The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples

The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples (Zlatna jabuka i devet paunica) is a Serbian epic poetry. It was published for the first time as a fairy tale by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in 1853. Later on it was published as a Bulgarian fairy tale by A. H. Wratislaw in his Sixty Folk-Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources, number 38 in 1890. Andrew Lang included it in The Violet Fairy Book, as a translation from a German version of Karadžić's original tale.Ruth Manning-Sanders included it in The Glass Man and the Golden Bird: Hungarian Folk and Fairy Tales. It is Aarne-Thompson type 400*, the swan maiden.

An emperor's golden apple tree was robbed every night, and his sons set themselves to watch it. The older two slept, but the youngest stayed awake. Nine peahens arrived. Eight rifled the tree, while the ninth came down beside him and became a beautiful maiden. She talked with him. He begged her to leave one apple, and she left two. This went on for two nights, until his brothers spied on him and saw how it happened. They made a bargain with a witch, and the next night she leapt up and cut off a lock of the maiden's hair. The prince caught the witch and had her executed, but the peahens did not return.

Grieving, the prince set out in search of his beloved. He found a castle with an aging empress, who had one daughter. On hearing that nine peahens bathed in the lake outside, he set out, despite her efforts to have him stay. The empress bribed his servant to blow a whistle when the nine peahens approached. This threw him into an enchanted sleep. The ninth tried to wake him, but to no avail. She told the servant they would come on the next day and never again. The next day, the servant put him to sleep again, and the maiden told him that if the prince wanted to find her, he should roll the under peg on the upper. The servant repeated this to the prince. The prince cut off his head and went on alone.

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