"The Slave Mother" is an Italian
fairy tale
A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic (paranormal), magic, incantation, enchantments, and mythical ...
, collected by
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino (, also , ;. RAI (circa 1970), retrieved 25 October 2012. 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian writer and journalist. His best known works include the ''Our Ancestors'' trilogy (1952–1959), the '' Cosmicomi ...
in ''
Italian Folktales
''Italian Folktales'' (''Fiabe italiane'') is a collection of 200 Italian folktales published in 1956 by Italo Calvino. Calvino began the project in 1954, influenced by Vladimir Propp's '' Morphology of the Folktale''; his intention was to emulat ...
'', from Terra d'Ortano.
[Italo Calvino, ''Italian Folktales'', p. 455. .]
Synopsis
A couple of tenant farmers had five sons. One day the woman heard an owl ask her whether she would rather be rich while young or in old age. After telling her husband of it, she told it in old age. Soon she went out to get greens for a salad and was carried off by pirates. The family lamented her but had to go on.
Two years later, the family found a treasure in the fields. They smuggled it off, gave up the farm, and went to the city to live a fine life. One day the sons wanted to buy a beautiful young slave girl. The father refused, saying they should buy an old slave woman, who knew how to work. He saw one and bought her, and they gave her new clothing and put her in charge of the house. Still, she sighed every time she saw the five sons. The old man asked her one-day, and she explained that she had once had five sons, but she had been taken by pirates while gathering greens for salad. The old man realized she was his wife. They were delighted to have her back, and she lived her old age in wealth.
Motifs
The choice of destiny features in the fairy tale "
Catherine and her Destiny
Catherine and her Destiny is an Italian fairy tale collected by Thomas Frederick Crane in ''Italian Popular Tales'', and included by Andrew Lang in ''The Pink Fairy Book''. It is classified as Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as ATU 938, "Placidas" ( ...
" and also such
chivalric romance
As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalric k ...
s as ''
Sir Isumbras
''Sir Isumbras'' is a medieval metrical romance written in Middle English and found in no fewer than nine manuscripts dating to the fifteenth century. This popular romance must have been circulating in England before 1320, because William of Nas ...
''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Slave Mother
Italian fairy tales
Mother
]
A mother is the female parent of a child. A woman may be considered a mother by virtue of having given childbirth, birth, by raising a child who may or may not be her biological offspring, or by supplying her ovum for fertilisation in the cas ...
Female characters in fairy tales