"The Pink" or "The Carnation" (Die Nelke) is a fairytale collected by the Brothers Grimm. In this story, a childless queen prays for a child. One day, an angel tells her that she will have a son with the power to wish for anything. This prophecy comes true, and the queen and king are happy. However, the greedy royal cook decides to kidnap the child. One day while the queen naps with her son during a trip to the royal menagerie, he steals the child and leaves animal blood on the queen’s robes, then tells the king that she negligently allowed their son to be killed by an animal. The king believes him and has the queen walled up in a tower. She only survives because angels bring her food every day.

Meanwhile, the cook takes the little prince out into the wilderness and tells him to wish for a wonderful castle. The cook keeps the boy there. As the boy grows up, the cook decides he needs a companion, and tells him to wish for a beautiful maiden. Again, as he wishes, the maiden appears (created by him? summoned from somewhere else? No idea!).

The boy and girl immediately become close. However, the cook eventually decides there’s too much risk that his crimes will be discovered. He orders the maiden to stab the boy and bring him the boy's heart and tongue, or die herself. He has no way to back this up, as the maiden clearly realizes, because she instead serves up a deer's heart and tongue (shades of Snow White here) and tells the prince to hide. The prince turns the cook into a black poodle and forces him to eat flaming coals.

Some time later, the prince decides hey, this is probably a good time to go check on Mom. However, the girl is frightened of the journey. At her request, the prince turns her into a pink or carnation - thus the title of the story - and takes her along. He also brings the poodle-cook. He stops at the tower to tell his mother that he's on the way to rescue her; then he goes to the castle and announces himself to the King as a huntsman. He offers the greatest hunting game ever, and uses his wishing powers to do so.

With all the fine game meat, the King is very pleased and throws a banquet, insisting that the huntsman sit at his side. Once they're at the banquet, the huntsman reveals himself as the lost prince and explains his whole story. He restores the cook to his true form, and the King has him thrown into the dungeon and executed. The prince restores the maiden to her true shape, and everyone is astonished by her beauty. The King has the Queen freed, but she dies soon after from her ordeal, and the King dies of a broken heart. The prince and the maiden are married and presumably rule the kingdom.

Analysis
This story is categorized in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther system as Type 652, The Boy Whose Wishes Always Come True. The tale was collected in Zwehrn, and the Grimms noted a few other variants, with or without the flower transformation (Hunt). 
 
I remember reading this and thinking it was kind of a weird story, then forgot about it. Despite being a Grimm story, it's very obscure. However, when I looked into it, I learned that the scattered versions collected are surprisingly widespread. 

In a Lower Saxon version, in which a king’s twelfth child is born; the king chooses the first beggar who visits to be godfather (shades of “Godfather Death”), and this godfather declares that the boy will have whatever he wishes. The court jester, Kio, is hiding and overhears this. As the little prince grows older, Kio realizes that he really does have the ability to wish for things, and steals him away to a foreign land. He tells the boy, Lietchen, to wish for a wealthy house, lands and servants for him, and tells him to transform a lily into a woman. Kio marries the woman, who is thus the boy’s foster-mother. Lietchen eventually begins asking his foster-mother about their past; equally curious, she asks Kio, who tells the whole story. Liechen is spying and listens; he immediately transforms the woman back into a lily which he returns to its garden, and turns Kio into a poodle. He returns to his homeland where he presents himself at the castle as a kitchen boy and catches the king’s attention. After an astoundingly blasé mention that yeah, the king used to have a son named Lietchen ("He probably drowned, for I haven't been able to find any trace of him"), the boy reveals all and Kio is executed by burning (Schambach-Müller, pp. 291ff).

This is very close to a version mentioned in the Grimms' notes with a beggar godfather, a spying dwarf, and the dwarf's wife being a pivotal character; however, that one skipped any flower transformations and the dwarf's wife drops out of the story. It actually makes more sense for the villain to wish for a wife for himself, rather than instigating his own defeat by telling the boy to wish himself a friend and companion.

Jacques wrote in about this story, and informed me of a French version, “Le Chien Canard” (“the duck (fetching) dog”). In this version, collected as "Le Vieux Soldar" by Lemieux, the king looks for fairy godmothers for his newborn son. Two bless the child with beauty and intelligence, but a third is angry at not being invited and curses him with the ability to wish. This is unusual in making the wishing a curse rather than a gift, which does seem apropos considering what happens next, and is probably the result of some mixing with "Sleeping Beauty." Here the kidnapper is an old soldier who has long served the king; the queen is accused of cannibalism. Once the boy is older, the soldier has him wish for a castle full of mirrors; there the soldier hunts all day and forces the boy to be a servant. When the boy becomes uncooperative, the soldier has him wish for a princess. The soldier makes the princess his servant and orders her to kill the boy. She refuses, and the soldier kills her. He has the boy wish for a second princess, who meets the same fate. A third princess is much quicker on the uptake, and helps the boy figure out that he, not the soldier, is the one with the power to make wishes come true. (At least one French-Canadian version gives this a touch of "Blackbeard" when the princess discovers the bodies of her predecessors - Dorson, p. 443). When the soldier returns home, the boy turns him into a hunting dog and they all return to the king for the typical conclusion. There is no flower transformation in this version.

Ulrich Marzolph noted a variant, "The Story of Hasan, the Youth Whose Wishes Are Fulfilled," in one manuscript of The Arabian Nights. Here, mermaids grant a childless couple a son with magical wishing powers. However, their greedy slave kidnaps the infant and replaces him with a puppy. The boy, Hasan, grows up to marry the daughter of the sultan, who gets the slave to tell the whole story.  As soon as Hasan learns the truth about his past, he transforms the slave into a dog and the princess into a mule and travels with them to find his parents, after which he restores the princess to human shape and they are married.

Marzolph links the story type to the 14th-century Dutch drama Esmoreit, and attributes its popularity to the Grimms' "The Pink" (Marzolph, 215). Esmoreit is not a magical tale, but it is a "Calumniated Wife" story type. The Queen of Sicily is imprisoned on charges of infanticide, while her infant son Esmoreit is sold away by a scheming relative and raised in Damascus. A princess named Damiette raises him and serves as a kind of foster-mother/sister, but falls in love with him when he grows up. So that they can be together, she explains that he's not actually related to her and encourages him to track down his birth family. The queen is freed, the culprit is punished, and the couple gets married (Salingar 47-48).

"The Pink" always struck me as a weird story. Some of these variants clear up fuzzy plot logic and make more sense. For instance, the boy doesn't  know that he controls the wishing magic, or doesn't know about his birth parents, and the girl helps him dig out the truth. 

The Grimms, as well as commentators Bolte and Polivka (pp. 121ff), focused on the plot point of the girl transformed into a flower, comparing it to stories like "The Myrtle" in The Pentamerone. In those stories, a prince falls for a girl who emerges from a flower, or a flower that turns into a girl. He hides the flower in his room to spend time with the girl whenever she emerges, but some jealous women find out and try to destroy it.

However,t he only real similarity to "The Pink" is the flower/girl transformation. And as you can see from the other variants I've mentioned, the flower is not a particularly common part of the story. For instance, one list of nine collected French-Canadian versions included only one with the flower incident, that being a fleur-de-lys (Dorson, p. 429). That list was not exhaustive, and there's at least one other French flower version, with a rose ("Roquelaire, voleur de l'enfant du roi"). But this is still in the minority. It would be more accurate when analyzing this tale to focus on the villain's transformation into a dog. This incident, which resonates across pretty much all the variants I've found, returns him forcibly to his original role as a servant. In "Hasan, the Youth Whose Wishes Are Fulfilled," it is a karmic echo of the way the servant replaced the infant Hasan with a puppy. In the case of the soldier in "Le Chien canard," the transformation turns his hobby on him, with the avid hunter becoming a hunting dog.

Reading "The Pink" after my recent posts, it jumped out at me that this is actually pretty close to the Perseus family of stories.

ATU 707 and ATU 708, “The Wonder-Child”
I just went over this story type in my post on "Le Chat Noir" (see "Cinderella's Cat Child"). The overarching plot is extremely similar, with a queen giving birth to a wonderful child. She usually predicts what will make the child special, and here it happens in a more roundabout way through the angel's declaration that she passes on to the king.

Then there's an antagonist - frequently a cook - who frames the queen for her child's death, smearing animal blood on her clothes while she sleeps. Here, the wicked cook is a man, but in many Type 707 stories it's the queen's jealous sister(s). This leads to the queen’s unjust imprisonment. And as the typical ending goes, the lost child confronts his father at a feast, where he exposes the truth and has his mother freed and the villain violently punished. 

The flower girl also reminds me of the swan maiden in "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", who just shows up on the island at an appropriate time to become the prince’s love interest and magical helper.

There are also strong parallels to some other story types:

Type 313, "The Girl Helps the Hero Flee"
This type should really be named "The Heroine Saves the Boy." In these stories, the hero winds up in the villain’s stronghold, where a maiden—often the villain’s daughter—uses her magical powers to escape with him in a chase full of transformations. Here you get stories like “The Master Maid,” “Nix Nought Nothing,” or in the Grimms’ collection, “Sweetheart Roland” and “Foundling-Bird.” (Incidentally, “Foundling-Bird” also has a cook as the villain.)

In "The Pink," the boy is the one with the supernatural powers. He's even the one who creates the villain's castle, and the girl arrives through his wish. She has no powers of her own, but she does use similar trickery to conceal the prince and trick the cook. She's summoned (created??) by the hero in the first place. She’s too scared to even leave the castle. She does still have a hint of action when she tricks the cook and contributes to his demise. Maybe, as in "Kio," she was originally created from a flower, and that's why she's so timid? However, in Dorson's version of "The Duck-Dog," the beautiful girl from England is savvy, rebellious and clever. She's the one who discovers the boy's true power and directs him in how to use it against their captor. "There, my old rogue... You killed two women, but you didn't kill me."

There's no transformation chase specifically in "The Pink", but there is a faint parallel when the prince turns her into a flower.  Compare “Sweetheart Roland,” where at the end of the transformation chase, the girl turns herself into a flower believing that she’s been forgotten, only to later be reunited with her sweetheart. However, as previously mentioned, Type 652 stories don't actually feature flowers all that frequently. "The Pink" is somewhat of an outlier.

In quite a few versions of Type 652, the villain intends for the girl to be his wife, but she prefers the boy. Type 313 girls are typically the villain's daughter, and thus similarly connected to him. You could also compare Esmoreit, where the love interest initially serves a sisterly or motherly role.

ATU 675, "The Fool Whose Wishes All Came True"
A foolish or lazy young man receives the boon that whatever he wishes will come true. After the local princess mocks him (often in a suggestive scene that involves the man riding on a log), he wishes that she will become pregnant, and it comes true. The king is furious at this apparent scandal, and when he determines that the fool is the child's father, he puts all three—fool, princess and baby—into a chest or a boat and sets them out to sea. The fool then uses his wishes to bring them to an island and create a beautiful castle. This soon attracts the attention of the princess's father, and with the fool's new rise in status, everyone is reconciled.

The main similarity is the boy with the power of wishing, but there are also a ton of parallels to the ATU 707/708 family here. There’s the Perseus-like plotline of the princess who mysteriously becomes pregnant, and who is then cast into the sea with her child. As in “The Wonder-Child,” there’s a miraculous landing on an island where the small family prospers and eventually wins the admiration of the king back home. There’s also the fact that the fool often receives his powers from a fish, frog or other aquatic creature—much like ATU 707 stories, where a fish is frequently involved in the marvelous child’s birth. (Maybe all stories are secretly Perseus? I'm mostly joking, but there are some tales that seem rooted into the basic fairytale code. Others are Cinderella and "East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon.")

Thank you to Jacques for suggesting this post!

Sources

• Ashliman, D. L. "The Fool Whose Wishes All Came True."
• Ayres, Harry Morgan (trans.). An Ingenious Play of Esmoreit: The King's Son of Sicily. 1924.
• Bolte, Johannes and Georg Polívka. Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- u. hausmärchen der brüder Grimm, vol. II. 1915.
• Dorson, Richard M. Folktales Told Around the World. 1975. p. 429, "The Duck-Dog."
• Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1909). "The Pink."
• Hunt, Margaret R. (trans.) Grimm's Household Tales, Volume 1. "Notes."
• Lemieux, Germain (ed.) Les vieux m’ont conté, Tome 19. 1983. p. 51, "Le Vieux Soldar."
• Marzolph, Ulrich. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 1. 2004.
• Salingar, Leo. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. pp. 47-48 (description of Esmoreit).
• Schambach-Müller, George. Niedersächsische Sagen. 1855. p. 291ff, "Kio."

I’ve been on a Perseus research kick lately, and read through Edwin Sidney Hartland’s The Legend of Perseus, an exhaustively researched, occasionally surprisingly sarcastic three-volume series examining the concepts of this story and similar fairy tales across the world.
 
The myth basically goes like this: a king named Acrisius hears a prophecy that his daughter Danae’s child will kill him, so he locks Danae in a bronze chamber. However, the god Zeus visits her in the form of a shower of gold, and fathers her son, Perseus. When Acrisius discovers this, he shuts his daughter and grandson in a chest which he casts into the sea. But they survive; the chest washes ashore and a fisherman rescues them. Years later, the local king sets his sights on Danae, and tries to get rid of Perseus by sending him off to fight the snake-haired Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turns people to stone. Perseus receives advice and magical weapons from the gods, sneaks up on Medusa by using a shield as a mirror, and slays her. On the way back, he runs across a princess named Andromeda, who’s being served up as human sacrifice to a sea monster named Cetus after her family angered Poseidon. Perseus slays Cetus as well as Andromeda’s wicked suitor Phineus, and takes Andromeda as his bride. Returning home, he uses Medusa’s head to petrify Danae’s unwanted bridegroom. As for Acrisius, his prophecy comes true via a freak frisbee accident.
 
This is one of the few Greek myths that’s actually pretty positive all around, and probably the most fairytale-like one out there. The villains are punished, and the heroes are decent people who get a happy ending. (The one bump is the backstory of Medusa; the earliest variants indicate that she’s simply a horrifying monster, the offspring of even more ancient and horrifying monsters, but the Roman writer Ovid wrote up a version in which she was a beautiful girl changed into a beast for the crime of being raped (!). Even though it's probably not at all what the older storytellers envisioned, this version - which makes Medusa a sympathetic and tragic figure - is currently the most well-known backstory.)
 
The myth has given rise to quite a few big-name adaptations:

• A lost play by Euripides from the 4th century BC, Andromeda, is now lost but was hugely influential and its depiction of Perseus and Andromeda might have been the first on-stage treatment of a couple falling in love.
• The 1981 film Clash of the Titans is a loose adaptation with stop-motion animated monsters including Medusa (Cetus was renamed the Kraken for some reason). This movie exposed a lot of people to the myth.
• There's also a loose, thematic adaptation in Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, which launched a whole wave of myth retellings for young readers; Perseus “Percy” Jackson, named for the mythological figure, is a demigod subject of an ominous prophecy who goes on a quest to save his mother, is lent help and otherworldly weapons by the gods, slays Medusa along the way and later uses her head to petrify his mom’s abusive boyfriend, and falls for a girl named Annabeth.

One of the most interesting facts about the Perseus myth, though, is that it seems to be two separate stories mushed together. There's Perseus's birth, and there's his quest to slay Medusa, which serves as an origin myth for protective amulets known as gorgoneia. But the Andromeda sequence feels random - not connected to the rest of the plot at all. Different versions are super inconsistent on whether Perseus kills the sea monster with a sword or with Medusa's head. Plus, the major players in the Andromeda segment, and only the Andromeda segment, have constellations named for them - Perseus, Andromeda, Cetus the sea monster, and Andromeda's parents. Nobody else gets a constellation, unless you count Pegasus the winged horse. The Andromeda story is a star origin myth! Maybe these were separate stories about Perseus that eventually got combined; we don't know. Tumblr user amorphousbl0b pointed out the star connection and also an interesting key similarity - through both parts, Perseus is a defender of women. In the Medusa story, he protects his mother from an unwanted suitor; similarly in the Andromeda segment, he saves Andromeda from her cowardly and vicious fiancé Phineus (who also happens to be her uncle).

This myth is full of classic fairy tale tropes. The wonder child with the miraculous conception, an unwanted child who survives being thrown out into the water, a prince raised in poverty, the princess and the dragon, otherworldly helpers with advice and magical gifts, and monsters.

There are some fairy tales which hit all the same plot beats as Perseus; Hartland recounts one from Tuscany where there's a witch in place of Medusa, a helpful old man with a flying horse in place of Athena and Hermes, and one-eyed women who are pretty much exactly the Graeae (pp. 11-13). However, remember that there are kind of two halves to the Perseus story - and there's an answer to this too in some popular folktale types.

The Blood Brothers
In ATU tale type 303, "The Blood Brothers," a childless couple is blessed with the birth of twins (or, occasionally, triplets) after the wife ingests magical water, fish, or fruit. Sometimes the blood brothers are identical boys born from different women who both ate the magical food. (For example, in the Brothers Grimms' "The Gold-Children", a fisherman gives his wife and horse pieces of a talking golden fish to eat, after which the wife gives birth to golden twin boys, the horse gives birth to golden twin foals, and two pieces of fish buried in the earth produce two golden lilies.)

As young men, the brothers set out to make their fortunes. One brother discovers a city where a princess is about to be sacrificed to a dragon. He, of course, slays the dragon and marries the princess. At this point, things go wrong; he may run up against a rival for the princess’s hand, or be captured by a witch. (In "The Gold-Children," a witch turns him to stone.) However, his brother had a token to warn him if any danger occurred, and comes to the rescue.

At first Hartland's description of this story seemed like a stretch to me, but there are real parallels. First is the supernatural birth. According to Hartland, because the mother in this story is married, the miraculous birth has to be more remarkable to have the same impact; so where in some stories we might have a virgin birth like Danae’s, in others we have a married woman giving birth to twins or triplets.

Often the boys are the sons of a fisherman, or have some link to water or the ocean; compare Perseus and his mother being rescued from the sea by a fisherman. There’s often a gold or celestial motif, with the boys having golden markings or stars on their foreheads, or being born after the wife eats a golden fish, which matches with Zeus appearing as a golden shower. Or sometimes there is a mysterious supernatural father.

This story follows the Andromeda track, with a wonder child growing up to save a princess from a dragon. If there’s a rival who tries to kill the hero and/or steal the credit for the dragon-slaying, this parallels Phineus, Andromeda’s other suitor.
 
The Three Golden Children
Then, on the Medusa track, there's ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children." Here, a king overhears three sisters gossiping. The youngest boasts that if she married the king, she would bear wonderful children with stars on their foreheads, golden hair or arms, or other markings along those lines. The king takes her up on it and makes her his queen. However, when her prediction comes true, her jealous sisters frame her for infanticide or claim that she has given birth to animals.

From here, there are typically three routes the story can take  (Goldberg, 2016). In one route, the children are actually killed, but come back in a transformation sequence. In another, typical of Slavic variants, the mother and her son(s) are thrown into the sea together in a barrel like Danae and Perseus, and wash up on an island where the son or sons later build a palace to get their father’s attention.

In the third route, the sisters steal the children and cast them into the water in boxes or baskets; then, the queen is imprisoned on the sisters' false accusations. However, the children are rescued and raised by a servant, or merchant, or fisherman, etc. 

The children (in the most famous variants, two brothers and a sister) grow up, but then an old woman (usually sent by their wicked aunts) tells the girl of magical treasures such as a singing tree and a talking bird. The girl begs her brothers to get her these items, and they agree, leaving her with tokens that will tell her if they're in danger. A magical helper typically shows up along the way to offer advice (an equivalent to Athena, Hermes, and the Graeae).

However, the treasure is guarded by magic which turns the two older brothers to stone. Back home, the younger sister sees their tokens change, and charges out, guilt-stricken, to rescue them. In "The Sisters Envious of Their Cadette," from Antoine Galland's edition of The Arabian Nights, phantom voices mock and threaten anyone who climbs a certain mountain. When the brothers turn around to fight or flee, they are turned into black stones. On the way to save them, younger sister Periezade wisely plugs her ears. Compare Perseus looking in a mirror to fight Medusa – it's the same effect of don’t turn around, no matter what. In the end, the sister wins the treasures and restores her brothers along with all the other adventurers who were petrified.

The siblings return home with their trophies, which serve the additional purpose of leading them to the king, revealing the truth, and vindicating and saving their mother. In this story, too, there’s a woman at the heart of the quest. For Perseus, there's Danae threatened with forced marriage. For ATU 707, there's the little sister tricked into asking for magical items, and - although the siblings don't know it yet - the falsely-imprisoned mother.

I've always been fond of both Perseus and Periezade as fairytale heroes, and was delighted to realize that their stories have these parallels. One interesting note is that both ATU 303 and ATU 707 have the plot of the "life-token" and the sibling rescue, which Perseus doesn't really have a match for.

And so on
These are widespread stories, with infinite variations. An Irish version seemingly combines Medusa and Perseus's grandfather Acrisius. The mythical Balor was a giant with an eye that destroyed everything he looked at, and there are many folktales of how he was defeated. In one specific folktale collected in the 19th century, Balor locks up his daughter Eithne in a tower to keep her from bearing a son prophesied to kill him. One of his enemies gains access to Eithne anyway; Balor tries to drown the resulting baby triplets, but one survives and grows up to kill him.
 
Or sometimes Medusa is the love interest! This seems to be a minor trend in ATU 707 variants from Eastern and Southeast Europe, where the brother is the main hero, and the final task is to fetch a beautiful woman with magical powers who becomes his bride and helps reveal the truth about their family origins. In a variant from Epirus (a region now part of modern Greece and Albania) "the beauty of the land" (E Bukura e Dheut, a stock character from Albanian lore) lives on the other side of a river; many have pursued her, only to turn to stone. With help from his winged horse, the hero takes her home and marries her. This story gives the vibe that the beauty is somehow trapped in this isolated state, and is grateful to the hero when he frees her (Von Hahn, 287, notes to story no. 69). In a Nogai tale, "Sarygyz, Mistress of the Djinni", the final quest is to fetch the titular character, who lives near a cemetery and turns people to stone. With advice from a talking horse, the boy wins her as his bride. In a note reminiscent of Medusa’s serpent hair, the key is to arrive while Sarygyz is washing her hair; then she revives her victims by shaking her hair.
I've found some references to similar sorceress-brides in a Dargin version, "Арц-Издаг" ("Silver Izdag"), and in a story from Chechnya where "Malkha-Azani" is a sorceress with an enchanted mirror, living beyond nine mountains, who petrifies any men who approach her palace. More research needed - probably with some translation services - but it's very intriguing to see how a Medusa figure can play a different role. The same thing happens in the Greek story of the Tzitzinæna, although she takes a more motherly role to the heroes once she's tamed (Legrand, p. 77ff). In these variants, there is a theme that the hero must call the sorceress and get her to acknowledge him, and this is the most dangerous part of his journey where he might turn to stone. A winged horse is also common in these types - similar to Pegasus.

These stories are incredibly widespread, and with Perseus you can get just a hint of how ancient they are, too.
Editing to add: We know that the classical myth of Perseus has signs of being two separate myths about Perseus combined. Maybe there is a clue how that happened in these fairytale types – one about a miraculously born child who grow up to slay a dragon and save a princess, and the other about a miraculously born child who survives drowning and goes on a quest for a magical item to save his mother.

SOURCES

• Goldberg, Christine. "Review: The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev, Volume II. In: Journal of Folklore Research. Online publication: March 16, 2016.
• Hartland, Edwin Sidney. The Legend of Perseus: A Study of Tradition in Story, Custom and Belief. 1894. Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3.
• Legrand, Emile. Recueil de Contes Populaires Grecs. 1881.
• Von Hahn, Johann Georg. Griechische und albanesische Märchen. 1864.

Further reading

• Periezade

One of my favorite childhood fairytales was the expressively titled "The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Cadette" (or in more modern language, "The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Younger Sister.") This is one of the Arabian Nights, but it's actually part of a group of "orphan tales," which appeared in Antoine Galland's translation from the early 1700s, and not in the original manuscripts. Some, like Aladdin and Ali Baba, are actually more well-known than the original Nights, and I have to say Periezade was my absolute favorite when I read a collection as a kid.

The story begins with a king named Khusraw Shah or Khosrouschah. There were a few real Persian kings named Khosrau. This story’s Khosrau Shah comes off as capricious and murderous, but we'll get to that in a minute.

He overhears three sisters talking. One dreams of marrying the king's baker, another of marrying the Sultan's chef, and the youngest and most beautiful says that she would marry the Sultan. While the first two make their wishes out of gluttony, the youngest is said by the narrator to have more sense. Amused, the Sultan has them fetched to the palace and performs all three weddings on the spot. Unfortunately, this sows resentment; the older sisters grow jealous and plot their sister's demise. Over the next few years, she gives birth to two sons and a daughter, and each time her sisters replace them with a puppy, a kitten, and a wooden stick that they pass off as a molar pregnancy. They secretly put the babies in a basket and boat them off down the canal.
The king initially wants to execute his wife straight off, but his advisors talk him down and he decides to instead have her imprisoned on the steps of the mosque, where everyone on their way to worship must spit on her.

The superintendent of the palace gardens, with fantastic timing, happens to be in the area each time a baby comes floating along the river. He realizes that they must have come from the queen's apartments, but decides it's better not to get involved, and just raises them as his own. He and his wife pass away before they have the chance to explain the children's true origins, so the king's children - Bahman, Perviz and Periezade - are left to live in their isolated house, living a wealthy and comfortable yet solitary life. The boys are named after Persian kings - Perviz's name means "victorious" and I found out that one of the real Khosraus had "Parviz" as a byname. Periezade's name is derived from "peri" or fairy. The narrator takes note that Periezade is formally educated and physically active just as much as her brothers.

One day, an old woman tells Periezade of three marvelous treasures: Speaking Bird, the Singing Tree, and the Golden Water. Periezade is overcome with longing for these things (I had forgotten before I reread it how weirdly obsessed she becomes). She pleads so much that her oldest brother Bahman agrees to go and find them, leaving behind a magical dagger that will become covered in blood if he dies. Soon enough the dagger turns bloody, and Perviz does the same, leaving Periezade with a string of pearls that will get stuck if he's in danger. When Perviz also falls into peril, Periezade disguises herself as a boy and sets out after them.

Now, both Bahman and Perviz had encountered an old man on their journey, and Periezade soon does the same. In many stories, when a trio of siblings encounters an old beggar in the woods, it's a chance to contrast the nobler and kinder youngest sibling. However, in this case all three siblings are courteous and generous to the old man who warns them of the dangers ahead. The difference is in how they take his warning into account. He tells them that as they climb the mountain to the Speaking Bird, they must not turn back, even though voices will taunt or frighten them. The brothers each climbed the hill, filled with over-confidence, and end up turning around only to be transformed into black stones. Periezade, however, has the practical foresight and self-knowledge to stuff her ears with cotton. Not only does she get the bird, but it tells her how to restore her brothers and all the other travelers to life with the magical Golden Water.

They return home with the treasures, and it so happens that the king encounters the brothers while they're hunting in the forest. They invite him to dinner. The Speaking Bird advises Periezade to serve a cucumber stuffed with pearls. Baffled, the king says that it makes no sense, and the Speaking Bird tells him that it makes just as much sense as a woman giving birth to animals. The Bird reveals the whole backstory, and the king embraces his long-lost children, sends the wicked sisters to be executed, and restores his queen to favor. (Even though I feel like a much more satisfying ending would be for her to take the kids and run far, far away.)

Background
Periezade's story is an example of Aarne-Thompson Type 707, "The Bird of Truth" or "The Golden Sons." Another version does appear in the Arabian Nights, known as "The Tale of the Sultan and his Sons and the Enchanting Birds."

European versions are widespread. The persecuted wife accused of giving birth to animals, who is imprisoned but later restored to favor when her grown children return, is a very common motif that appears in all sorts of stories. Sometimes all of the children are boys. Sometimes it's twins, a boy and a girl, or a girl and several boys. Often, they are connected to stars or other celestial bodies, such as having a star on their foreheads. The blame on the queen in these stories hints that she indulged in bestiality to produce animal children, or she is responsible for bearing not a child but a molar pregnancy, disgracing her husband either way.

The old woman who tells Periezade about the treasures remains mysterious. In some versions, it’s actually the wicked aunts or one of their servants, trying to get rid of the children now that they know they’ve survived. It seems this element was lost or confused in the Galland version. In some other tales, though, the old woman is a benevolent figure.

Not all versions feature the quest for the magical objects, but the typical ending is that the king encounters the grown children - perhaps in the woods, perhaps at his own wedding to a second wife - and their story comes out, causing him to repent of his treatment to his wife. ​

The story has ancient roots. A similar tale appeared around 1190 in Johannes de Alta Silva's Dolopathos sive de Rege et Septem Sapientibus. A lord marries a fairylike maiden who gives birth to septuplets, six boys and a girl, each born wearing a gold chain. The jealous mother-in-law swaps the children for puppies, and the easily fooled husband punishes his wife by having her buried up to the neck in the middle of the woods. The children survive and grow up in the forest; each has the power to transform into a swan, but the mother-in-law discovers them and steals the boys’ golden chains, leaving them trapped in swan form. The sister escapes this fate and continues to take care of her brothers, and when the lord finds out, he has the chains returned to his sons and frees them. (One son, whose chain was damaged, is left as a swan.) This is closer to the tale type of the Swan-Children, but there are still familiar elements. The more modern versions of "The Wild Swans," like Hans Christian Andersen's story, have the sister imprisoned, persecuted and accused of murdering her own children. Perhaps not incidentally, at the end she saves her brothers and regains her children at the same time, and is finally able to speak and tell her husband her whole backstory.

The oldest known version of the Periezade variation is "Ancilotto, King of Provino," in The Facetious Nights of Straparola from the 1550s. The heroine is named Serena. This version has the quest as the villainous mother-in-law and aunts’ attempt to get rid of the children. The similarities in general are close enough that Galland might even have been directly influenced. Galland's contemporary, Madame D'Aulnoy, wrote her own version of the story as "Princess Belle-Etoile and the Prince Cheri."

Sources

• Ancilotto, King of Provino
• The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, ed. Andrew Lang. 1898. "The Story of Two Sisters Who Were Jealous of Their Younger Sister."

Other Blog Posts

• A Star on her Forehead
• The Search for the Magic Lake