Princess of Only One Word
Which one word would mischievous fairies limit a princess to say?
I much enjoyed this story told by Marion Strencioch as Der verhexte Ring. Like many comic fairy tales, it has great potential to mock social pretension of our own age.
Marion kindly gave me what source information she had. However, those authors were falible in their citations!
Below is the current state of my understanding (discovered with the help of Mistral.ai - a French alternative to Silicon Valley):
Source note — "Princess of Only One Word"
This tale was told in German by Felix Karlinger, Italienische Volksmärchen (Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Düsseldorf/Cologne 1973; "Die Märchen der Weltliteratur"), in the Venetian section of his collection. Karlinger cites as his source D. Giuseppe Bernoni, Fiabe e Novelle Popolari Veneziane (Venice 1873), p. 45 — but that reference is faulty: p. 45 of the 1873 volume contains a different tale, "Ari ari, caga danari" (a variant of ATU 563, the gold-dropping donkey).
The true source is almost certainly Bernoni's second, similarly titled collection, Fiabe popolari veneziane (Venice 1875), which contains the tale "L'anelo fada'" ("The Enchanted Ring") — a precise match in title and position. Karlinger evidently conflated the two Bernoni volumes, a common hazard in Bernoni bibliography (even Italo Calvino mixed them in his Fiabe italiane notes). The tale was also reprinted, again citing only Karlinger, in the Swiss journal Märchenforum No. 75, "Märchenland Italien" (Mutabor Verlag, Autumn 2017).
Citation created by Mistral.
More comic tales
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For those who are teachers: Telling stories in the classroom: basing language teaching on storytelling