The Prince and the Foal (German: Vom Prinzen und seinem Fohlen; Greek: Το βασιλόπουλο καὶ τὸ πουλάρι, romanized: To basilópoulo kai to poulári, lit.
'The King's Son and the Foal') is a Greek folktale from Epirus, first collected by Austrian consul, Johann Georg von Hahn and published in the mid-19th century.
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 own mother, and reach another kingdom, where the prince adopts another identity.
At a safe distance, he wears a smock and a raggedy cap over his suit, takes some hairs from the horse and tells the animal to come whenever he burns them, and dismisses it.
Some time later, the king tells his three daughters to take a melon in the garden; the princess do and explain the melons as analogy for their marriageability (one overripe, another a bit overripe, the last ripe enough), so the king summons all available men in the kingdom for a suitor selection test: the princesses are to throw golden apples at their desired husbands.
At a hiding spot, the gardener summons his faithful horse and gallops to the fountain of water of life to fetch some in a flask.
The king obeys, and the gardener doffs the raggedy clothes, and rides to the castle in the suit of armor with the sea with its waves.
[1][2][3] The tale was first collected by Austrian consul, Johann Georg von Hahn with a source in Epirus, and translated to German with the title Vom Prinzen und seinem Fohlen.
Danish linguist Jean Pio [sv] published Hahn's tale in the original Greek with the title Το βασιλόπουλο καὶ τὸ πουλάρι ("The King's Son and the Foal"),[4] which was later published in Spanish as El hijo del rey y el potro.
According to Toelken, this Subtype 2 is "the oldest", being found "in Southern Siberia, Iran, the Arabian countries, Mediterranean, Hungary and Poland".
[28] 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 [de], this motif occurs in tales from North Africa to East Asia, even among Persian- and Arabic-speaking peoples.
[29] 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".
[31] 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).
[32] 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.
[35] Von Hahn also summarized a variant from Ziza, near Joaninna, wherein the Jew lover, as doctor, prescribes the foal's entrails as remedy for the queen; the prince simply asks for one robe, instead of three, and the princess discovers him when he takes a bath in the garden and she glimpses the princely robes under his shabby disguise.
[36] In a Greek tale from Chios titled Ό Μπιλιμές (From Turkish bilimem, 'I don't know'), translated as The Ignoramus, a king and queen have no children, so they decide to pray to the moon to solve their problem.
When the boy is twenty years old, after the death of the king, he receives his sword and a golden-studded armour, and, after school, goes to the stables to meet the foal, which can speak.
The widowed queen begins to have an affair with a Jewish pedlar, and both conspire to kill the prince for fear of future reprisal: first, they cook two cakes laced with poison; next, they dig up a hole in front of the door and cover it with a carpet.
While the soldiers are away, he summons his loyal horse, rides into war and saves his father-in-law in the nick of time by killing the enemy king, but being wounded in the fight.
[37] In a Cretan tale collected from a source in Partira, Heraklion, and translated as The Little Horse and the Boy, a couple have no son, and a mare with no foal.
Years later, the boy's fathers dies and his widowed mother has a new lover, who decides to marry the woman if she kills her son.
This time, the colt tells him they must escape: the boy places cotton on the animal's horsehoes to silence their flight and they depart to the wilderness.
When they reach a kingdom, the colt advises the boy to find work with the king while he lies low in the mountains, and gives him some of its hairs to be summoned should the need arise.
The boy shows him the gold scarf as proof of his deed, marries the king's daughter, and brings the colt to live with him at the palace.
[38] In a Greek-language tale collected from Arminou, Cyprus, with the title Ο λοιτζιαρέτης, a royal couple have no children, nor does their mare birth any foals.
Later, war breaks out, and Theocharis joins in the fray: he summons Faris, dons his golden armour and defeats his enemies with a sword.