Episode Details

A poor man's golden-haired twins are raised by the King as prince and princess — until a quarrel at dice in the garden, a brother's angry curse, and a seven-headed dragon who seizes the girl and vanishes with her as if the earth had swallowed her up. Miklós dares not face the King and wanders the world, until as the Black King's coachman he ferries three táltos horses dry-hooved to the Fairy Queen's island, where thirteen swans alight under a golden apple tree and become maidens. The tale is told whole, as Benedek wrote it: the secret forced out of him and the Queen lost, the three sleeps at the golden tub of milk on the mountain, the mourning city whose queen has lain ill for seven years, the seven nested barrels of the wine of life in the cellar — and the táltos boy who, standing over the strengthless dragon, spares his life outright, then leads his uncle through the mountain of snakes and frogs, stepping on not one creature, to wake the Fairy Queen from her eternal sleep.

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

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