The Three Daughters of King O'Hara is an Irish fairy tale collected by Jeremiah Curtin in Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland.
Then the youngest wished for the best white dog, and it arrived in a golden coach with four horses to take her away.
A little boy there called her mother, and a woman there gave her scissors that would turn rags into cloth of gold.
The next day, she chased after her husband again, and they came to another house, where another little boy called her mother, and a woman gave her a comb that would turn a diseased head healthy, and give it gold hair.
Similarly, in the early 20th century, Norwegian folklorist Reidar Thoralf Christiansen classified the tale as belonging to type 425, "The Search for the Lost Husband", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index.
[2] More specifically, the tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 425A, "The Animal as Bridegroom".
in this tale type, the heroine is a human maiden who marries a prince that is cursed to become an animal of some sort.
According to Hans-Jörg Uther, the main feature of tale type ATU 425A is "bribing the false bride for three nights with the husband".
[6] In fact, when he developed his revision of Aarne-Thompson's system, Uther remarked that an "essential" trait of the tale type ATU 425A was the "wife's quest and gifts" and "nights bought".
[7] In the same study, he concluded that the dog as the animal husband appears "confined to the Germanic and Celtic areas".
[8] The motif of the separation of the heroine from her children is located by scholarship across Celtic and Germanic speaking areas.
[9][10][11] In a variant from County Mayo, collected from a sixty-year-old woman named Una Canavan with the title The Hill of Needles, a widowed nobleman has three daughters.
He becomes a man at night, and the set a up a house to live together, with her bearing three sons in the following years.
However, after each baby is born, the white goat warns her not to shed a tear over anything that happens to their children, otherwise she will lose him forever.
After passing by the three houses, she continues on her trail behind the white goat, who reaches the top of a cliff and the ground swallows him.
The girl despairs at losing him, but an old man appears and gives her a spade to dig up a hole in the ground: she finds a slab of stone and a set of stairs leading further underground.
The girl climbs down the stairs and reaches another land, where she takes shelter with an old couple who listens to her story.
The couple then reveals a woman names Scabby Crow lives in a castle beyond, she has three daughters (the women who gifted her the comb, scissors and tablecloth) and a son (the white goat).
The girl goes to visit her husband in human form, but as soon as he sits on the bed he falls as asleep - a trick of the witch.
The girl manages to talk to her husband on the second night, who asks her to find a way to convince the witch to lift her spell.
[13] Scottish folklorist John Francis Campbell claimed that an oral version told in 1812 to a man named John Dewar by a servant woman, was a version of a "popular tale" written in Wales "about 400 years ago".
The prince, then, must remain as a greyhound until a maiden agrees to marry him, and his sister nurses three children and receives a kiss from a king's son.
The princess's brother also falls in love with the greyhound's sister, the green girl, after drinking a potion of "mheadair Bhuidh" (yellow mead) from her hand.
The greyhound, now a human prince, announces he will marry the one who can retrieve his father's sword and scepter from the glass mountain.
The tale continues as the "wicked druid" Dubhmalurraidh changes one of the princess's sisters into her shape, to cast the king into confusion.
[15] Adeline Ritterhaus summarized another Icelandic variant she named Der zum Riesen verzauberte Königssohn ("The King's Son changed into a Giant").
The princess's sisters accuse the dog husband, and insist she reveals his name, but she remains steadfast.
The princess uses the magical objects as bargaining chips to be able to spend a night with her husband, who is to be married to another woman.