1 Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1946], 1977), p. 69.

2 ‘Peruanto,’ in Lo cunto de li cunti (The pentamerone), trans. Sir Richard Burton (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), Day I, Diversion 3, pp. 24–31.

3 Coming too late to my attention to explore further is the suggestion by Letterio di Francia that Pietro is the same character as one to be found in Cinthio degli Fabrizi’s sprawling Libro della origine delli volgari proverbi, dating to 1526, his tale in turn taking its origin from another by Antonio Cornazano in De proverbiorum origine (Milan, 1503), entitled ‘Leggenda del pescatore e del pesce fatato’ (Legend of the fisherman and the magic fish), in illustration of the proverb (no. VII) ‘Se ne accorgerebbi gli orbi’ (Even a blind person would recognize that). By all indications, di Francia is providing a potential source, or an analogue story, based on a generic narrative tradition that predates Straparola. But the matter still requires further investigation. He also recommends a perusal of Ser Giovanni Forteguerri’s Novelle edite ed inedite for another early version, although my cursory glance did not turn up the story. Di Francia, Novellistica in Storia dei generi letterari italiani (Milan: Casa editrice Dottor Francesco Villardi, 1924), vol. I, ‘Dalle origini al Bandello,’ pp. 716ff. Fabrizi’s Libro has been recently republished (Milan: Spirali, [1526], 2007), Cornazano’s De proverbiorum origine (Milan: Martire Mantegazz, 1503), Forgteguerri’s Novelle, ed. Vittoria Lami (Bologna: Presso l’Editore Gaetano Romagnoli, 1882).

4 For more on the problem of the influence of The Arabian Nights, see Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 99 and surrounding pages. There he states ‘other reflections of the Nights and other Arab anthologies continued to appear in European story collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the Piacevoli notti by Gianfrancesco Straparola, the Heptameron by Marguerite of Navarre and Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone.’ This would seem to bode well for some form of influence, but with such disparities as those represented in the stories of Aladdin and Piero, the most that may be said is that The Nights nourished a story type that as folklore had an indirect influence upon Straparola in this case.

5 Suite des contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode (Paris: Théodore Girard, 1698). Another version, drawn from Straparola, based on ‘the lazy boy’ (Type 675), and laundered for the salons, was written by Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat, entitled ‘Le Turbot,’ first published in Histoires sublimes et allégoriques … dédiés aux fées modernes (Paris: Florentin & Pierre Delaulne, 1699), pt. II, pp. 66–212. As in Mme. d’Aulnoy’s version, the hero, such as he was represented in the pages of Straparola, remained entirely unacceptable, yet she wished to follow the original, providing the illusion that Mirou was a perfect fool, thick, and vengeful. He, with a princess and their child, end up in a barrel, but it washes up on a happy isle where Mirou’s tutelary fairy makes him beautiful and bright and renames him Fortuné. And now, by some miraculous slippage, it is Fortuné the prince who is the true father of the child; the idiot fisher boy has been entirely forgotten and thus the problem of blue blood origins of the royal child is resolved. The child was conceived by this prince during a nocturnal caprice in a convenient trysting palace furnished by a fairy. Even though the father is now an aristocrat, the morals are little better. This is one of the eight tales assigned directly to Straparola’s influence among the authors of the early French fairy tale by Raymonde Robert, for which see the following note.

6 This number (i.e., as many as six from Straparola), however, would be contested by Raymonde Robert. For Mme. d’Aulnoy, she accepts his influence only in this story and ‘Le Prince Marcassin’ (II.1), and credits to him only eight of the thirty-six which are based directly or indirectly on folk tales among the 115 fairy tales catalogued by Delarue and Tenèze. Le conte de fees littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Nancy: Presses universitaires, 1982), p. 132. Nevertheless, cases for several more have been made in the present commentaries.

7 That Alidor flies to the beloved as a bird, that the princess is enclosed in a tower, and that Alidor becomes desperately morose suggests that Mme. d’Aulnoy was looking simultaneously at the story tradition epitomized by Marie de France’s Lai de Yonec. In ‘Fortunio and the King’s Daughter’ (III.4), Straparola also employs the motif in having Fortunio turn himself into an eagle in order to fly up to his beloved, although once in her room he converts himself back again.

8 Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze, in Le conte populaire français: Un catalogue raisonné (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve and Larose, 1976), vol. II, pp. 358, 584, 649. Here they list twenty – still not a substantial number.

9 Folktales of France, ed. Geneviève Massignon, trans. Jacqueline Hyland (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 14–16, 278. It was heard from an old peasant woman who was the rival of the famous informant from Plouaret so frequently recorded by F.M. Luzel in his Contes populaires de la Basse Bretagne.

10 (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812). As stated at the outset, the number of variants in this narrative group is legion and a comparative study could grow to considerable length. The following three are offered as openers, representing Scandinavia, Brittany, and Greece. In the first, a lazy boy named Lars is taunted by a princess, who tells him that he needs a ‘boy’ to help him, to which he replies that she should have one too. Gifted with the power to make spoken wishes come true, he got her pregnant. The king, baffled by this turn of events, was furious and even more so when, upon demanding that the infant bestow an apple upon its father, the child gave it immediately to Lars. All three are put to sea in a boat, whereupon the princess takes over, using Lars’ powers to build a palace on an island as well as overhaul Lars himself. All ends up in reconciliation and the acceptance of Lars as an heir. Klara Stroebe, Nordische Volksmärchen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1915), vol. I, no. 30. A version in which the king refuses to accept the boy as his successor is found in F.M. Luzel, Légends chrétiennes de la Basse-Bretagne (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1881), vol. I, pp. 59ff. See also Johann Georg von Hahn, Griechische und Albanische Märchen (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1864), no. 8. ‘Der halbe Mensch’ (The half-man), vol. I, pp. 102–9. This is an unusual version in which the princess laughs at the hero and mocks him because he has only half a head, one arm and one leg, although he is able to hew wood in the forest. His tutelary fish, which fulfilled wishes when called upon for having its life spared, first loaded the boy’s mule, to the amazement of the princess. When she becomes mysteriously pregnant, the story flows along in the expected order. The ‘father’ is discovered by the child’s gift of the apple and death is pronounced for all three, which is commuted to exposure at sea. The princess feeds the half man figs and gains his secret, they build a palace, and the king finds them while out hunting. A spoon is hidden in the king’s coat and he is accused of stealing, and so father and daughter are reconciled. But in the end, the half man is not converted into a prince and is given one of the king’s slaves in marriage, rather than the mother of his child.

11 Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), no. 34, ‘The Cloven Youth,’ pp. 99–102, taken from Domenico Giuseppe Bernoni, Tradizioni popolari veneziane (Venice: Filippi,[1875], 1969). James Bruyn Andrews found ‘Le Naïf’ (The simpleton) along the Ligurian coast between Menton and Genoa, which tells of a fool who has the power to realize all his dreams. His first wish is a wagon full of wood upon which he rides under the window of the princess. Upon hearing her raillery he wishes her pregnant, and from that point onward the story unfolds in the expected manner. The child goes from man to man and picks out the Naïf for his father. They too, as a little family, are subjected to life in a barrel until the boy wishes their escape. Contes ligures, traditions de la rivière recueillis entre Menton et Gênes (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1892), pp. 266–70.

12 Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 45–81.

13 The story circulated widely in a variety of forms throughout Italy. Comparatists will wish to consult ‘La favola del falchetto,’ in Giuseppe Pitrè’s Novelle popolari toscane, ed. Laura Regina Bruno (Palermo: La Palma, 2005), no. 30, pp. 227–9, in which the hero rides into town on a bundle of wood, passes under the window of a princess, and sets up the mockery that leads to the rest: the curse, the baby, the laughing response to everything, the grand palazzo, Falchetto’s remake, and the arrival of the king; ‘Lu cuntu di Martinu,’ in Giuseppe Pietrè’s Otto fiabe e novelle siciliani (Bologna: Fava & Garagnani, 1873), no. 3; ‘Lu loccu di li passuli e ficu’ in Pitrè’s Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani (Palermo: Luigi Pedone Lauriel, 1875), no. 188; ‘Scioccolone’ in Rachel Harriette Busk’s Folk-Lore of Rome (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1874), p. 119; and ‘Il matto della Tegna,’ in Isaia Visentini’s Fiabe mantovane (Turin: E. Loescher, 1879), no. 47, pp. 208–11. In this last, Matto goes into the country to gather a bundle of wood. Weary of his burden, he throws it on the ground, climbs on, and says that whoever carries it will now carry him home. When it moves on its own, he passes before the palace where the princess cries out, ‘Look, it’s Matto del Tegno.’ He warns she will fall in love with him, which she does. They marry in secret, have a child, arouse the king’s wrath, and provoke a huge festival to find the father by passing the child about until it gives the apple to Matto. To hide his shame, the king thinks only of getting rid of all three. When they are set adrift in a boat, Matto wishes for bread and it appears by virtue of his unexplained magical powers. Once on the uninhabited island, through these same powers Matto builds a palace with servants, horses, carriages, and all. The king somehow finds himself hunting on this remote island and seeks shelter from a storm, only to be confronted by his as yet unrecognized daughter with charges of theft. Her stratagem leads to recognition, reconciliation, family acceptance, and a recall home. This is Straparola’s story in truncated form without the magic tunny fish and infected with a few alternate folk tale motifs, but still in possession of all the critical parts of the compound narrative.

14 In a more archetypal sense, the princess shares her initial condition with all the princesses who have been locked away in towers, immured and imprisoned, in order to keep them free of unwanted impregnation. These were measures taken by a threatened king in order to control the acquisition of a son-in-law on his own terms. Invariably, in each of those tales, all measures fail, whether the princess is visited by a bird who turns lover, or the rays of the sun peering through a chink, or, as in the present case, by a low-lifer who commands the verbal magic whereby mere wishes may be turned into fact. These stories are related, in turn, to all those concerned with the delaying tactics of riddles, quests, or menacing chests (as in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice), whereby the weak will eliminate themselves or fortune will intercede. A concomitant solution is for the king to marry his own daughter – hence the incest crises plots already seen – and thereby create a bloodline male heir in the next generation. Historically, kings have had cause to fear sons-in-law who inherited their power through marriage to daughters, as King Lear’s story attests. The matter becomes acute in matriarchal cultures where power is transmitted through marriage and may be passed on before the old king is dead.

15 Rua, Tra Antiche fiabe e novelle: Le ‘Piacevoli notti’ di Messer Gian Francesco Straparola (Rome: Ermanno Loescher, 1898), pp. 99–100.

16 On the medieval fascination with automatons, flying horses, wonderful mechanical devices, tales of speaking brass heads and their Byzantine origins, see Karen Jolly, ‘Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices,’ in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 67.

17 Faouzia Demnati Chaïeb is interested in this and related stories, such as ‘Costanza’ (IV. 1), in terms of their settings in Africa and the Near East and the political climates of the times. This story begins in a dynastic dilemma which detaches the son from his homeland (in violation of the principle of male primogeniture). His direction is towards the East in a landscape half political and half romance geography. Straparola creates decadent sultans in Cairo and Tunis, while Livoretto’s quest is for the daughter of the king of Damascus through a series of palace intrigues. The historical overtones concern the excessive political power of the mamelukes in Cairo. Such tyranny began in the thirteenth century and ended in 1517 after the campaign of Selim Soliman II against Egypt. Thus, the time frame of the story must date to the mameluke era. These are interesting correlations, although any particularity of interest on Straparola’s part in the sociological and political realities of these areas may be questioned. It is true that the motivating circumstances of these stories depend upon the willful absolutism and predatory luxuries of the ‘oriental’ ruler as imagined by Western storytellers in the age of the Ottomans. That stories created in this ambience also represent a social critique of ‘oriental’ court culture is a debatable extra measure. L’altérité orientale-mauresque dans la culture du quotidian en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance (Manouba, Tunisia: Publications de la faculté des letters, 2000), esp. p. 303.

18 Vishnu Sharma, The Panchatantra, trans. Chandra Rajan (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 81.

19 Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1946], 1977), p. 56.

20 A small anthology of resumes of tales involving ‘thankful beasts’ appears in W.A. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations, ed. Christine Goldberg (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, [1887], 2002), pp. 93–107. One in particular stands out, collected among the Slavs, in which two brothers seeking their fortunes curry the favour of ants and fish and take the water of life to an ailing princess, thereby uniting two of the leading ‘Livoretto’ features. When she refuses to marry the designated hero and imposes impossible tasks upon him, he meets them with the aid of his loyal animal friends, including the fish that tosses back to him a pearl lost in the sea. Louis Paul Marie Leger, Recueil des contes populaires slaves (Paris: E. Leroux, 1883), no. 25, p. 102.

21 Thompson, ‘Goldener Märchen’ (ATU 314), in The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1946], 1977), p. 59. This story type he lists under the heading of ‘Helpful Horses’ because the enabling hero, although not always, is usually accompanied by his magic horse. Further to the motif of golden hair and the significant role it has played in folklore, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 362–3.

22 In the later literary record, the tale perhaps best epitomizing this group is ‘La belle aux cheveux d’or’ of Madame Catherine d’Aulnoy in which Beauty with the golden hair rejects the advances of a great king and becomes the object of the enforced quest of a courtier named Avenant. The hero must perform impossible tasks, which he accomplishes with the aid of animals indebted to him for former favours: the carp who fetches the ring; the crow who helps him behead an ogre; and the owl who leads the way to the water of eternal youth and beauty. Given the similarity of details, it would appear that she is again drawing directly upon Straparola, yet reworking the several motifs to her own ends. Madame d’Aulnoy, Contes des fées, ed. Nadine Jasmin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), pp. 175–87. This story includes the motif of the unwanted king or ogre who, in seeking to rejuvenate himself, accidentally takes the wrong liquor, or is intentionally beheaded but not brought back to life. The minor details in common, such as the three scales and the two feathers, give further assurance that d’Aulnoy was drawing on Straparola’s version, although the eternal question remains concerning the availability of folk tales to members of the French aristocracy.

23 The antiquity of this motif may be demonstrated by a story in Alberuni’s India, originating circa AD 1030. A practitioner working with the oil of immortality and invincibility brings it to a boil and invites the king to take first advantage of it by climbing in, promising that he would pour in the packets of ingredients that would lead to his perfection. The king declined, inviting the other to do as he wished, so in he went. But when the king came to the last packet, he grew fearful of producing a superior rival and hence allowed the practitioner in the vat to dissolve and become consolidated into a silver bar. Alberuni’s India, ed. Dr. Edward Sachau (New Delhi: Tupa & Co., 2002), p. 179.

24 An account of this discovery is given by Thompson, The Folktale, p. 275 without benefit of a reference, but according to him translated by M. de Rougé.

25 ‘The Heavenly Nymph and the Kettle of Boiling Oil,’ in Vikrama’s Adventures or The Thirty-two Tales of the Throne, trans. Franklin Edgerton, Harvard Oriental Series, vols. 26–7 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), no. 15, vol. 26, pp. 140–5.

26 Contes populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886), vol. II, p. 303. The Ţūţīnāma hereafter the Tooti-nameh (Tales of a parrot) by Ziyā al-Dīn Nakhshabī, ed. Francis Gladwin (London: J. Debrett, 1801), pp. 108–12; this is a Persian work dating to AD 730, derived from the Sanskrit Couka-saptatī (The seventy stories of the parrot). The work by Minaef is entitled Indiiskia Skaski y Legendy (St. Petersburg, 1877).

27 W. Radloff, Proben der Volksliteratur der Türkischen Stämme Süd-Sibiriens, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: L’Académie imp. des sciences, 1866–72), vol. IV, p. 373.

28 The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, trans. J.C. Mardrus and Powys Mathers, 4 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), vol. II, pp. 458–88. Stith Thompson in The Folktale has a section on ‘Helpful Horses’ where he discusses them in relation to the ‘golden hair’ tales, which in turn relate to the giant and wild man helpers who furnish the young hero with a magic horse for his exploits, as in Straparola’s own story of ‘Guerino and the Wild Man of the Woods’ (V.1), which also includes such helper animals as the hornet that buzzes around the head of the right girl, ‘Potentiana of the golden hair.’ Once again crossroads form. He too rides into the city, as Livoretto does, and attracts the attention of the court with his performance on horseback. As Thompson says, ‘The tales of helpful horses have a tendency to merge into one another in many of their details, sometimes in the way in which the magic horse is acquired, sometimes in the remarkable deeds accomplished’ (p. 61). In the ‘goose girl’ type (ATU type 533), the girl is given a speaking horse who continually warns her and, as in the identity exchange framing motif, the heroine is forced to cede her identity to a false princess who kills the horse, the head of which is mounted over the castle gate. The goose girl has power over animals which she can call to her aid, and so the parallels accumulate once again in a closely related tradition with the magic horse in common. The earliest European reference to the mechanical horse of The Arabian Nights appears in Cléomandès et Claremonde, a romance by the minstrel Adenès of Brabant, no doubt written for Mary of Brabant who married Philippe the Bold in 1277. The poem was composed before 1283. An imitation of the original was made by Count Tressan at the end of the fifteenth century, said to have been derived from the Spanish. It circulated at the time of Straparola under the title Cheval de Fust, or Celinde et Meliarchus. On how this story came to Europe and made its way north, see Thomas Keightley, Tales and Popular Fictions: Their Resemblance, and Transmission from Country to Country (London: Whittaker & Co., 1834), pp. 42ff. Tressan’s story is described in 1481 in Caxton’s translation of Reynard the Foxe, chap. 32, when Reynard enumerates all the jewels he had lost, thus giving an account of the ebony horse originating in The Arabian Nights. Caxton’s King Crompart, who made a horse from a tree, is derived from the magician villain Crappart in Cléomadès who, in the tradition of the Nights, steals the lady away by working the magic horse. Keightley traces the story to Persian roots, given its Persian setting in The Arabian Nights, and given the tale of the Indian who appears on his wonderful horse before Shah Chosroe and his son Firooz during the festival of the new year (Noo Rooz), celebrating the return of the vernal equinox. The motif is found again in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, pt. II, chap. 40, the episode in which the Don is sent to release the bearded women on Clavileño, the wooden horse operated by pegs in his head. Here Cervantes had a memory slip that led generations of annotators to assume that Pierre de Provence also flew through the air with his beautiful lady Maguelone on a magic horse, for the materials he undoubtedly found in Cléomadès or one of its derivatives he erroneously attributed to Pierre de Province et la belle Maguelone; none of his editors bothered to verify the fact before the nineteenth century.

29 It is for these reasons less likely, as J. Burke Severs suggests, that ‘in writing the Squire’s Tale Chaucer apparently had no one source before him but worked freely with elements from the legends of Prester John, the Cléomadès of Adenès li Rois, and The Arabian Nights’ – indeed which Arabian Nights? ‘The Tales of Romance,’ in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 275. ‘The Squire’s Tale,’ The Canterbury Tales, in Chaucer’s Major Poetry, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), pp. 459–70. Baugh’s comments are on p. 459. See W.A. Clouston, On the Magical Elements in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale ([London]: Chaucer Society, 1890), no. 26. In ‘Valentine and Orson’ there is the dwarf Pacollet of Toledo who made a wooden horse by enchantment with a pin in his head that made him fly through the air. Finally, King Gradasso, in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, III. vii. 24–8, cuts down an enchanted tree and from its wood a fine horse leaps forth, which, when the king mounts it, rises up into the air and then plunges into the Fiume del Riso, the River of Laughter. Trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 824. As stated above, all of these tales have as their remotest ancestor, concerning pin-operated horses, the tale of the amorous weaver in bk. I. of the Panchatantra. Therein, the weaver is set astride the Garouda bird, made of wood, and taught how to manipulate the pin to make it fly. He is en route to rescue a princess in the palace of the seven stories, who will mistake the flying artisan for Vishnu himself. Pañcatantra, trans. Édouard Lancereau (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 97–8.

30 Quatre Fils Aimon, L’épisode ardennais de‘Renaut de Montauban,’ ed. Jacques Thomas, 3 vols. (Bruges: Sinte-Catherina Drukkerij, 1962). See Sarah Bandelle-Michels, Les Avatars d’une chanson de geste de Renaut de Montauban aux Quatre Fils Aymon (Paris: H. Champion, 2006), p. 363, on Bayard as a speaking horse.

31 Little information on this intriguing book is available in English sources. See Jakob Meitlis, Das Ma’assebuch: Seine Entstehung und Quellengeschichte (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1987).

32 Trans. Sir Richard Burton (New York: Boni & Liveright, [1893], 1927), pp. 247–52. The more standard edition, however, is The Pentamerone, ed. N.M. Penzer, trans. Benedetto Croce, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1932), III.7, vol. I, pp. 271–7.

33 Contes populaires de Lorraine, ed. Emmanuel Cosquin (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886), vol. I, pp. 32–49. Cosquin provides many analogues in his annotations, including one collected in Greece by J.G. von Hahn, ‘Der Königssohn und der Bartlose’ (The king’s son and the beardless one), in Griechische und albanische Märchen (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1864), no. 37, vol. I, pp. 233–9, in which a horse becomes the prince’s confidant and in which he learns the language of animals, and another collected in Sicily by Laura Gonzenbach in Sicilianische Märchen (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1870), no. 30; ‘The Story About Ciccu,’ in Beautiful Angiola: The Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach, trans. Jack Zipes (London: Routledge, 2006), no. 5, pp. 28–40. Only the second half of this story pertains to the Livoretto type. Ciccu becomes a favourite at court, but his jealous brothers report that he can fetch the ogre’s sword, always taking counsel from his horse. He brings in the ogre, only to be sent for the most beautiful woman in the world to marry the king. This requires the labours of his animal friends. The horse fetches the princess from the castle when the princess asks to ride it. The means for slaying the old king was for Ciccu to go first into the tile oven, but secretly covered by the horse’s sweat. The order of the narrative is very similar to that of the present tale. Another, equally close, is from Brittany, the story of Petit-Louis, in which the boy sets out to find his godfather, the king, and along the way is robbed of his magic horse and his identity by a leper who throws him into a well. Destitute, he makes his way to the court, becomes a keeper of the horses, and rediscovers his old mount, along with its vital counsel. The leper tells the king that the boy has boasted of his ability to bring to court the princess with the golden hair, hoping he would perish in the attempt. But with the help of his animal friends he performs many feats and convinces the girl to accompany him. She too holds out by making requests involving her chateau and its keys thrown into the water. Each time Petit-Louis is compelled to perform until at last he fetches the waters of life and death whereby the old king is slain. The story forgets to deal with the leper or to employ the water of life, but we can imagine how they are handled in a more complete version. François-Marie Luzel, Veillées bretonnes: moeurs, chants, contes et récits populaires des Bretons armoricains (Morlais: J. Mauger, 1879), pp. 148ff; new edition (Rennes: Presses univertaires de Rennes, 2002). The number of related stories collected by the folklorists is impressive to say the least. Cosquin profiles several more in his annotations (vol. II, pp. 295–304), including the Russian tradition of tales concerned with the hero’s quest for the firebird.

34 Novelline popolari italiane (Bologna: Forni Editore, [1875], 1968), vol. I, pp. 18–22. A closely related tale was collected by James Bruyn Andrews in Liguria, no. 2, ‘Le roi d’Angleterre.’ A boy en route to visit his family is the victim of identity theft by a man who makes him his domestic and assumes his place at the court of England. The real godson of the king is compelled to work in the stables where he has the company and advice of a talking horse. The imposter has him sent on demanding missions, including the rescue of the abducted princess. The horse is a flawless advisor and the boy makes his way towards royal marriage after proving himself the actor of the audacious deeds by which the girl is retrieved. A ship is prepared with food for the beasts along the way who then promise their loyal service. Rats and ants perform magic tasks and the wedding follows, along with the incineration of the imposter. Contes ligures, traditions de la rivière recueillis entre Menton et Gênes (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1892), pp. 8–15.

35 Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, n.d.), pp. 162, 239, 324. ‘Ferdinand the Faithful’ also appears as No. 126 in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, ed. Elizabeth Dalton and Ludwig Emil Grimm (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), pp. 366–9. The commentary by Johannes Bolte and Jiří Polívka on the story of ‘Ferenand getrü und Ferenand ungetrü’ includes a substantial bibliography of further analogues. They examine those in the ‘talking horse’ group and those in the ‘golden-haired maiden’ group. Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1913–32), vol. II, pp. 18–37. A late discovery, and altogether closer to Straparola, is ‘Willy Faith’ from Danish Fairy Tales, ed. Svend Grundtvig (London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1914), pp. 9–26. Willy has a talking horse which counsels him as he makes his way to a foreign court. He picks up three magic feathers against the animal’s advice, which together form the face of a beautiful princess. Once installed as a groom in the king’s stables, the portrait comes to the king’s attention. He falls in love and the enforced adventures to find her ensue. This tale involves the crossing of a body of water and provisions for the beasts and fish along the way. The princess, when found, must be ‘disenchanted’ by capturing a feather from the golden bird. On the way back, she throws the keys to her castle into the sea, but the fish return them. With that obstacle to an unwonted marriage removed, she demands the waters of life and death. This was the third quest, the result of picking up the third feather. Willy, dismayed, consults his horse and completes the quest with a little help from his friends. He is then made the object of the first trial of the magic waters and returns to life more handsome than ever. The king insists upon two round trips in this fountain of youth, but in the middle of the second the water of life runs out. Alas, poor king; welcome to matrimony, rich Willy Faith. Now the speaking horse is ‘disenchanted’ too and is transformed into the brother of the princess. The entire story as it was known to Straparola remains intact with several agreeable accretions.

36 Giuseppe Pitrè provides another, No. 34, ‘The Enchanted Horse,’ in which three brothers set out, the eldest two impoverishing themselves through gambling, while the third, through his prudence, makes a fortune, leading to the invidious jealousy of his brothers. The king of the country is obsessed by the golden hair he sees caught in a tree in the middle of the sea. First he wanted the hair, and then, of course, its owner, always upon pain of death for the hero. With each new challenge the hero consults his talking horse and confidant, and always the horse knows what to do. The hero first builds up good will with a variety of animal helpers, finds the queen of the golden hair in a court entirely of gold, and abducts her, as in Straparola, by luring her onto the horse’s back before leaping on behind her and taking her to the king’s court. Along the way she throws precious possessions into the water, true to the present story, which must be fetched with the help of the talking animal helpers. Much as the opening is a significant variant upon Straparola’s circumstances of the hero’s departure, so the finale is a variation, employing not the magic water, but the sweat and grease solution as the hero sits in boiling water for three days, protected by the sweat of his horse, while the king is fricasseed in grease. The queen and hero then marry. The story comes from Noto. It may or may not owe something to the literary tradition, but clearly bears a close, though abbreviated, kinship with Straparola’s tale. The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2009), vol. I, pp. 180–3.

37 The story restored by Calvino was initially collected in Liguria by James Bruyn Andrews for publication in his Contes ligures (Paris, 1892), no. 46. Italian Folktales Selected and Retold by Italo Calvino, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 18–21. Other stories of speaking horses who guide their princely riders through challenging adventures with magical clairvoyance include ‘El Príncipe Español’ in which the prince sets out on his adventures and collects helping animals as he goes, a whale and an ant among them, in his search for ‘La Belleza del Mundo.’ The horse provides complex and detailed instructions throughout the story, which is a series of quests to faraway castles including, along the way, the location of the tree with the golden apples and the three golden horseshoes. Cuentos populares Españoles, ed. Aurelio M. Espinosa, 3 vols. (Madrid: S. Aguirre, 1946), vol. I, pp. 326–31. See also John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, A. Gardner, 1890–3), vol. II, pp. 344–76; Patrick Kennedy, The Fireside Stories of Ireland (Dublin: McGlashan & Gill, 1870), pp. 47–56; Genero Finamore, Tradizioni popolari abruzzesi (Lanciano: Carabba, 1882), vol. I, Novelle, no. 11; and Reinhold Köhler, Kleinere Schriften, ed. Johannes Bolte, 3 vols. (Weimar: Feiber, 1898–1900), vol. I, pp. 541–72, and vol. II, pp. 328–46, containing a Jewish version similar to Straparola’s.

38 Folktales of France, ed. Geneviève Massignon, trans. Jacqueline Hyland (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 49–54.

39 On this motif, see Heinrich Däumling, Studie über den Typus des Mädchens ohne Hände innerhalb des Konstanze-Zyklus (Munich: C. Gerber, 1912), and Stith Thompson, The Folk Tale (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1946], 1977), pp. 120–2. See also Count Théodore Joseph Boudet de Puymaigre, ‘La fille aux mains coupées,’ Revue de l’histoire des religions 10 (1884), pp. 193–208.

40 Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1946], 1977), p. 121.

41 Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, [1956], 1980), p. 718.

42 On Monsters anad Marvels, trans. Janis Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 3.

43 On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis Pallister, p. 58.

44 On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis Pallister, p. 83.

45 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). See pp. 96 and 100 for commentary on the present story.

46 Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities (New York: Harmony Books, 2003), p. 2.

47 On the sociology of wicked stepmothers, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 226ff.

48 Giovanni Battista Basile, ‘Penta the Handless,’ in Il Pentamerone: or The Tale of Tales (1534–6), trans. Sir Richard Burton (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927), III.2, pp. 206–16.

49 The Pecorone of Ser Giovanni, trans. W.G. Waters, 3 vols. (London: Society of Bibliophiles, 1898), vol. II, pp. 73–90. A mere byway to the history of this narrative is the story of ‘La serva fidele’ in Tommasino Reppone di Gnanopoli’s (Pompeo Sarnelli’s) Posilecheata, ed. Enrico Malato (Florence: Sansoni, 1962), pp. 77–107. Yet the story bears mention because of the displaced employment of so many common features. This is the tale of a sweet girl-child cursed at birth by the sixth of seven fairies, the last serving to mitigate somewhat the spell cast by her predecessor. The sixth, angry at the world, condemns Pomponia to three years, months, days and hours of life as a serpent, following a transformation on her wedding night. During this time the heroine must find an alter ego who will be flawlessly faithful in her service. The resonances inhere in the heroine’s departure on her wedding night, the location of a sister-like double, the conversion to serpent state, the menace posed by the three sisters, the period of expiation, and the eventual restoration to human state. This story may owe something to the story tradition that gave rise to Straparola’s ‘Biancabella.’

50 Linda Dégh, for example, describes eleven Hungarian and central European versions of ATU 706, involving young daughters threatened by paternal incest who, in their flight, become victims with severed hands. Studies in East European Folk Narrative ([Indiana]: American Folklore Society, 1978), pp. 340–59.

51 Italo Calvino, ‘Olive,’ in Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, [1956], 1980), no. 71, pp. 255–61. The two Renaissance works have been profiled in the commentary on the story of Doralice (I.4). They are, respectively, an early fifteenth-century verse romance and a play adapted from it at mid-century under the title Rappresentazione di Santa Uliva. When the Emperor Julian discovers that his daughter alone matches his first wife for beauty, he demands a papal dispensation, but the girl severs her hand in resistance. She is exiled, marries a king, gives birth, drops the child by accident and is accused. In exile she prays to the Virgin, who restores her hand. She is then found by a second king and marries, leading to the monster birth accusations and the forged letters. These narrative elements were hence well known in Italy and must feature in the consciousness of storytellers, although there is a distance to be crossed between a saint’s life play and a fairy tale only a century later. See Sacre Rappresentazioni del secoli XIV, XV, e XVI, ed. Alessandro d’Ancona (Florence, 1872), vol. II, pp. 235–315. In a late version, the girl is promised to the devil in marriage, but avoids her fate by crossing herself. So her greedy father, paid by the devil, punishes her by having her hands severed and sending her into the forest. All the familiar features follow: marriage to a king, his absence, the birth of her children, the letter exchange by an evil witch, the exile to the forest, the restoration of her hands in the water, the magic castle, and her rediscovery by the king. Dietrich Jecklin, Volkstümliches aus Graubünden (Zürich: Olms, [1874], 1980), vol. I, pp. 111ff. The story was well-established in German-speaking areas, for it survives in a late medieval version entitled ‘Deu tochter des küniges von Reuzen’ in which the daughter cuts her hair and disfigures herself to avoid an incestuous union approved by the Pope which had been purchased with gold and silver. Her escape is to Greece where she marries into royalty but falls prey to the wicked queen mother. A substitution of letters by getting the messenger drunk sends her again into exile, this time to Rome where the reunion of the family eventually takes place. Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, Gesamtabenteuer: Hundert Altdeutsche Erzählungen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), vol. II, pp. 595–613.

52 La Manekine, trans. Christiane Marchello-Nizia (Paris: Stock-Plus, 1980). The king wants his daughter, Alegría, burned alive when she refuses him and cuts off her left hand. A seneschal comes to her aid and she manages her escape to Scotland where she marries a king and falls victim to her wicked mother-in-law. When the false letters are exchanged about a monster birth, her husband now putatively seeks her death by fire, forcing yet again her escape by sea, this time to Rome. Her hand is found in a fountain and rejoined by the prayers of the Pope. This is a story of the thirteenth century. There are many useful notes on the handless girl tradition by Hermann Suchier in his edition of the Oeuvres poètiques de Philippe de Remi, Sieur de Beaumanoir (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1885). He cites nineteen versions from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Closely related is the Historia de la hija del rey de Hungría: Legendas en prose catalana-provensal (Palma: Guasp & Vicens, 1873), which takes place in Marseille and features a heroine who hides in a convent where the Virgin miraculously heals her. Not far removed from these stories of beleaguered wives are the stories of chastity, refusal, and mutilation in the lives of the saints. Saint Agatha, for refusing to marry the consul or to renounce her faith, has her breasts seared or severed. When she is offered medical help, she refuses, placing her trust in the healing powers of Christ alone – and indeed Saint Pierre restores them, much as the maiden’s hands are miraculously restored in some stories by the Virgin herself. Jacques de Voragine, La légende dorée, trans. Teodor de Wyzewa (Paris: Perrin, 1920), no. 33, pp. 146–50.

53 The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, trans. Richard Burton (London: The Burton Club, 1884), vol. IV, pp. 281–3.

54 Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: Gordian Press, [1927], 1969), pp. 48–9. Schlauch is concerned with the false accusations of queens and the many motifs pertaining to the Emaré, Belle Hélène, ‘Doralice’ group, of which Biancabella is one, but now in a tradition of her own. The story is the same as, or similar to, the ‘Histoire des deux soeurs jalouses de leur cadette’ which, in Les milles et une nuit (Lyons: Briasson, 1717), Antoine Galland claims to have collected from a Maronite Christian Arab from Aleppo named Youhenne Diab, and for which there is no written Arabic source. It is nights 667 to 688 of The Arabian Nights. See also Jack Zipes in his notes to The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2009), vol. I, p. 841.

55 Stith Thompson provides an overview of the conditions that bring about the heroine’s loss of hands from incest avoidance to breaking a taboo or giving birth to monsters. He traces the motif back to ‘1200 in southern England,’ naming seventeen variants. It had become universal by the seventeenth century. Thompson links the story to ‘Our Lady’s Child’ narratives concerned with the loss and regaining of the protection of a fairy godmother or the Virgin Mary herself, claiming that the motif ‘first appeared in polite literature through Straparola.’ The Folktale (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1946), pp. 120–2. In a parallel tradition, there is the motif of blinding, as in the legendary story of Hildegarde, one of the wives of Charlemagne, who, falsely accused of scandal, was sent to the forest to have her eyes put out. She is rescued, the eyes of a dog are sent back to the court as proof of the deed, and the accused lady escapes to Rome where she becomes a famous healer. Ultimately, she cures her accuser, Charlemagne’s brother Talaud, of his blindness, as reported by Vincent de Beauvais. See F.-M. Luzel, Légendes chrétiennes de la Basse-Bretagne, 2 vols. (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1881), vol. II, pp. 262–3. The notes correspond to ‘La bonne femme et la méchante femme’ (The good woman and the wicked woman), in which there is a rich mixture of elements from the ‘Biancabella’ tradition, including the girl abandoned in the woods with her arms severed and fed by a little dog. She too is taken up by a seigneur who marries her, only to have her children substitued by animals and false letters sent to her husband – all the work of a wicked sister-in-law. She too is exiled with her children, still without arms until they are restored by a woman who is none other than the Blessed Virgin. She remains in the forest in a nice thatched cottage until her penitent husband rediscovers her.

56 François-Marie Luzel, ed., Contes populaires de Basse-Bretagne, 3 vols. (Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve & Larose, [1887], 1967), story 6, vol. II, pp. 341–8.

57 Emmanuel Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, [1887]), no. 35, vol. II, pp. 44–6.

58 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 226.

59 Cosquin in turn directs readers to many cognate tales featuring the little boy who goes to the château to recover teeth, hands, and eyes in exchange for rich goods produced by magic in aid of the heroine by her magic helper. See Josef Wenzig, Westslawischer Märchenschatz (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1845), p. 45. This is related to the trick employed by the husband of Doralice to gain entrance to her palace by masquerading as a peddler. See the commentary to I.4.

60 Folktales of France, ed. Geneviève Massignon, trans. Jacqueline Hyland (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 116–20, 267. A tale similar to this was included by Jean Fleury, ‘La fille sans mains’ (The girl without hands), in his Littérature orale de la Basse-Normandie (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve & Larose, 1967), no. 3, pp. 151–60. This story begins with the vain mother of a beautiful daughter who wants the girl disfigured or slain, demanding that the assassins bring back not only her heart but her two hands. They spare her, but not her hands. The girl then wanders, attempts to eat fruit, is taken in by a noble family, is loved by the son, hated by the mother-inlaw, gives birth to two sons, is driven out during her husband’s absence, nearly loses a child in the water but recovers her hands while saving it, retires to a house for twelve long years, and is ultimately found by her husband. The old mother is placed underground where she is eaten by beasts. We think of Doralice up to her neck in worms.

61 The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2009), no. 62, vol. I, pp. 287–9.

62 ‘Le tre sorelle’ (The three sisters), in Novelline popolari italiane, ed. Domenico Comparetti (Bologna: Forni Editore, [1875], 1968), no. 25, vol. I, pp. 103–6.

63 Angelo de Gubernatis, ‘La cieca’ (The blind girl), in Le novelline di Santo Stefano (Turin: A.F. Negro, 1869), no. 13, pp. 35–6. A similar tale, ‘La niña perseguida’ (The persecuted girl), appears in the Cuentos populares españoles, ed. Aurelio Espinosa (Madrid: S. Aguirre, 1947), vol. II, pp. 376–90. See also Gherardo Nerucci, ‘La bella Giuditta e la su’ figliola Maria’ (Beautiful Judith and her daughter Maria) and ‘Uliva,’ in Sessanta novelle popolari montalesi, ed. Roberto Fedi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), no. 17, pp. 134–65, and no. 39, pp. 324–34, respectively. See also Heinrich Pröhle, ‘Die schöne Magdalene,’ in Kinder- und Volksmärchen (Leipzig, 1853), no. 36, pp. 122–6. This is a composite tale in which a widow shepherdess has a beautiful daughter, but when a lover comes for the girl, the mother is jealous and wants him for herself. So Magdalene is sent to the forest with executioners who cut off her arms. She wanders the forest and into the garden of a castle on top of a mountain where she is found by the king. He marries her and all is well until letters to the king about the birth of their son fall into the hands of her own cruel mother who sees that her daughter has become a queen. The false letters cause her to be sent once more into the forest of tribulation with the baby now strapped to her back. She entrusts the baby to a lion with a thorn in its paw, seeks healing in a pond, returns to extract the thorn, and together they settle down in a house belonging to a ‘white’ man. The king discovers her in time and the wicked shepherdess is punished by being rolled down a hill in a barrel driven full of nails. This same device was used against mean queens in stories in the Ancillotto group (IV.3). A very similar story, ‘La fille du marchand de Lyon’ (The daughter of the merchant of Lyons), appears in the Contes populaires de Lorraines, ed. Emmanuel Cosquin, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886), no. 78, vol. II, pp. 323–8. A dog’s heart is brought back by the servants sent out to kill the girl on her mother’s orders. She hides in a tree, is found by a count, marries, has a child, is hated by the mother-in-law, and again is taken out, this time by coachmen, who insult her and kill her child. She escapes and, in male disguise, is overheard by the count as she tells her tale and is thus restored. It is much decayed, but has for its narrative ancestor Le roman de la manekine of Philippe de Beaumanoir, the famous thirteenth-century jurist. The same story was collected in the Tyrol by Christian Schneller for his Märchen und Sagen aus Wälschtirol (Innsbruck, 1867; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1976), no. 50.

64 Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris: Vieweg, 1886; reprint, Marseille: LaFitte, 1978), vol. II, p. 45.

65 Ed. F.M. Luzel, 2 vols. (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve & Larose, [1887], 1967), vol. II, pp. 292–308. The story was collected from a carpenter in Tonquédec in 1873. Further versions of the handless girl stories are known in simpler narrative forms. Paul Sébillot, Contes populaires de la Haute-Bretagne (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880), vol. I, pp. 105ff. See also Gherardo Nerucci, ed., Sessanta novelle populari montalesi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1880), pp. 348ff; and ‘Uliva’ in Sessanta novelle popolari montalesi, ed. Roberti Fedi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 324–34.

66 Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, n.d.), pp. 205–10. The stories of girls with severed hands are among the most widespread in the world. It appears among the Contes grecs, ed. Émile Legrand, Recueil de contes populaires grecs (Paris: Leroux, 1881), p. 24, drawn in turn from a book of pious tales written in the seventeenth century by a Cretan monk. In a Lithuanian version, the opening of the story also has an affinity with the Cinderella group when the girl seeks to delay her fate by asking for lavish clothes before being whisked away as the rat girl. August Leskien and Karl Brugmann, eds., Litauische Volkslieder und Märchen (Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1882), no. 24.

67 ‘L’oiseau bleu’ was first published in 1697 in the initial volume of Les contes des fées, but survives only in the collection entitled Le cabinet des fées. See Contes des fées (édition critique), ed. Nadine Jasmin (Paris: Champion, 2004). Jasmin indicates the pointlessness in collecting the many ‘oiseau bleu’ sequels that appeared throughout the nineteenth century, for they are all folkloric reductions of the literary original (p. 1091), except insofar as they reincorporate motifs through a process of contaminatio corresponding to those in the Straparola tale, in a sense returning to the proto-narrative group through alternate sources, as in the story of ‘La bonne femme et le méchante femme’ collected by Luzel in Lower Brittany, as recounted above, in turn related to the entire group of tales of the kind and unkind girls, for which, see Warren E. Roberts, The Tale of the Kind and the Unkind Girls (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1958; reprint, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994).

68 For those seeking to create a mental geography for this tale, it begins in Lombardy and proceeds West towards Polonia, which is counterintuitive if the country is imagined. Rather, Polonia is a city belonging to the Matter of France, mentioned by Andrea da Barberino (1370–1431) in his I reali di francia (The royal house of France), ed. Giuseppe Vandelli et al. (Bari: Laterza, 1947), first published in 1491 and dealing with adventures from the age of Charlemagne and Roland.

69 Stith Thompson, in The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1946], 1977), p. 58, speaks of the metamorphosis into animal shapes, a motif he identifies closely with ‘the grateful dead’ stories, although it does not pertain to Straparola’s ‘Bertuccio’ in the present collection (XI.2).

70 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 396–408.

71 Edzard Storck, Alte und neue Schöpfung in den Märchen der Brüder Grimm (Bietigheim/Württ: Turm Verlag, 1977), pp. 126–30.

72 The Pecorone, trans. W.G. Waters, illus. E.R. Hughes, 3 vols. (London: Society of Bibliophiles, 1898), vol. II, pp. 34–69; or (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897), IX.2, pp. 113–26.

73 Worthy of mention is that both stories parallel the courting of the princess in the story of Kamar al-Akmar, or ‘The Magic Tale of the Ebony Horse,’ nights 414–32 of The Arabian Nights.

74 Contes populaires de Lorraine, 2 vols. (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1886; reprint, Marseille: Lafitte, 1978), no. 15, vol. I, pp. 166–9.

75 A closely related tale, ‘Le corps sans ame, ou le lion, la pie, et la fourmi,’ in Contes français, ed. E. Henry Carnoy (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1885), no. 8, pp. 275–80, tells of a boy who settles the spat of the bickering animals, gains from each the power of self-metamorphosis into their respective forms, and goes in quest of the princess held in thrall by the seven-headed monster Corps-sans-Ame (body without soul). He runs through his forms to dispatch the monster and deliver the princess, but is nearly drowned by his rival. He saves himself by turning into a bird, just as the hero of the present story. A wedding in the making with the wrong groom is interrupted by the arrival of Kiou-Cher the hero, who is claimed by the princess. The name Corps-sans-Ame suggests the link with stories in which a quest for the egg containing the monster’s soul must be carried out, as well as with those in which the bird and the ant forms are employed respectively to secretly visit the princess in her room and to escape notice once there.

76 Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1887), vol. II, pp. 166–77. There was also an extensive tradition of such stories in Spain and Portugal, as reported by Aurelio M. Espinosa in Cuentos populares españoles, 3 vols. (Madrid: S. Aguirre, 1946). See, for example, nos. 141 and 142, two versions of ‘La princessa encantada’ (The enchanted princess), vol. III, pp. 33–43. In a version corresponding to that found in Cosquin (I.15), the hero achieves the power of self-transformation into the forms of the animals he has helped, thereby enabling him to slay the beast with the seven heads and rescue the princess. This is Type III of the tale. In the Vth type, the hero conquers only by finding the egg that determines the life of the monster. He cites Straparola III.4 as a cognate tale to Type III, along with several others.

77 J.F. Campbell, “The Sea-Maiden,” in Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Orally Collected, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1994), vol. I, pp. 147–72. This work was first printed in 1890 by Alexander Gardner and Paisley. The story is told in Gaelic about a son promised to a mermaid at birth. It is a long and complex tale of heroic battles with beasts, abductions, and a double quest for the hero from underwater captors. The first is a water beast who reveals the husband’s body by degrees to his wife who is standing on the shore enticing the creature with jewelry. The second concerns the mermaid, who is slain by the hero’s brothers who go in search of him when his tree begins to wither in evidence of his distress. The first two brothers fail and are captured in their turn, but the third succeeds, rescues them all, and a substantial treasure as well. This story performs the same motif as found in Straparola, but the tale as a whole shows many accretions and variations. Campbell offers several variant tales in his annotations.

78 For parallels such as these, Campbell thought Straparola must have been known early at the Scottish court, and that David Rizzio is a likely candidate to have carried him north.

79 Maive Stokes, Indian Fairy Tales, annotations by Mary Stokes (London: Ellis & White, 1880), no. 22, pp. 153–63.

80 ‘Der Mann ohne Leib,’ in Kinder- und Volksmärchen (Leipzig, 1853; reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1975), no. 6, pp. 24–9.

81 Johann Georg von Hahn, Griechische und albanesische Märchen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1864), no. 5, vol. I, pp. 85–9. This tale presents a fascinating compilation of three distinct narratives artfully conjoined. It begins with the miraculous birth of a son promised to a dragon, resembling the curse of the boy’s mother in the present tale. After settling an argument among the animals, he gains the ability to metamorphose himself into a lion, an eagle, or ant. He fights battles for the king and marries the princess. ‘Dragon slaying’ elements appear (as in X.3) when he is sent to do battle with the water dragon. Usually this episode precedes the marriage (as in the Cesarino, Saint George tales), but here replaces the mermaid episode. As in the ‘Livoretto’ group, as well as the ‘dragon slaying’ group, the hero is replaced by an imposter who is accepted by the king. But the princess knows her man and, like the devoted wife of the present tale, she goes to the dragon’s well with her magic apples. With these gifts, she wins the sight of incrementally larger protions of her husband’s emerging body. The protagonist now resorts to his animal forms, first that of an ant, and then of the eagle in order to fly away with the princess. This tale reveals the embedded resemblance of III.4 to X.3 and VII.5: the magic births, the helper animals, the slaying of dragons, and the ultimate enchantment of the hero liberated by brothers or his beloved wife.

82 Orient und Occident (Munich: Georg Müller, 1918), vol. II, p. 117–18. Another tale containing these characteristics is ‘The Cobbler’s Lad,’ in Danish Fairy Tales, ed. by Svend Grundtvig (London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1914), pp. 148–65. This hero learns the language of the animals, settles a dispute over food, and wins the power to metamorphose himself into any of their forms. As a falcon he flies to Spain where he meets a princess promised to a goblin if ever the sun should shine on her before a certain age. She lives in a castle with north-facing windows. The boy flies into her bedroom, hides from searchers by becoming an ant, and remains beside her as a pampered white falcon. He returns as Prince Falcon to fight in the tournament with his fine trappings. Now it is the princess who is abducted and the cobbler must assume his many magical forms to find her. At this juncture, the story links with others, for he finds her in a castle inside a mountain combing the goblin’s hair with his head in her lap. She must find the secret to his powers – again it is an egg containing his soul – this one in a lake in Poland, and send her lover on the liberating quest. Many adventures follow and the ending writes itself.

83 F.M. Luzel, ed. Contes populaires de la Basse-Bretagne, 3 vols. (Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve & Larose [1887], 1967), vol. II, pp. 381–418.

84 There is a parallel situation of extracting bodies held back by the elements in the Nordic tale of ‘The Three Princesses of Whiteland.’ Rather than give gifts to a mermaid to allow a body to emerge progressively from the waves, the hero must allow himself to be whipped by trolls on three successive nights, each time more fiercely, in order to bring the girls progressively out of the earth where they have been buried up to their necks. The youngest is won for a bride, following the harrowing ordeal – a rather graphic form of male testing in the bride quest. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, Popular Tales from the Norse and North German, ed. George Webbe Dasent (London: Norroena Society, 1907), pp. 203–10.

85 ‘La fanciulla e il mago’ (The girl and the sorcerer), in Le Novelline di Santo Stefano (Torino: Negro, 1869), no. 23, pp. 47–8. Mention may be made here of a story collected initially in Liguria that is retold by Italo Calvino in his collection of Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon Books, [1956], 1980), no. 6, pp. 18–21. The curious feature, apart from replicating all the familiar parts of the present tale, is that the elements are integrated into a story that contains the adventures of a boy with a horse in the Livoretto tradition. Jack meets the animals arguing over a dead donkey, solves their dispute, and wins their gratitude, but like Fortunio, Jack has shape-shifting powers into a lion, dog, eagle or ant, rather than promises of service. He then sets off to liberate a princess from an ogre, true to versions of both stories, first climbing into her apartment as an ant. His purpose is to gain instruction from the princess about how to kill the ogre by cracking the fatal egg over his brow. Jack’s task is rather to go in quest of the magic egg, to slay the giant, and return with the princess. The tale is instructive in showing the migration of story elements and the reconfigurations that link materials into diverse patterns. The tale was first collected by James Bruyn Andrews, Contes ligures (Paris: E. Leroux, 1892; reprint, Marseille: Laffitte Reprints, 1979), no. 46.

86 Emmanuel Cosquin, Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris: Vieweg, 1886), vol. II, p. 131.

87 Novellistica XVI-XVII secolo (Milan: F. Vallardi, 1925), p. 372. Luisa Rubini shares this view, that Basile ‘hat die PN sicher gekannt’ (most certainly knew the Piacevoli notti). She lists the ten stories with cognate elements. Arguably, their differences may be accounted for by independent reliance upon local versions of common tales. That copies of the Piacevoli notti made their way to Naples is quite conceivable, but that Basile adapted those stories to create his own is far less so. ‘Straparola,’ in the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. Rolf Wilhelm Brednick (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), vol. VII, p. 1365.

88 All commentators on Basile have had to grapple with the question of his relationship to the matter of the folk and the degree to which he transforms their stories. As Stith Thompson poses the question, how much ‘was exerted on Basile by the actual form of the tales when he reworked them in the high-flown style of the Pentamerone?’ His answer is that we shall probably never know, because there are no folk tales from the period with which to make comparisons. The Folktale, p. 459.

89 No. 151 in Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales (Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday, n.d.), pp. 470–4, but No. 181 in Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1857). The following titles are suggested for readers interested in the German tales concerning nixies and mermaids. Closest to the Grimm brothers’ tale is Ludwig Bechstein’s ‘Der Müller und die Nixe’ [sic], in Deutsches Märchenbuch (Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1855), pp. 210–15; new ed., Märchenbuch (Augsburg: Wettbild, 2008). A classic in the genre is Johann Karl Musäus’ ‘Die Nymphe des Brunnens,’ in Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1782–87) (Munich: Winkler Verlag, 1961), pp. 279–325. But in this work the nixie of the fountain is no longer the siren who lures men to their deaths, but a fairy godmother to the little Mathilde, daughter of a Swabian robber baron. The girl’s mother is told by the fairy that she will not live to raise her daughter, but that she will replace her, giving the girl a magic apple which will grant to her three wishes during her lifetime. Then even the nixie disappears, leaving the girl to make her way in the world, to marry Graf Konrad, and to endure many hardships in a context of sensibilities worthy of the pre-Romantic age of Empfindsamkeit. There are essentially no narrative features corresponding to the siren episode in Straparola. The same is true of Johann Christoph Matthias Reinecke’s ‘Der Nixen Eingebinde’ in his Eichenblättern (Gotha: J. Perthes, 1793).

90 (Paris: M.-M. Brunet, 1698); trans. Jack Zipes in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition from Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 145–55.

91 On the question of influence and the narrative order passing from the folk tale to the fairy tale, see Raymonde Robert, Le conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Nancy: Presses universitaires, 1982), esp. pp. 97–126.

92 This story was translated into English from the edition of tales prepared by Thomas Simon Gueullette, ‘The Mogul Tales; Turkish Tales…’ in Tales of the East; Comprising the Most Popular Romances of Oriental Origin, intro. Henry Weber, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, 1812), vol. III, pp. 173–5. I signal here the connection between the Edinburgh edition and the Turkish Tales of Pétis de la Croix, trans. Dr. King and others, 2 vols. (London: W. Mears & J. Browne, 1714), vol. II, pp. 44–56. Pétis de la Croix, who died in 1713, left his French translation among his papers; it was published in 1722 under the title L’Histoire de la Sultane de Perse et des Visirs. It relates the same famous framing tale that first appears in the Book of Sindibad, and that reappeared in the History of the Forty Vizirs, and in the French Dolopathos of Johann de Alta Silva, as well as the English Seven Wise Masters. See also Auguste Louis Armand Loiseleur-Deslongchamps, Essai sure les fables indiennes et sur leur introduction en Europe, suivi du roman des Sept Sages de Rome en prose (Paris: Techener, 1838), p. 173.

93 This same story came to the West both later in the History of the Forty Vezirs, or the Story of the Forty Morns and Eves, as well as earlier, whether singly or in a collection. This work is attributed to Sheykh Zada. It was retranslated in the nineteenth century by E.J.W. Gibb and published in London by George Redway (1886), and dedicated to W.A. Clouston. The story appears as the ‘Thirty-ninth Vezir’s Tale,’ pp. 358–63. There are curious variants between the French translation taken from several manuscripts of the original, the earliest dating to the first half of the fifteenth century, and this translation from a version published in Constantinople between 1617 and 1623, given the dedication to Sultan Mustapha I. (Ultimately Gibb worked with five manuscripts containing 112 stories in which only thirty-five were common to all.) In his rendition, the black horse has become a bay, and under the pressure of romance, the king marries his master of the horse to the vizier’s daughter who had seduced him, allowing him to become chief vizier in his turn. The most telling detail is that the horse master, in offering a sword to the king ostensibly to behead him, had calculated rather more perspicaciously, after identifying the vizier’s daughter as his seducer, that he might be a candidate for the king’s protection. It is an important detail. E.J.W. Gibb professes that he is no student of folklore and notes the work that must be done by ‘eminent scholars’ in determining the place of The Forty Vezirs in the shaping of European folklore (p. xvii), but he ventures, nevertheless, to list the six stories by Straparola which are cognate with tales in the Turkish collection, along with those in the French fabliaux, Chaucer, the Gesta romanorum, the Decameron, and the Cento novelle antiche (which dates to the same era as the Gesta romanorum), thereby suggesting that these stories were in circulation generally throughout Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Such early dates, however, can only be in reference to Arabic tales predating the arrival of the Ottomans though whom, in the Near East, many are uniquely known. The question relates to the larger question of the arrival in the West of all that pertains to ‘the seven sages,’ ‘the seven wise masters,’ ‘Sintipas,’ and to this medieval phenomenon in general.

94 Trans. Charles Swan, rev. Wynnard Hooper (London: Bohn, 1876; reprint, New York: Dover, 1959), pp. 199–201. Edward Tripp in The Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1973), pp. 98–9, outlines the origins of the story of Argus Panoptes, referring the reader in turn to Apollodorus, 2.2.2–3 and to the Metamorphoses of Ovid, bk. I, ll. 622–723. See note 95.

95 This mixture of classical mythology and the European folk tale of the man who can never tell a lie, and who sets up his staff to carry out a provisional conversation with his master, are further represented in Le violier des histories romaines, ed. M.G. Brunet (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858), pp. 265–6, which is the Ancienne traduction des gesta romanorum. The story remains essentially the same. In resisting Mercury, Argus of the hundred eyes is slain and his head cut off so that, in effect, he has no opportunity to speak the truth to a magistrate. This is in turn related to the story of Mercury and Argus, the guardian of Io, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), bk. I, 624, p. 22.

96 (Bremen: Friedrich Wilmans, 1800), no. 23, pp. 293–310.

97 ‘Lu Zu Viritati,’ (Old man truth), in Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 2 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2009), no. 78, vol. I, pp. 346–8. The notes make little of this story, saying that it ‘does not conform to any of the types listed in Aarne-Thomspon-Uther’s “Anecdotes and Jokes.” It is essentially a morality tale of honesty triumphing over deceit, but it shows that honesty needs the addition of wit in order to succeed’ (p. 869). There is a pragmatic kind of folk wisdom in evidence, but it shows less of the complex ethical musing and paradox of the Turkish ‘originals.’

98 ‘Massaru Verità,’ in Sicilianische Märchen, ed. Laura Gonzenbach, anno. Reinhold Köhlers (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1870), no. 8, pp. 39 –41; Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (New York: Pantheon, [1956], 1980), no. 187, pp. 668–71. There are certain differences between Calvino’s telling and Gonzenbach’s original. In the original, he was instructed to say that the missing creature had hurled itself off the mountain. When he arrives at the palace, the entire court is present and he makes his reply in local dialect. Only the minister had wagered his life. Vittorio Imbriani offers a further folk version entitled ‘Giuseppe ’a Veretà’ in XII Conti pomiglianesi (Naples: Detken e Richoll, 1876), pp. 1–2, mentioning in his notes (p. 3) two further works featuring the story: ‘Don Peppino’ in La scuola italica, II.5 (Aug. 23, 1874); and ‘Le tre Maruzze,’ by Signore Troja, in Novella trojana, 1875, of which I can locate no further information.

99 Danish Fairy Tales, ed. Svend Grundtvig (London: G.G. Harrap & Co., 1914), pp. 187–92.

100 Téofilo Braga, Contos tradicionais do poro portugues, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1987), pt. II, no. 1, vol. I, pp. 189–90. Braga follows the story to Madiera as ‘Boi Bragado,’ and it is ‘O Rabil’ in Contos populares portugueses, ed. Adolfo Coelho (Lisbon: Compendium, 1996), no. 56. There are several books bearing this title.