Folk Tales of Greece — Part 2 (The Prince and His Foal · The Murder-Knife, the Whetstone of Patience and the Candle that Does Not Melt)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part two. Two Greek folk tales collected by Johann Georg von Hahn in Epirus and Greece and published in his Griechische und albanesische Märchen (Leipzig, 1864); heard here in a fresh in-house English translation made from Hahn's German. Both tales are drawn from the volume's first part. In The Prince and His Foal, a queen's son and a mare's foal are born at the same hour and grow up together — and when the queen and her lover plot against the boy three times over, with poisoned bread, poisoned wine and poisoned needles, it is the weeping foal who betrays every plot; when a feigned sickness demands the boy's life as its cure, he rides three times round the palace in suits of heaven, spring and sea, escapes, and returns in a gardener's black cap to win a king's daughter and the Water of Life. In The Murder-Knife, the Whetstone of Patience and the Candle that Does Not Melt, a girl who is promised a dead man for a husband watches three weeks, three days and three hours beside a sleeping prince, loses her place to the woman who watched only the last three hours, and as a goose-girl tells her whole story to three strange gifts — a knife that rises against her throat, a whetstone that always draws it back, and a candle that will not melt — while the prince listens at the door. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Crimson Peak, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:51 The Prince and His Foal
16:31 The Murder-Knife, the Whetstone of Patience and the Candle that Does Not Melt
Many further tales of the book are not read on this shelf. Das goldene Huhn (No. 36) and Das Pfefferkorn (No. 56) stand excluded by name after full readings, and the volume's Drakos and dragon-slayer tales and the strong-man cycle stand excluded as a class. For this Part, every remaining tale of the volume's first and second parts was read in full: the rest were each excluded by name, a record kept in the shelf's canon; two tales of compelled marriage, Der Bauer und die Elfin (No. 77) and Die Elfin als Hausfrau (No. 83), stand benched for a ruling, and Dionysos (No. 76), a framed collector's anecdote rather than a folk tale as printed, stands held. The tales that passed and were not used here are kept for Part 3. The same volume's Albanian tales are a different shelf's ground and are not used here. No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From Griechische und albanesische Märchen by Johann Georg von Hahn (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1864), public domain — Greek tales 6 and 12, complete and in book order, in a fresh in-house English translation from the German. Narrated by Scratch. Theme: Crimson Peak.
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