Stan Bolovan is a

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

fairy tale A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, household tale, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic, enchantments, and mythical or fanciful bei ...

collected in ''Rumänische Märchen'' by Mite Kremnitz (1882).Mite Kremnitz, ''Rumänische Märchen : Stan Bolovan'' on zeno.org
Fairy tale collector

Andrew Lang Andrew Lang (31 March 1844 – 20 July 1912) was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a folkloristics, collector of folklore, folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectur ...

included it in his ''

The Violet Fairy Book ''The Langs' Fairy Books'' are a series of 25 collections of true and fictional children's literature, stories for children published between 1889 in literature, 1889 and 1913 in literature, 1913 by Andrew Lang and Leonora Blanche Alleyne, a marr ...

'' (1901). Versions of the tale were later retold by

Ruth Manning-Sanders Ruth Manning-Sanders (21 August 1886 – 12 October 1988) was an English poet and author born in Wales, known for a series of children's books for which she collected and related fairy tales worldwide. She published over 90 books in her lifetime ...

in '' A Book of Dragons'' (1965) and '' A Choice of Magic'' (1971), and by Christopher Rawson in ''The Usborne Book of

Dragon A dragon is a Magic (supernatural), magical legendary creature that appears in the folklore of multiple cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but European dragon, dragons in Western cultures since the Hi ...

s'' (1979).

Synopsis

Stan Bolovan's wife was sad, though they were prosperous. Finally, she confessed that she was grieved that they had no children. Stan visited a wise man and begged him for children, and ignored his warnings about feeding them all. He returned to find his wife delighted: they had a hundred children. Soon, they found they could not feed them all, and Stan set out to find food. He found a flock of sheep and hoped to steal some, but a dragon stole animals and milk from the flock. He asked, and the shepherds promised him a third of the flock if he rid them of the dragon. He met up with the dragon and said he ate rocks by night and flowers by day and would fight. He set a contest: he squeezed buttermilk from cheese, and the dragon tried to squeeze it from a rock, and had to own he was better. The dragon offered him service with his mother, who would pay him sacks of

ducat The ducat ( ) coin was used as a trade coin in Europe from the later Middle Ages to the 19th century. Its most familiar version, the gold ducat or sequin containing around of 98.6% fine gold, originated in Venice in 1284 and gained wide inter ...

s. The mother set them two trials: her son threw a staff as far as he could, and then it was Stan's turn. First, he told the dragon he was afraid that he would kill him with the force; then he claimed to be waiting until the moon got out of the way. The mother then sent them to fetch water, and Stan could not have carried the skins she sent, but when he said it was too much bother and threatened to carry the stream instead, the dragon carried them for him. The mother then sent them to gather wood, and Stan started to tie trees together, declaring he would carry back the entire wood, and the dragon brought back wood for him, before he uprooted the forest. The mother told her son to crack open his head in the night. Stan hid under a pig's trough and was not harmed. They gave him gold to go away, which he could not carry, but he said he wanted to stay in her service, because his friends would be ashamed of him, to carry so little; they urged him to go, and he went on the condition that the dragon carry back the gold for him. He did not want to go all the way home with the dragon, so that it would not know where he lived, but his hungry children came running, and were so hungry they shouted for the dragon's flesh. Terrified, the dragon dropped the gold and ran away, leaving Stan and his family to prosper with it.

Fairy Tales with Similar Elements

* The Boy Who Had an Eating Match with a Troll * The Valiant Little Tailor

References

External links

''Stan Bolovan''
1882 works Romanian fairy tales Romanian mythology Dragons in fairy tales {{1880s-story-stub