The King of Love (Fairy tale)

Author: Thomas Frederick Crane

Time Period: 1851 CE–1900 CE

Country or Culture: Italy; Western Europe

Genre: Fairy Tale

Overview

Thomas Frederick Crane was a respected professor of Romance languages at Cornell University during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His specialties included Spanish and Italian, and his scholarship included publications on medieval literature and folklore. His book Italian Popular Tales (1885) contains a variety of stories translated from Italian, as well as informational commentary about each tale. The book is dedicated to Giuseppe Pitrè, an Italian contemporary of Crane from whose collections the stories in the compilation are translated. “The King of Love” is the first tale in the first chapter of stories in Italian Popular Tales.

According to Crane’s introductory comments in the first chapter of his collection, there are four categories of tales in which one spouse, usually the wife, is punished for trying to discover a secret held by the other, typically the husband, who appears in animal or beast form. In one form of this story, the husband is disciplined for his curiosity; in another variant, the wife’s or her jealous sisters’ curiosity results in the animal groom’s departure from the marriage; a third outline follows the story of a groom who is saved from his monstrous form by his wife after she has defied him in some way; and the fourth category focuses on the castigation of the wife for her inquisitiveness. “The King of Love” is a tale from Sicily that fits the latter type of this group of tales. More specifically, the story fits into the Aarne-Thompson tale type 425A, the animal groom, because of the King of Love’s ability to change from a bird to a man and back again.

The story loosely follows a similar pattern to that found in the tales of Cupid and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, and East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, as it presents a young woman who is offered in marriage to an unknown groom as a result of a wrong step taken by her father. The bridegroom is as grotesque in some ways as the young woman is lovely and obedient. Despite their differences, the couple will fall in love, but their love will be challenged by a variety of trials and tests before it will be able to thrive. No matter which version of the tale is read, common motifs can be found, and these motifs can be studied from a variety of viewpoints. An archetypal pattern that ties these motifs together in a logical plot format is the hero’s journey, which one cannot study without consulting Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).

“The King of Love” follows Campbell’s journey cycle, with a few modifications. As the hero, Rosella is separated from her old life; faces an initiation, including tests and trials, into a magical world; and then must depart from a dangerous realm before she can find the happily-ever-after ending that is expected of a good love story.

Summary

In addition to sharing motifs with various animal-groom tales, the plotline of “The King of Love” is a conglomeration of various other stories as well. The story begins with a dutiful younger daughter helping her father gather herbs and vegetables. When she pulls a choice specimen, she unwittingly opens a door to a mysterious dwelling. A servant, identified as “a Turk” (Crane 1), emerges and demands that the father and daughter enter his master’s abode and accept their punishment for trespassing.

The master of the abode first appears as a bird bathing in a container of milk. As the bird dries itself, it becomes a good-looking man. The father pleads ignorance of his and his daughter’s misdeed, saying that they did not know they were trespassing. In response, the master of the house claims the daughter as his wife, giving the father a bag of gold and sending him away with the invitation to come see his daughter at any time.

“Rosella, do you really want to know my name?” “Yes.” And the water came up to his waist, for he had become a bird, and had got into the basin. Then he asked her the same question again, and again she answered yes, and the water was up to his mouth. “Rosella, do you really want to know my name?” “Yes, yes, yes!” “Then know that I am called THE KING OF LOVE!” And saying this he disappeared.

“The King of Love”

The daughter, Rosella, becomes the mistress of the home, receiving the keys to her husband’s storerooms, and she lives a contented life until her sisters come to visit while her husband is away. The sisters convince Rosella to dig into her husband’s most closely held secret: his true identity. When she asks her husband his name, he warns her that the information she wants may endanger her life, then gives her three chances to put her curiosity aside. The first time he asks her if she really wants to know his name, he turns into a bird in one of his golden basins. The second time he asks, he disappears further into the basin. After he asks for the third time and she once again affirms that she truly wants to know who he is, he tells her that he is the King of Love, and then he vanishes. As he does so, the pregnant Rosella finds that their home and all of their belongings have gone as well, and she is left in an empty field.

She wanders the fields until nightfall, when, in despair, she cries out for help. Aid comes unexpectedly from her husband’s aunt, an ogress who warns Rosella of her husband’s other aunts, who are all ogresses as well, and of his mother, Rosella’s mother-in-law, who is the worst of the seven sisters. For the next six days, Rosella receives help from each of her husband’s aunts. Finally, his sister takes Rosella in and tells her how to temporarily defeat her mother-in-law. Rosella struggles with the ogress and ultimately triumphs. The ogress intends to eat Rosella, but Rosella’s sisters-in-law intervene, saving her life. In an effort to appease her mother-in-law and to save herself and her unborn child, Rosella must go on a journey to deliver a letter to the ogress’s friend, another ogress.

Frightened and weary, Rosella finds herself once again in a solitary field. Her tears reach her husband’s ears, and he comes to her. Though he helps her on her quest to deliver the letter, he scolds her for the curiosity that led her to her trials. His advice to her includes specific tasks to perform along the way: She is to drink from a “river of blood” and a “stream of turbid water,” pick fruit from an overfilled garden, and eat bread from “an oven that bakes bread day and night” (Crane 4), complimenting each one as she does so. Then she must feed the hungry dogs that guard the entrance to the ogress’s house; sweep a dirty, neglected doorway; clean the food of two giants; and remove the tarnish from several sharp implements. All of these things must be done before she can finish the task her mother-in-law sent her to accomplish. Her husband asks her to do one additional thing: After she has delivered the letter, she must “snatch up a little box on the table, and run away” (4). Rosella follows his orders, delivers the letter, and steals the chest as instructed. She flees, and because she followed her husband’s advice, the obstacles that the ogress calls upon to kill her all remember her kind acts and refuse to do so.

Though Rosella’s husband has advised her not to be so curious, she quickly forgets, and eventually, overwhelmed by curiosity, she opens the box. She is entertained by the “great quantity of little puppets” (Crane 5) that emerges from the chest, but when she is unable to make them go back into the box, she must call on her husband once again. Exasperated, he again solves her problem and sends her to his mother, who once again threatens to eat Rosella because she did not complete her task unaided.

The price for Rosella’s life is another chore: She must gather enough bird feathers to fill six mattresses, and then her marriage will receive her mother-in-law’s blessing. The King of Love helps her once again, but once the task is completed, the ogress forces her son to marry another woman instead. Rosella is made to kneel by the mattresses she and her husband filled, holding torches for him and his new wife. After this, the story is quickly resolved. The King of Love tricks his new wife into being “swallowed . . . up” (Crane 6) by the earth in place of Rosella; then, when his mother intends to prevent Rosella’s baby from being born, he tricks her into letting the birth happen. The ogress dies, and the King of Love is able to then provide a good life for his wife and sisters.

Bibliography

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Crane, Thomas Frederick. Italian Popular Tales. London: Macmillan, 1885. Print.

Leeming, David Adams, and Marion Sader, eds. Storytelling Encyclopedia: Historical, Cultural, and Multiethnic Approaches to Oral Traditions around the World. Phoenix: Oryx, 1997. Print.

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