The youngest of three poor brothers will not cut wood. While his elder brothers toil and are blessed — a store-chamber of flour and bacon under the walnut tree, a cellar of a hundred wine barrels under the acacia — Jankó throws his axe away and roasts bacon instead, and the grey old man rewards the idleness with a wonder-wand. His father drives him from the house, and Jankó takes service with a king as swineherd, a hundred pigs in his care. Warned on pain of a horrible death never to enter the lead forest, he drives the pigs straight into it.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In the lead forest the seven-headed dragon rushes to tear him to pieces, and one wave of the wand takes all seven heads — and in the seventh head is a key. Beyond it: a lead castle, a lead nosegay, a lead horse hanging in the well, and in the sty the king's own lost hundred pigs and his old swineherd, shut in by the dragon. Jankó frees them all, sends the man home with a tub of lead money, and drives two hundred pigs home where a hundred went out. And so it goes, exactly, twice more: the silver forest and its fourteen-headed dragon, and three hundred pigs; the golden forest and its twenty-four-headed dragon, and four hundred pigs home — each nosegay begged away by a princess, lead, silver and golden in turn.
Then the king proclaims his three daughters to the lads who can leap on horseback to the nosegays atop a tall tree. No prince can leap halfway. But there is a swineherd who keeps three bridles — and a youngest princess who will throw her golden apple to no one who stands before her.
The tale is told whole, as Benedek wrote it, and its hard passages stand at the source's own weight: three dragons slain, each with a single wave of the wonder-wand, each in a single clause of the telling; and the wand's own stated power — that one swing of it could strike down a whole regiment of soldiers — stands in the old man's gift speech exactly as written, though the tale never turns it on any human being. No one is killed or harmed in the tale but the three dragons: the captive swineherds come out of the sties alive and go home the richer, and every threat in it is answered before it lands.
From Benedek Elek, Magyar mese- és mondavilág (Athenaeum, 1894–96), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.
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