The king of the ravens
The King of the Ravens is a rather unknown French fairy tale, it was written down by Jean-François Bladé and published together with 18 other magical fairy tales by Josef Guter .
content
A grass-green, one-eyed man has three daughters, all of whom were very beautiful. The youngest, however, at ten years old, was the most beautiful. The king of the ravens comes to him and wants to marry one of his daughters. The father then goes to his daughters and it turns out that the two older ones have already been promised to someone else. He doesn't even ask the youngest. When the King of the Ravens learns that no one wants to marry him, he furiously picks out his father's eye and flies away. Wailing, he tells his youngest daughter what happened and she decides to marry the King of the Ravens. When the raven came flying again the next day and heard the good news, he gave the man his eye back.
After the wedding, a flock of ravens arrives and carries their queen to a barren, icy land and to the king's castle. At midnight the king of the ravens comes and tells her that he has been cursed by a villain. A villain has turned him and all his people into ravens. The spell can only be broken if she sleeps next to him for seven years without looking at him while he rests next to her in his human form. To be on the safe side, he put a bare sword between them. To bridge the lonely days, the queen inspects the area and meets a laundress who tries to wash black laundry white. The queen helps her and the laundry becomes pure white again. As a thank you, she should only come back when she is in great need.
The day before she can finally look at the King of the Ravens, she doesn't want to wait any longer. She waits until her husband sleeps and then realizes that he is beautiful, but on closer inspection she drips wax onto his skin and wakes him up with it. The King of the Ravens explained to her that she had ruined everything and that a villain could do anything to him now. While the queen was leaving the castle crying, the villain managed to enter and tied the king of the ravens with an iron chain. Then he took him to a mountain on a high island, forged him to the summit and had him guarded by a black and a white wolf, who alternately sleep and therefore one wakes during the day and one at night.
In her need, the queen returns to the laundress and receives iron shoes, a pocket sack with bread, a bottle with wine and a knife. When she has run through the shoes, be very close to her goal. The sack and bottle were never empty and so she was able to feed herself on her search. Because she still needed a blue flower that "sing day and night and that it breaks iron". With this flower she can free her husband. When she gets to the flower, her shoes break and she cuts them off. She arrives at her husband's house with the flower, puts the wolves to sleep with the song and kills them. Then she frees the king, and the blue flower wilts immediately. Then all the ravens come and take their human form. Whereupon all are liberated and can return home.
literature
- Josef Guter (Ed.): The King of the Ravens. Magic fairy tales from eleven countries. Pp. 108-120. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1984. ISBN 3-596-22849-2
References
- ↑ Fairy tales in French ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed December 21, 2015.
