The Snake Prince

The Snake Prince is an Indian fairy tale, a Punjabi story collected by Major Campbell in Feroshepore.

[1][2] The tale is a local form of the cycle of the Animal as Bridegroom or The Search for the Lost Husband, in that a woman marries a man of supernatural origin, loses him and must regain him.

Soon after, when he opens it to show the queen, he instead finds a baby boy, whom the king and his wife raise as their son, and the old woman becomes his nurse.

[3] American folklorist D. L. Ashliman classified the tale in the Aarne-Thompson Index as type 425A, "The Monster (Animal) as Bridegroom".

[2][6] Scholarship also points that a story of a maiden marrying a snake being is attested in the Panchatantra, an Indian collection of folkloric accounts and related tales.