Episode Details

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An old king dreams that his daughter pours two pitchers of water upon the ground, and the water rises and floods the whole world — and the wise men read it as two valiant sons who will conquer the earth. To cheat the dream he walls her into a little iron house on the highest mountain, with neither door nor window in it. But a spring bursts up out of the iron floor, and in the morning two golden-haired boys are playing round her, named for that water and for the day they came: Vízi Péter and Vízi Pál, Peter and Paul of the Waters. At seven years old they lean their shoulders to the wall and push it out, part beneath the wishing tree of the world with their knives stuck in its trunk — white water if the other lives, red blood if he is dead — and Péter, sparing the wolf, the tiger and the lion on his road, comes with their three cubs into a city hung all in mourning black.

At the city's well he fights the twelve-headed dragon, leaps into its twelfth mouth, and pierces the black dove that is its soul; then, sleeping with his head in the rescued princess's lap, he loses that head to the red prince, who marries her in his place. But the beasts weld his head back on — backwards first, to the lion's slap and the wolf's shame — and the twelve golden apples and the dragon's twenty-four golden teeth prove him before the king, and the impostor falls. Against his wife's warning he rides out to the witch's farm, is hurled by the queen of the whirlwinds through the very land of hell and out again, and at the fire that feeds itself he throws his bacon at the toad-roasting witch — and wakes in pieces in her tub. It is left to Pál, who reads his brother's death in red blood at the wishing tree, to walk the same road and stand at the same fire.

The tale is told whole, as Benedek wrote it, and every hard passage stands at the source's own weight: the dragon fought in the open, its soul a black dove in its belly, pierced; the hero's head struck off in his sleep in a single sentence, and welded on again whole by his faithful beasts; the impostor prince felled with a single cut; the hero cut to pieces in the witch's tub, and raised whole again by the witch herself. The dragon's yearly tribute of a maiden is the city's own telling, never enacted on the page — the princess is brought to the well and rescued before any harm.

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

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