involves the heroes going on a quest for wondrous items.Goldberg, Christine. "Review: The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev, Volume II . In: Journal of Folklore Research. Online publication: March 16, 2016. Richard MacGillivray Dawkins stated that "as a rule there are three quests" and the third item is "almost always ... a magical speaking bird".Dawkins, Richard McGillivray. Modern Greek folktales. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1953. p. 166. In other variants, according to scholar Hasan El-Shamy, the quest objects include "the dancing plant, the singing object and the truth-speaking bird".El-Shamy, Hasan. "Individuation. Motif J1030.1§". In: Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy (eds.). Archetypes and Motifs in Folklore and Literature. A Handbook. Armonk / London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. p. 265.
Variations Russian folklorist also noted two different formats to the tale type: the first one, "legs of gold up the knee, arms of silver up to the elbow", and the second one, "the singing tree and the talking bird".Barag, Lev. Belorussische Volksmärchen. Akademie-Verlag, 1966. p. 603.
The Brother Quests for a Bride In some regional variants, the children are sent for some magical objects, like a mirror, and for a woman of renowned beauty and great powers.Troger, Ralph. A Comparative Study of a Bengal Folktale, Underworld Beliefs and Underworld Helpers: An Analysis of the Bengal Folktale Type, The Pursuit of Blowing Cotton-AT-480. Indian Publications, 1966. p. 41. This character becomes the male sibling's wife at the end of the story.Walker, Barbara. (1996). "The Innocent Maligned Female in Turkish Oral Narrative". In: Erdem, ERDEM 26. SAYI, p. 827. Retrieved from .Даскалова-Перковска, Лиляна et al. "Български фолклорни приказки: каталог". Университетско издателство "Св. Климент Охридски", 1994. pp. 240–244, 654. .Goldberg, Christine. "Söhne: Die drei goldenen Söhne (AaTh/ATU 707)" In: Enzyklopädie des Märchens Online: Band 12: Schinden, Schinder – Sublimierung. 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. 833. https://www.degruyter.com/database/EMO/entry/emo.12.183/html For instance, in the Typen Turkischer Volksmärchen ("Types of Turkish Folktales"), by folklorists Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Naili Boratav. Type 707 is known in Turkey as Die Schöne or Güzel ("The Beautiful"). The title refers to the maiden of supernatural beauty that is sought after by the male sibling.Eberhard, Wolfram; Boratav, Pertev Nailî. Typen türkischer Volksmärchen. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1953. pp. 287-291, 422.
Such variants occur in Albania, as in the tales collected by J. G. Von Hahn in his (Leipzig, 1864), in the village of Zagori in Epirus, and by Auguste Dozon in (Paris, 1881). These stories substitute the quest for the items for the search for a fairy named ("Beauty of the Land"), a woman of extraordinary beauty and magical powers. One such tale is present in Robert Elsie's collection of Albanian folktales (Albania's Folktales and Legends): The Youth and the Maiden with Stars on their Foreheads and Crescents on their Breasts.
Another version of the story is The Tale of Arab-Zandyq, in which the brother is the hero who gathers the wonderful objects (a magical flower and a mirror) and their owner (Arab-Zandyq), whom he later marries. Arab-Zandyq replaces the bird and, as such, tells the whole truth during her wedding banquet.
In an extended version from a Breton source, called , the youngest triplet, a king's son, listens to the helper (an old woman), who reveals herself to be a princess enchanted by her godmother. In a surprise appearance by said godmother, she prophesises her goddaughter shall marry the hero of the tale (the youngest prince), after a war with another country.
Another motif that appears in these variants (especially in the Middle East and Turkey) is suckling an ogress's breastmilk by the hero.Parkes, Peter. "Fosterage, Kinship, and Legend: When Milk Was Thicker than Blood?". In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 3 (2004): 597–598. Accessed June 8, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879474.
The Sister marries a Prince
In an Icelandic variant collected by Jón Árnason and translated in his book Icelandic Legends (1866), with the name (The Story of the Farmer's Three Daughters, or its German translation, ), the quest focus on the search for the bird and omits the other two items. The end is very much the same, with the nameless sister rescuing her brothers Vilhjámr and Sigurdr and a prince from the petrification spell and later marrying him.
Another variant where this happy ending occurs is Princesse Belle-Étoile et Prince Chéri, by Mme. D'Aulnoy, where the heroine rescues her cousin, Prince Chéri, and marries him. Another French variant, collected by Henry Carnoy (, or "The tree that sings, the bird that speaks and the water of gold"), has the youngest daughter, the princess, marry an enchanted old man she meets in her journey and who gives her advice on how to obtain the items.
In the Armenian variant Théodore, le Danseur, the brother ventures on a quest for the belongings of the eponymous character and, at the conclusion of the tale, this fabled male dancer marries the sister.
Alternative source for the Truth to the King (Father) In the description of the tale type in the international index, the bird the children seek is the one to tell the king the sisters' deceit and to reunite the family. However, in some regional variants, the supernatural maiden whom the brother and the sister seek is responsible for revealing the truth of their birth to the king and to restore the queen to her rightful place.Laoust, Émile. Contes berbéres du Maroc. Publications de l'Institut des Hautes Études Marocaines. Tome I, Vol. 2. Paris: Éditions Larose, 1949. p. 190.Dégh, Linda. Folktales and Society: Story-telling in a Hungarian Peasant Community. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1989 . p. 336.
Very rarely, it is one of the children themselves that reveal the aunts' treachery to their father, as seen in the Armenian variants The Twins and Theodore, le Danseur. In a specific Persian version, from Kamani, the Prince (King's son) investigates the mystery of the twins and questions the midwife who helped in the delivery of his children.
Distribution Late 19th-century and early 20th-century scholars (Joseph Jacobs, Teófilo Braga, Francis Hindes Groome) had noted that the story was widespread across Europe, the Middle East and India."This story has the peculiarity, that it occurs in the Arabian Nights as well as in so many European folktales." Jacobs, Joseph. Europa's Fairy Book. 1916. pp. 234–235. Portuguese writer Braga noticed its prevalence in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and in Russian and Slavic sources, while Groome listed its incidence in the Caucasus, Egypt, Syria and Brazil.
Russian comparative mythologist Yuri Berezkin (ru) pointed out that the tale type can be found "from Ireland and Maghreb, to India and Mongolia", in Africa and Siberia.Юрий Евгеньевич Березкин. "«Сказка о царе Салтане» (сюжет ATU 707) и евразийско-американские параллели". In: Антропологический форум. 2019. № 43. p. 89. URL: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/skazka-o-tsare-saltane-syuzhet-atu-707-i-evraziysko-amerikanskie-paralleli (дата обращения: 19.03.2021).
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