Anthousa, Xanthousa, Chrisomalousa

Synopsis

An old woman who had long tried to make lentil soup finally succeeded, but when she set the pot in a stream to cool, Prince Phoebus's horse was startled and would not drink, so the prince kicked the pot over. She cursed him to crave Anthousa, Xanthousa, Chrisomalousa as much as she had craved the soup. The prince searched for three months until he found a tower with no entrance where she lived. He saw an ogress (drakaina) call to her, and Anthousa, Xanthousa, Chrisomalousa threw down her hair for the ogress to climb. After the ogress left, the prince called to her, she let down her hair, and they fell in love. She hid him from the ogress, and the next morning they sealed the mouths of all speaking objects in the tower and fled. The ogress returned, and a forgotten mortar told her they had escaped. She chased them on a bear, but Anthousa, Xanthousa, Chrisomalousa threw down a comb that became a swamp, then another comb that became thorns, and finally a scarf that became a sea. Unable to cross the sea, the ogress warned that the prince would leave her in a tree while fetching his mother, and upon kissing his mother would forget her and plan to marry another. When this happened, she should take two pieces of wedding bread dough and make them into birds. The birds flew to the castle and one questioned the other about what had happened, reminding the prince. He returned to the tree, brought her to the castle, and they married.

Analysis

This Greek fairy tale belongs to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 310, known as "The Maiden in the Tower," a category that also includes Rapunzel, Petrosinella, Persinette, The Canary Prince, and Prunella. Recorded in eastern Thrace in 1890, it is unusual because it skips the typical opening where a baby is handed over to an ogress in a garden. The chase scene with the ogress closely mirrors the one in Petrosinella and actually belongs to a different folktale type, ATU 313, "The Girl Helps the Hero Flee," which includes tales like The Water Nixie, Foundling-Bird, Nix Nought Nothing, and The Master Maid. In those stories, the girl is the evil figure's own daughter, and some folklorists believe the Rapunzel version's adoption plot may be a later change from an original where she was the ogress's child.

Swiss scholar Max Lüthi argued that the magical flight episode, a hallmark of ATU 313, is part of ATU 310 even though it is missing from Rapunzel. Scholar Ton Deker noted that in oral tellings, the heroine and prince do escape the tower through this magic flight. According to Anna Angelopoulou and Aigle Broskou, Greek, Yugoslavian, and Corsican versions present the heroine as the witch's daughter, a trait professor Michael Merakles linked to type 313. In the Spanish Folktale Catalogue, Julio Camarena and Maxime Chevalier created a new subtype, 310B, which combines the tower imprisonment with a magic flight escape. Josep A. Grimalt and Jaume Guiscafrè suggest this hybrid might be a Romance or Mediterranean pattern. Walter Puchner observed that in the "Forgotten Fiancée" subtype, common in Mediterranean variants, the heroine sends doves to the prince's palace to jog his memory. The heroine's three names translate to "Blossoming," "Fair-haired," and "Golden-haired."

Variants

A variant from Malta, Fenchelchen (after the fennel), collected by scholar Bertha Ilg, also combines the maiden locked in the tower by the witch with the girl's magical escape. Rachel Harriette Busk published a Roman tale from Palombara titled Filagranata, in which a woman's desire for parsley leads the witch to take her child and raise her in a tower; the prince finds her, she throws down her tresses, and the tale continues with the Magic Flight sequence, where Filagranata gives the prince a mason's trowel, a comb and a jar of oil, and concludes with the Forgotten Fiancée episode. In a tale collected by Bulgarian folklorist Kuzman Shapkarev from Ohrid, modern day North Macedonia, titled МОМА ТЕНТЕЛИНА И ВОЛЦИ (Girl Tentelina and the Wolf), a pregnant woman lost in a swamp makes a deal with a wolf who helps her in exchange for her daughter. Years later the wolf locks the girl Tentelina in a tower, and her brother Costadin, after learning the story, rescues her with help from three old ladies, and they escape by throwing magic objects to delay the wolf.