Episode Details

A Hungarian wonder tale from Elek Benedek's great collection of Hungarian folk tales and legends. A king's silk-garden is grazed bare every night, and every watchman set over it sleeps at midnight — until the youngest prince feeds a little mouse at the garden gate, and wins, night by night, three bridles that summon a silver, a golden and a diamond horse, each with a whole regiment at its heels. When his brothers' envy turns murderous, he trades his shining clothes for a Romani boy's rags and vanishes into the world, to serve as a gardener's lad at the Red King's court — where the youngest princess, looking out of her window on three Sundays, sees the ragged boy ride like the sun, and will have no other husband, not for all the princes in the world.

From Benedek Elek, Magyar mese- és mondavilág (Athenaeum, 1894–96), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.

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