The boy pretends to have a fever and goes to fulfill the pony's request: just as he tosses the clothes in the bathtub, the water destroys them.
While the boy is at school the other day, his mother writes a "telegraph" to her husband, spinning a false story that their son is training to be a bandit, so he killed their dog and their cat and destroyed his own clothes.
However, the boy takes off a wig from his head, revealing his golden hair, rises with his horse in the air and tells his father everything his mother did to him.
The girl returns home and finds some suitors aiming for her hand, but she made her choice: the boy in bearskin.
One day, on Christmas, his two brothers-in-law are hunting, but cannot find any game, when they spot their brother-in-law surrounded by hares and deers.
The next time, the brothers-in-law find him again and ask him for some game, and he agrees to give them, in exchange for branding his nose with a cwancygiera ("zwanzieger", a type of silver coin).
He returns home to his wife and rests for a bit, after a hurt leg, when a maidservant of his parents-in-law come with a letter to invite them for a meal at the main house.
Some time later, the girl's mother goes to talk to her daughter and compliments her decision to marry the lowborn boy, for the other two sons-in-law have been branded by a person the woods.
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.
According to Toelken, this Subtype 2 is "the oldest", being found "in Southern Siberia, Iran, the Arabian countries, Mediterranean, Hungary and Poland".
[18] Germanist Günter Dammann [de], in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, argued that Subtype 2 (see above) represented the oldest form of the Goldener narrative, since the golden apple motif in the suitor selection roughly appears in the geographic distribution of the same subtype.
[20] According to German scholars Günther Damman and Kurt Ranke, another motif that appears in tale type ATU 314 is the hero branding his brothers-in-law during their hunt.
[23] In a Polish tale collected by Polish folklorist Aleksander Saloni [pl] with the title O synie króleskiem (Russian: О королевском сыне; English: "About the Royal Son"), while a king is away at war, a magician named Milojardyn turns the true queen into a mare and replaces her for his daughter.
The boy comes back from school and goes to the stables to feed the mare, which tramples him and warns him against eating soup or sweets his "mother" may give him.
The prince hides his golden hair and astral mark on his chest, then hires himself to the king's gardener as an apprentice.
[28] In a Polish tale collected by Oskar Kolberg from Tomaszowice with the title O dwóch jabłkach (German: Die zwei Äpfel; English: "About Two Apples"), a childless couple prays to God to have a child.
The next morning, the man finds the tree from his dream and plucks two apples, then goes to feed the horses, but a fruit falls to the ground and lands near a mare that eats it.
Seven years later, the boy goes to school, and whenever he goes back home he meets the apple-born colt instead of his mother, which greatly infuriates the latter, so much so she tries to kill her own son: first, she gives him poisoned food.
The boy follows the animal's orders and buries the food; three days later, snakes and lizards appear in the dung heap.
The colt advises the boy to hide his hair under a cap and go to the nearby castle to find a job as their gardener.
The boy makes great bouquets for the king's three daughters, the youngest princess getting the most beautiful, to her sisters' envy.
One day, the king sends the gardener to meet the queen, and he exposes his golden hair, which the youngest princess sees.
They make their escape after a third border, leaving the princess behind, and reach yet another land, where the Scabby-Headed prince learns the local king will marry his daughter to whoever can jump over a large pit.
The king tells his daughter a golden-haired prince on a golden-maned horse helped him in the war, so he cannot be his lowborn son-in-law.