The Boys with the Golden Stars
The Boys with the Golden Stars (Romanian: Doi feți cu stea în frunte) is a Romanian fairy tale collected in Rumänische Märchen.[1] Andrew Lang included it in The Violet Fairy Book.[2] An alternate title to the tale is The Twins with the Golden Star.[3]
The Boys with the Golden Stars
The Boys with the Golden Stars
Doi feți cu stea în frunte
The Twins with the Golden Star
ATU 707 (The Three Golden Children, or The Three Golden Sons)
The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", albeit following a specific narrative that is found in Romania, Moldova, and Hungary, as well as in other Eastern European and Balkanic countries.
Origins[edit]
The Romanian tale Doi feți cu stea în frunte was first published in the Romanian magazine Convorbiri Literare, in October, 1874, and signed by Romanian author Ioan Slavici.[4]
Synopsis[edit]
A herdsman had three daughters, Ana, Stana and Laptița. The youngest was the most beautiful. One day, the emperor was passing with attendants. The oldest daughter said that if he married her, she would bake him a loaf of bread that would make him young and brave forever; the second one said, if one married her, she would make him a shirt that would protect him in any fight, even with a dragon, and against heat and water; the youngest one said that she would bear him twin sons with stars on their foreheads. The emperor married the youngest, and two of his friends married the other two.[a]
The emperor's stepmother had wanted him to marry her daughter and so hated his new wife. She got her brother to declare war on him, to get him away from her, and when the empress gave birth in his absence, killed and buried the twins in the corner of the garden and put puppies in their place. The emperor punished his wife to show what happened to those who deceived the emperor.
Two aspens grew from the grave, putting on years' growth in hours. The stepmother wanted to chop them down, but the emperor forbade it. Finally, she convinced him, on the condition that she had beds made from the wood, one for him and one for her. In the night, the beds began to talk to each other. The stepmother had two new beds made, and burned the originals. While they were burning, the two brightest sparks flew off and fell into the river. They became two golden fish. When fishermen caught them, they wanted to take them alive to the emperor. The fish told them to let them swim in dew instead, and then dry them out in the sun. When they did this, the fish turned back into babies, maturing in days.
Wearing lambskin caps that covered their hair and stars, they went to their father's castle and forced their way in. Despite their refusal to take off their caps, the emperor listened to their story, only then removing their caps. The emperor executed his stepmother and took back his wife.
Analysis[edit]
The birth of the wonder-children[edit]
The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children".[6]
Most versions of The Boys With Golden Stars[7] begin with the birth of male twins, but very rarely there are fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. When they transform into human babies again, the siblings grow up at an impossibly fast rate and hide their supernatural trait under a hood or a cap. Soon after, they show up in their father's court or house to reveal the truth through a riddle or through a ballad.[8]
The motif of a woman's babies, born with wonderful attributes after she claimed she could bear such children, but stolen from her, is a common fairy tale motif; see "The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird", "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", "The Three Little Birds", "The Wicked Sisters", "Ancilotto, King of Provino", and "Princess Belle-Etoile". Some of these variants feature an evil stepmother.
The reincarnation motif[edit]
Daiva Vaitkevičienė suggested that the transformation sequence in the tale format (from human babies, to trees, to lambs/goats and finally to humans again) may be underlying a theme of reincarnation, metempsychosis or related to a life-death-rebirth cycle.[9] This motif is shared by other tale types, and does not belong exclusively to the ATU 707.
French scholar Gédeon Huet noted the "striking" (frappantes, in the original) similarities between these versions of ATU 707 and the Ancient Egyptian story of The Tale of Two Brothers - "far too great to be coincidental", as he put it.[10]
India-born author Maive Stokes noted the resurrective motif of the murdered children, and found parallels among European tales published during that time.[11] Austrian consul Johann Georg von Hahn also remarked on a similar transformation sequence present in a Greek tale from Asia Minor, Die Zederzitrone, a variant of The Love for Three Oranges (ATU 408).[12] Bulgarian folklorist Lyubomira Parpulova noted the resemblance between the twins' cycle of reincarnations to the heroine's of Bulgarian tale type ATU 408, "Неродена мома" ("The Maiden Who Was Never Born").[13]