The Sleeping Prince is a Greek fairy tale collected by in Folktales of Greece.
It is Aarne-Thompson 425G: False Bride takes the heroine's place as she tries to stay awake; recognition when heroine tells her story. This is also found as part of Nourie Hadig, and a literary variant forms part of the frame story of the Pentamerone.
The tale type was also closely related to AaTh 437, "The Supplanted Bride (The Needle Prince)". However, the last major revision of the International Folktale Classification Index, written in 2004 by German folklorist Hans-Jörg Uther, reclassified the tale type as ATU 894, "".
Synopsis
A king had only his daughter, his wife having died, and had to go to war. The princess promised to stay with her nurse while he was gone. One day, an eagle came by and said she would have a dead man for a husband; it came again the next day. She told her nurse, and her nurse told her to tell the eagle to take her to him. The third day, it came, and she asked; it brought her to a palace, where a prince slept like the dead, and a paper said that whoever had pity on him must watch for three months, three weeks, three days, three hours, and three half-hours without sleeping, and then, when he sneezed, she must bless him and identify herself as the one who watched. He and the whole castle would wake, and he would marry the woman.
She watched three months, three weeks, and three days. Then she heard someone offering to hire maids. She hired one for company. The maid persuaded her to sleep, the prince sneezed, and the maid claimed him. She told him to let the princess sleep and when she woke, set to tend the geese. (The fairy tale starts to refer to the prince as the king.)
The king had to go to war. He asked the queen what she wanted, and she asked for a golden crown. He asked the goose-girl, and she asked for the millstone of patiences, the hangman's rope, and the butcher's knife, and if he did not bring them, his ship would go neither backward nor forward. He forgot them, and his ship would not move; an old man asked him if he had promised anything, so he bought them. He gave his wife the crown and the other things to the goose-girl. That evening, he went down to her room. She told her story to the things and asked them what she should do. The butcher's knife said to stab herself; the rope, to hang herself; the millstone, to have patience. She asked for the rope again and went to hang herself. The king broke in and saved her. He declared she was his wife and he would hang the other on the rope. She told him only to send her away. They went to her father for his blessing.
Analysis
Tale type
Richard MacGillivray Dawkins described that the "essence" of the tale type involves the heroine being destined to marry "a dead man", which is not dead at all. The prince, in fact, is under a magical sleep in a room in a castle somewhere. The heroine finds him and stays by his side on a long vigil. The heroine hires a maid or slave to help her in the long vigil, but she replaces the heroine and takes credit for awakening the prince. At the end of the tale, the prince, now back to life, is asked by a broken heroine to bring her ("almost always") three objects: a knife, a rope to hang herself with and a stone of patience.
Motifs
The tale type may start with one of two opening episodes: a bird announces to the heroine she will marry a dead man, and she decides to look for him; or the heroine is with her family on a field or in the forest, goes astray and ends up in the dead prince's tomb, where she begins her long vigil over his body.
Variants
Greek scholars Anna Angelopoulou and Aigle Broskou locate variants of type AaTh 425G in Greece, Turkey, Southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, North Africa (among the Berbers) and even in Poland.
Israeli professor Dov Noy (de) reported that the tale type 894 was "very popular in Oriental literature", with variants found in India, Iran, Egypt and regionally in Europe (southern and eastern).
As for type 437, Richard Dorson stated that it appears "sporadically in Europe", but it is "better known in India". Indian scholar A. K. Ramanujan states that the tale type is known in Europe as "The Needle Prince".
Europe
Scholars Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana stated that "in European tradition" type AaTh 894 is found in association with the story of "The Sleeping Prince". Professor Jack V. Haney stated that type 437 is more common in Ukraine, but "uncommon" in Western Europe.
Italy
A Sicilian variant was collected by Laura Gonzenbach with the title Der böse Schulmeister und die wandernde Königstochter ("The Evil Schoolmaster and the Wandering Princess").