Fairytale Analysis: "The Pink"

"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."