Episode Details

A god-fearing king builds a church of gold and diamonds — and will not set foot in it until someone brings him the psalm-singing bird, wherever in the world it may be. His youngest son rides a táltos horse past three enchanted wells, where three maidens wait out twelve years of captivity, and across the Red Sea to the castle of the twelve-headed dragon — and wins the bird at last not by the sword, but by mercy. But the road home holds the tale's true trial: the elder brothers, ransomed from slavery by his own gold, repay him with a cruelty that only a wonder-lake can undo — and it falls to the bird itself, mute for every other soul, to sing the truth into the king's church.

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

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