A young Rom enters into the service of his godfather, the king. When he refuses to disclose a prophetic dream, he is walled in. The daughter of the king, who has fallen in love with him, supplies him with food through a hole in the wall.

One day the king is threatened by his enemy, the red king. He must solve two riddles – which is the upper and which the lower end of a wooden stick; which of two identical-looking horses is that of the king. Both riddles are solved by his daughter with the help of her walled-in lover, who has already dreamt about it all. The next task for the king is to behave exactly like the hostile ruler living far away who sees everything with the help of a ‘four-eyed one’. With the aid of the Rom, who in the meantime has been released, the king also passes this test.
Now the hostile red king challenges the king to a duel. In his place the Rom goes to meet the hostile king with eleven comrades who behave exactly as he does so that the red king cannot recognise who the real leader is. So, he hides a child in the group’s bedchamber as a spy who, from the way the men address one another, finds out who the leader is. Since the Rom had not dreamt about this earlier, the red king’s trick works. But the Rom, through his cunning, escapes the gallows and negotiates a peace treaty with the red king. He returns to his godfather and is given his daughter’s hand in marriage.

The tale of magic ‘So džalas o čhavo sune’ (What the Boy Saw in His Dreams) told by Andrej Blada, combines themes from the widely used type catalogued under the name of ‘The Dream’ / ‘Der Traum’ (ATU 725) with elements from other tales such as ‘The Golden-Haired’ / ‘Goldener’ (ATU 314), in which the hero stubbornly withholds his dream about what the future holds. This motif of the concealed dream also appears in magic tales of narrators from the Serbian Kalderash as well as in the tales of Hungarian or Slovak Roma. According to Mode / Hübschmannova (1983 Vol. I: 518), they are based on an Indian fundamental type that is also to be found in folk tales from Turkey, Persia, Greece and Armenia. The figure of the štare jakhengero, the “four-eyed one”, stems from Slovak folk tales; the original name, štyroký, was not, however, adopted directly but translated into Romani. The narrator does not shy away from employing modern technology in his magic tale: The hero uses a telephone from his lookout to speak to the king in order to trick the four-eyed one.

Stylistically, this story is full of formulas, terms of intimacy and interpolations. The strong language used in direct speech of some fairy tales of South and East European Romani groups denote power and strength; they are, however, regarded as ‘offensive’ by outsiders within the majority population or by Roma from other groups who use other forms of communication. They either do not appear at all in the folk tales of the majority population or are not written down for ‘moral’ reasons – a manipulation that falsifies the original tale and, in the case of Romani fairy tales, enshrines an interpretation dominated by the point of view of outsiders.

Literature

Fennesz-Juhasz, Christiane; Cech, Petra; Halwachs, Dieter W.; Heinschink, Mozes F. (ed.). 2003. Die schlaue Romni: Märchen und Lieder der Roma / E bengali Romni: So Roma phenen taj gilaben. Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag (Transkript und deutsche Übersetzung / transkripto taj njamcicka translacija / transcript and German translation: pp. 194–221).

Mode, Heinz; Hübschmannová, Milena (ed.). 1983. Zigeunermärchen aus aller Welt. 3 Bände, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag (andere deutsche Übersetzung / eg aver njamcicka translacija / another German translation: Band I, pp. 139–56).

Uther, Hans-Jörg. 2004. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography (= FF Communications 85–87), 3 Bände. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fenica.