Episode Details

An old king has one eye that always laughs and one that always weeps — and only his youngest son dares to ask him why. The answer sends the boy out on a wondrous quest: beyond sky-high mountains and three ancient grandmothers, over the Blue Sea to the seventy-seventh island, where Fairy Ilona's castle turns forever on a golden duck's foot and two springs bubble in her bedchamber — the water of death, and the water of eternal youth. The prince wins the water and outruns the fairies, but on the road home his own brothers betray him — and in the end it falls to a disguised carter-coachman, and to Fairy Ilona herself, to find the one who truly stood in her castle.

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

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