Prince Dung-Beetle (a translation)

   

　

A poor girl, young and pretty, ran along a path and almost trampled a dung beetle as she leaped over a stile. She pitied the little creature, pulled herself back and twisted her ankle. There she sat crying: "How will I be able to run to the doctor now! My mother is dying."

"Sit on my back," the dung-beetle hummed. The girl was afraid and cried still more loudly. But, suddenly, the beetle buzzed under her, stretched out his wings, and lifted her up so that she was borne, quick as lightning, to the doctor and druggist and, then, just as swiftly back to her home and sick mother.

"We’d better feed your little pony on some fine victuals," the mother said to her daughter as she broke for herself a piece of dark bread and drank from a little jug of water. "Indeed, where did my steed go,’ the girl said, looking all around her. Then, she looked out the window and saw a knight prancing across the field. "Oh, that is the blue prince," cried the mother. And, at that moment, the door flew open and the prince was there. He sparkled as if he had just been peeled out of an egg and said: "Greetings and God bless you!" And, then: "Give me the hand of your little daughter for she has saved me. For more years than there are trees in the forest, I lay in dust and shit, a beetle, stepped upon, mistreated, tortured, and despised, because I had done those same things to a little creature when I was a lad and was punished by being changed into an insect. But now, praise God, let me marry this maid who is mine, my angel who saved me."

The maiden, however, was afraid and became quite pale and, from their eyelashes, tears fell – both mother and daughter weeping. Then, the prince opened a window and blew on his horn. The mountains carried the resounding fanfare over the woods and, then, the wagons and horses appeared, the prince’s royal court.

This made the sick mother healthy because of her joy and her young daughter’s cheek was rosy and blushing to see her mother cured. There was a wedding at which the gnats serenaded the happy couple and the birds sang and every creature large and small that had feet to dance danced and pranced with joy.


Collected at Neuenhammer
(This fairy tale was collected by Franz Xaver von Schoenwerth. Schoenwerth lived from 1810 to 1886 in the Oberpfalz, Germany – the Upper Palatinate. Influenced by the Grimm Brothers, Schoenwerth collected several hundred tales of this sort. They were never published during Schoenwerth’s lifetime. After the death of his wife, the manuscripts containing the stories were transferred to the historical society for Regensburg and the Oberpfalz. They were rediscovered in the archives of that society about fifteen years ago by a German folklorist, Ericka Eichenseer, and published to much acclaim in 2010. The story type for "Prince Rostzwifl" – Rostzwifl is dialect for dung beetle – is "The Enchanted Prince Disenchanted" ATU 444.)