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Hungarian Folk Tales — Part 13 (Vas Laci)
Description
The youngest prince is strong as the iron he is named for — Vas Laci, Iron Laci — and full of mischief besides: seven devils live in him. He knocks an old woman's egg-basket off her head, and she wishes him good for evil: his first wish shall come true at once. That day his three elder sisters, paying him back for his pranks, all pelt only him in the ball game, and in his anger he cries, "Oh, may the earth swallow you up!" — and the earth opens, and takes all three. He tells no one. Grown to manhood, he confesses to the king and goes after them himself: an iron chest, earned by one lifted bundle of branches, carries him beneath the earth and under the water, past the bridge of dancing razors, into the silver castle of the seven-headed dragon.
He wrestles the dragon in its iron barn and walks his eldest sister out over the razors on the dragon's own skin. Steeled head to foot by the steel smith, he outwits the fourteen-headed dragon at the spinning golden castle — iron wheel against paper wheel, red flame against blue — and a raven takes all fourteen heads at his better bargain. A little snake saved from a burning haystack counsels him to refuse her father's gold and ask only for his worst horse, his rustiest sword and his dirtiest shirt; and so armed he comes to the diamond castle, where the twenty-one-headed dragon's wife is a devilish woman, and where his elder brothers hang bound to the smoke. There the ransom he is offered costs him the sword and the shirt — and very nearly everything else.
The tale is told whole, as Benedek wrote it, and every hard passage stands at the source's own weight: the seven-headed dragon wrestled in the open and its heads struck off; the fourteen-headed dragon undone by its own bargains; the hero cut into a thousand pieces and welded whole again, seven times stronger, by the snake princess's herbs; and the last dragon felled with a single stroke. No one is killed whom the tale does not restore or unmask as a monster: the swallowed sisters are found alive, and the brothers come down from the smoke and are raised whole by the wonder-herbs.
From Benedek Elek, Magyar mese- és mondavilág (Athenaeum, 1894–96), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.
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