Les Princes et la Princesse de Marinca (English: The Princes and the Princess of Marinca) is a French-Canadian fairy tale from Gaspésie published by Canadian folklorist Carmen Roy.Roy, Carmen. La Littérature Orale En Gaspésie. Bulletin / [National Museum of Canada]. no. 13. Ottawa: 1955. p. 226. It is related to the motif of the calumniated wife and classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children". These tales refer to stories where a girl promises a king she will bear a child or children with wonderful attributes, but her jealous relatives or the king's wives plot against the babies and their mother. Variants are widely collected across Canada.
Summary A prince gets lost in his own realm and reaches a house, where three orphan sisters are talking: the elder wants to marry the royal gardener, the middle one the royal baker and the youngest the king. The youngest marries the king and, while he is away at war, gives birth to a little girl, "the most beautiful under the sun", with a golden sun on her left shoulder. Her jealous sisters take the girl and cast her in the sea. The next year, the queen gives birth to twin boys, "the most beautiful under the sun", one with a golden moon on his left arm, the other with a silver star on his right arm. Years later, they are sent for a bird that speaks, a tree that sings and plays music and a jug of golden water. By pouring down the jug into a basin, a fish will come out with glass scales, glistening like mirrors.Roy, Carmen. Contes populaires gaspésiens. Montréal [etc.]: Fides, 1951. pp. 96-108. Collections de BAnQ.
Analysis Tale type The tale corresponds to tale type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index, which is known in Franco-Canadian sources as Les Trois Fils dorés ("The Three Golden Sons").Bergeron, Bertrand. Les Barbes-bleues - Contes et récits du Lac Saint-Jean - Répertoire de Monsieur Joseph Patry. Montréal, Quinze, 1980. p. 135. Collections de BAnQ. According to folklore scholar Stith Thompson, the French-Canadian variants represent one of three traditions of tale type 707 that occur in America, the others being the Portuguese and Spanish.Thompson, Stith (1977). The Folktale. University of California Press. p. 121. .
Scholarship points that the French oral repertoire of fairy tales was "well implanted" in North America and Canada, with many regions producing several variants of the tale type.
At least 25 variants are reported to have been collected from francophone North America.Thomas, Gerald. The Two Traditions: The Art of Storytelling Amongst French Newfoundlanders. St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada: 1993 . p. 185. . More specifically, Canadian and Franco-Canadian folklorists report 30 tales recorded in the archives of the Laval University.Bergeron, Bertrand. Les Barbes-bleues - Contes et récits du Lac Saint-Jean - Répertoire de Monsieur Joseph Patry. Montréal, Quinze, 1980. p. 135. Collections de BAnQ.Fowke, Edith. Tales Told in Canada. Doubleday Canada, 1986. p. 21. This led Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke to state that the type was "quite popular among French Canadians".Fowke, Edith. Tales Told in Canada. Doubleday Canada, 1986. p. 21.
Variants Professor Marius Barbeau collected a variant from French Canada (Québec), from teller "Mme. Prudent Sioui", from Lorette, and published it in the Journal of American Folklore. In this tale, titled Les Soeurs Jalouses ("The envious sisters"), three sisters, daughters of an old couple, complain that their parents are old and frail and wonder about their future, planning to find good husbands for themselves. The next day, the prince overhears their talk: the elder one wants to marry a baker, the middle one a butcher and the youngest the prince. The prince summons them to their presence and marries them to their respective husbands of choice. The youngest sister, now a princess, gives birth to a boy, "more beautiful than anyone else in the world", who the aunts replace with a monkey. The boy is cast into the sea in a box, but he is saved by an old man who collects flotsam for a living, and adopted by the old man and his wife.
Professor collected and published two other French-Canadian variants: La Barriere verte ("The Green Barrier") and Les trois enfants perdus ("The Three Lost Children"). In the first tale, three brothers marry three sisters, and the third couple is already expecting a child, to the envy of the other two. The children are cast into the other and, when adults, must seek "L'eau qui bouille, l'arbre qui chante et l'oiseau qui dit tout" ("the water that boils, the tree that sings and the bird that teils everything"). In the second tale, the youngest sister promises to give birth to triplets: a boy with the moon on the forehead, another with a star, and a girl from whose hair falls money. They are cast into the water, are rescued by a peasant couple and seek "the rose tree with all kinds of roses", from "the Garden of the End of the World", "water that boils in all colors and a blackbird that tells all truth".Labrie, Vivian. "Going Through Hard Times: A Topological Exploration of a Folktale Corpus from Quebec and Acadie". In: Fabula 40, no. 1-2 (1999): 56, 66-68. https://doi.org/10.1515/fabl.1999.40.1-2.50
In a variant by teller Isaïe Jolin, L'Oiseau de Vérité ("The Bird of Truth"), a king's son is asked by his father to find a wife. The prince then rides a chariot to look for potential brides and stops by a humble house, where a poor man dwells with his two daughters. The prince is invited to dine with them. He returns twice and asks the prettiest daughter in marriage. She consents and promises him she will bear the most beautiful children, their names written in gold on their backs, along with their parents' names. She gives birth to three children (a boy and two girls), who are cast in the water by her sister, who also forges a letter with a command to arrest the princess. The three children are saved by a king from another realm. The sisters send their brother, Tit-Jean, for a golden apple that makes one richer than the king. Tit-Jean obtains the apple, which begins to play "the best music there is" and produces money. Next, he seeks the olive tree branch that sings and the bird of truth that only tells truths.Dupont, Jean-Claude. Contes de bûcherons. Montréal, Quinze, 1976. pp. 179-193. Collections de BAnQ.
Author collected two tales from teller Joseph Patry, from Lac Saint-Jean. In the first one, titled L'oiseau vert ("The Green Bird"), a pair of siblings named Julie and Jean (Ti-Jean) leave home with four galettes and go into the forest. They survive by eating roots and berries, until they find an old woman who begs for a bit of food to eat. The siblings give the woman some of their galettes and she rewards them with a magic cane. The siblings use the cane to summon a génie and command the creature to build them a palace overnight. The next day, the queen, who lives in a nearby palace, admires the beauty of the palace that suddenly appeared and tells Julie that their abode is magnificent, albeit lacking the rosier sentant ('rosebush that feels') and the green bird.Bergeron, Bertrand. Les Barbes-bleues - Contes et récits du Lac Saint-Jean - Répertoire de Monsieur Joseph Patry. Montréal, Quinze, 1980. pp. 137-149. Collections de BAnQ. Although he classified it as type 707, the collector noted that it was a truncated version of the tale.Bergeron, Bertrand. Les Barbes-bleues - Contes et récits du Lac Saint-Jean - Répertoire de Monsieur Joseph Patry. Montréal, Quinze, 1980. pp. 135-136. Collections de BAnQ.
In the second tale from Joseph Patry, titled Le deux bessons ("The Twins"): a princess named Rosa prays to God to give her twins, a boy with a sun on his belly and a girl with the moon. This tale lacks the usual abandonment of the children and the quest of the other variants, but was still classified as type 707.Bergeron, Bertrand. Les Barbes-bleues - Contes et récits du Lac Saint-Jean - Répertoire de Monsieur Joseph Patry. Montréal, Quinze, 1980. pp. 187-202. Collections de BAnQ.
Carmen Roy collected another variant from Gaspésie with the title Le vieux fermier.Roy, Carmen. La Littérature Orale En Gaspésie. Bulletin / [National Museum of Canada]. no. 13. Ottawa: 1955. p. 226.
In a variant from Newfoundland, collected from informant Mrs. Angela Kerfont and titled The Bluebird, the twins, a boy and a girl, are raised by a white bear and sent on a quest for "a blue bird in a golden cage".Thomas, Gerald. The Two Traditions: The Art of Storytelling Amongst French Newfoundlanders. St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada: 1993 . pp. 183-185. . The tale was republished as The White Bear by author Edith Fowke.Fowke, Edith. Tales Told in Canada. Doubleday Canada, 1986. pp. 25, 26-28.
In a variant titled The Talking Nightingale, collected from informant Jacques Cohen, of Canadian Sephardim descent, a sultan has ten wives, but sighs over the lack of a son. One day, he consults with a sorcerer. The sorcerer advises him to go alone to a fountain near the tomb of a marabout and ask for the hand of the first maiden who fetches water in a jug. It happens thus and the sultan marries her as his eleventh wife. To his delight, she becomes pregnant. When she gives birth to a boy, the ten co-wives take the boy and replace him with a little puppy to deceive the king, while the child is given to a servant to be killed. The servant decides to spare the child and abandons the baby in the cave in the wilderness. The baby is found by a goatherd and his she-goats, and raises him. Years later, the boy, named Mess'ud ("of good omen"), is set to be married to the daughter of a local sherif. The sultan's co-wives learn of the boy's survival and tell him to fulfill three conditions to his future marriage: first, to build a large house; then, to build a garden with all species of trees and flowers; lastly, to search for the talking nightingale.Elbaz, André E. Folktales of the Canadian Sephardim. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1982. pp. 94-98.Fowke, Edith. Tales Told in Canada. Doubleday Canada, 1986. pp. 21, 22-25.