The Enchanted Watch
A foolish youth gains a wish-granting watch.
The Enchanted Watch is a Czech fairy tale collected by Jan Karel Hraše. Andrew Lang included it in his The Green Fairy Book.
Quick Facts
- Collector
- Jan Karel Hraše
- Collection
- The Green Fairy Book
- Compiler
- Andrew Lang
- Tale type
- ATU 560, The Magic Ring
Facts from the source article.
Synopsis
A rich man's two eldest sons each spent three years seeing the world and returned home. His foolish youngest son also wished to go, and his father reluctantly allowed him, expecting never to see him again. On the journey, the youth encountered men about to kill a dog and persuaded them to give it to him instead. He similarly acquired a cat and a snake.
The snake led him to the king of snakes, who wanted to reward him. Following the snake's advice, the son asked for a watch that would grant any wish when rubbed. He returned home in his dirty clothing, enraging his father. Days later, he used the watch to conjure a house and invited his father to a feast, then the king and princess.
Impressed by the marvels the son produced, the king married the princess to him. She soon wearied of his foolishness, learned of the watch, stole it, and fled. The son set out with the dog and cat. They saw an island with a house where the princess had fled.
The dog swam with the cat on its back; the cat stole the watch and carried it back in its mouth. The dog asked how far it was to land, and when the cat finally answered, the watch fell from its mouth. A cat caught a fish and freed it only when it promised to retrieve the watch. The fish did so, and the watch was restored. The son wished the princess, her house, and the island to drown, then returned home.
Analysis
The opening of this tale, where a poor man saves the king of serpents’ son and gets a wish-granting item, matches the Aarne–Thompson–Uther tale type ATU 560, known as "The Magic Ring." This type sits near ATU 561, "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," and ATU 562, "The Spirit in the Blue Light." Scholars Kurt Ranke and Karel Horálek set type 560 apart by the use of helpful animals that recover the magic object. Folklorist Antti Aarne noted that a snake or serpent appears almost everywhere this tale is told, with only a few exceptions.
Russian experts break the type into four parts: buying a cat and dog (plus other animals), getting the ring, the hero marrying a princess who betrays him, and getting the ring back. A European forerunner of this type is found in the "Pentamerone" with the story "The Stone in the Cock's Head" or "The Rooster's Stone." Russian folklorist Lev Barag pointed to an Asian version in the Mongolian collection "Siddhi Kûr," in the tale "How the Brahmane became a King."
French Slavicist Louis Léger translated the story as "La Montre Enchantée" ("The Enchanted Watch"), noting its original title "Hloupy Jenik" in Hraše’s 1874 book "Kytice z českých národních pověstí." Folklorist Andrew Lang, in the late 1800s, observed a similar tale in the Punjaub, among the Bretons, Albanians, Greeks, and Russians, about a youth who gets a magic ring, loses it to theft, and recovers it with help from grateful animals he once aided.
Professor Yolando Pino Saavedra stated that ATU 560 is more common in Eastern Europe. Wolfram Eberhard agreed on its Eastern European popularity and also noted its spread in the Near East, India, Japan, and China. Greek folklorist Georgios A. Megas said the type is "widely told in Greece," with 72 recorded variants. In a Dogri tale translated as "True Friends," a prince (a Rajkumar) frees a snake from a charmer; in thanks, the snake leads him to its father, Nagaraj, the snake king, in Patal lok, where the prince requests the magical ring from the king’s finger.
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