The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples
[2] It was published for the first time as a fairy tale by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in 1853, translated into English as "The Golden Apple-tree, and the Nine Peahens" (1874) by Elodie Lawton Mijatović,[3] and under a similar title by Woislav M. Petrovitch (1914).
[5] American illustrator and poet Katherine Pyle translated the tale as "The Seven Golden Peahens", while keeping its source as Serbian.
[7] Anthropologist Andrew Lang in The Violet Fairy Book included a re-translation from a German translation of Karadžić's tale.
[8] Ruth Manning-Sanders included it in The Glass Man and the Golden Bird: Hungarian Folk and Fairy Tales.
The next day, the servant put him to sleep again, and the maiden told him that if the prince wanted to find her, he should roll the under peg on the upper.
The dragon related how a witch had a mare and foal, and that whoever watched over these for her for three days would get his pick of her horses, but that whoever failed in the task would lose his life.
When he went back for dinner, the witch scolded the horse, listened to the excuse it gave for being recaptured by the prince, and told it to try going among the foxes on the morrow.
When at last the prince came to claim his reward, he asked the witch for the ugly horse in the corner and would not be dissuaded from his choice, but straightaway hastened back to the castle on his new steed and carried off the empress.
[5] Czech author Václav Tille (writing under pseudonym Václav Říha) published a similar tale, titled Berona: the youngest prince stays awake at night to see what has been stealing his father's golden apples.
An old lady bribes the servant and orders him to blow a whistle to make the prince fall asleep.
The prince finally finds his beloved after stealing a magic teleporting belt from the devil's three sons.
[10] Adolf Schullerus and Elisabeth Rona-Sklárek supposed it was a truncated version of the Servian tale The Golden Apple Tree and the Nine Peahens.
[14] In the story, the hero manages to defeat the villain with the help of a magical horse he tamed while working for the witch.
[17] In this subtype, after the hero acquires the powerful horse, it either tramples the sorcerer with its hooves or influences Koschei (or a dragon)'s mount to drop its rider to his death.
[19] Historical linguist Václav Blažek argues for parallels of certain motifs (the night watch of the heroes, the golden apples, the avian thief) to Ossetian Nart sagas and the Greek myth of the Garden of the Hesperides.
