The Sister of the Sun

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The Sister of the Sun is a Lapp fairy tale collected by J. C. Poestion in Lapplandische Mahrchen. Andrew Lang included it in The Brown Fairy Book.^[1]

[edit] Synposis

A king's son and a gardener's son played together, and each had a bow and arrows exactly like the other's. One day they shot, and found one of their arrows stuck in a golden feather. They quarreled over whose was the arrow, and so the feather, and took their case to the king. When the king gave it to the prince, the gardener's son continued to argue, and the king gave him the feather and ordered him to find the chicken it came from.

He met a fox, who told him that it might belong to the Sister of the Sun. They went to her house. On the way, they met a man; the fox said they should hide, but the boy told him his story and they traveled together. The fox offered to steal the hen, but the boy insisted on doing it himself. The fox warned him to only steal the hen with the missing feather, but inside, he was distracted, went to kiss the Sister of the Sun, and found that he could not catch the hen. The other hens clucked and woke the Sister of the Sun. She sent him to rescue her sister from a giant.

The fox brought him to the castle and then went in itself. It found the princess in the middle of a circle of dancing giants. It danced with them and offered to show them, with the princess, a dance that only two people could dance. When they gave it the princess, it knocked over the lights, gave the princess to the man and boy, and told the giants while they were restoring the light that it had the princess. When they had had time to get away, it ran away itself, by a different path; after a hard chase, the sun rose and turned them to stone.

They brought the princess back to her sister. The Sister of the Sun gave him the hen and told him that she would marry him herself in a few years. He brought the hen to the king, and told his story. The king said he would have him thrown into a barrel of pitch if it were false. Several years later, when there was no sign of the Sister of the Sun, the king prepared a barrel of pitch, and the boy was brought to be thrown into it. A ship arrived, carrying the Sister of the Sun, and although the boy was out of his wits with fear and had to be reminded of what had happened, they arranged to marry.

The bridegroom's father told them that they had to marry in the king's presence. The king arrived and ordered the boy to perform three tasks to prove himself worthy of the bride. First he had to fell a forest in a day. The Sister of the Sun told him to take an axe from her ship, chop down a tree, and order the rest of the forest to fall, but to bring back three chips of wood from the tree he had cut. He obeyed her, and the forest fell.

She wanted to defy the king, because she was not his subject, but the bridegroom's father persuaded her that it would be ill for him. The king told him to restore all the trees. The Sister of the Sun gave him water that restored them.

Again she wanted to defy the king, because she was not his subject, but again, the bridegroom's father persuaded her that it would be ill for him. The king told him to kill a serpent that lived in a river; no one saw it, but it ate children. The Sister of the Sun gave him a sword, told him to throw the chips of wood in the water, which would become a boat, and to cut off the serpent's three heads when they appeared. Then he was to take the tips of its tongues to the kitchen, and when the king appeared, throw them at him and run away without looking back.

The boy obeyed until he was running away; then he saw that the city had vanished behind him, and the ship vanished ahead of him. The boy went on until he came to an old woman. She could tell him nothing of the Sister of the Sun, but sent him to her next older sister with a letter, and told him if he grew tired on the way, he was to rustle the letter. He carried it, and when he grew tired and rustled the paper, he immediately was strong again. He carried it to her sister, gave her the letter, and asked after the Sister of the Sun. She had not, but sent him to the oldest sister with a similar letter.

The eldest sister told him that the Sister of the Sun was half dead with grief because her father had lost a battle because the boy had taken his sword. She told him how to revive her and warned him of danger on the way.

On the way, he met two brothers fighting over which of them should have their father's invisibility cloak; he persuaded them to let him try it, and went off with it. He used the cloak to steal in the same manner a tablecloth that would magically cover itself with food, a stick where one end could kill and the other restore to life, and a pair of shoes that would carry a man whereever he wished. He wished himself to the Sister of the Sun, restored her father's army with the stick, and married her.