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Tittone, son of the king of Green Knoll, goes in search of his three blood sisters, who are married to a falcon, a stag, and a dolphin. After a long journey he finds them, and while returning home he encounters the daughter of a king, who is kept prisoner in a tower by a dragon. Tittone uses a signal given to him by his brothers-in-law, and all three of them appear to help him. Together they kill the dragon and free the princess, after which Tittone takes her for his wife and returns to his kingdom with his brothers-in-law and sisters. MorethanafewofthelistenersweremovedbythemercyshownbyMarcuccio to Parmiero, and they all acknowledged that virtue is an unfailing wealth that time cannot consume, storms cannot blow away, and woodworms cannot gnaw to dust, unlike other forms of wealth in this life that come and go, and that what is acquired dishonestly never reaches the third generation. Finally Meneca seasoned the episode that had just been told by bringing the following tale to the table of nursery stories. “There once was a king, the king of Green Knoll, who had three daughters who were three jewels. These daughters were ardently loved by the three sons of the king of Lovely Meadow, who due to the curse of a fairy had all been turned into animals, for which reason the king of Green Knoll did not want to give them his daughters in marriage. “And thus the first of them, a beautiful falcon and enchanted as well, summoned all the birds to an assembly, to which chaffinches, wrens, orioles, siskins , flycatchers, screech owls, hoopoes, larks, cuckoos, magpies, and other 3 The Three Animal Kings Third Entertainment of the Fourth Day 314 AT 552A: Three Animals as Brothers-in-Law. Penzer comments, “This tale of the animal princes is a great favorite, and is found, in some form or other, in all the most important collections.” In Grimm it is no. 197 (“The Crystal Ball”), and in Italy variants can be found in Crane, Pitrè (Fiabe, nov. e racc. sic. 16 and Nov. tosc. 11), and Gonzenbach (29), among others. Penzer also discusses the “ring of recognition” motif, common in folktales the world over and present, in Italy, in tale 10.9 of Boccaccio’s Decameron. “It is one of the accepted methods of ‘declaring presence,’ and becomes a most useful deus ex machina to introduce at critical moments. In some cases the ring is merely handed by one person to another, but more often it is slipped unawares into a cup of wine by the lover or husband in disguise. In some cases the ring is broken and each person keeps half” (2:26). members of the feathered species came. When they had responded to his call, the falcon sent them all to demolish the choicest trees of Green Knoll so that neither flower nor leaf was left. The second of them, a stag, summoned the deer, rabbits, hares, porcupines, and all the other animals of that land, and ordered them to devastate the farmlands so that not even a blade of grass was left. The third, a dolphin, plotted with a hundred sea monsters and unleashed such a storm on the shores of that land that not one boat remained whole. “When the king saw that things were going worse and worse and he couldn’t remedy the damage that these three beastly lovers were causing him, he decided to put an end to the predicament and consented to give them his daughters in marriage. And the three grooms, wanting neither festivities nor music making, took their brides and left the kingdom. Upon the brides’ departure Grazolla, the queen, gave three similar rings to each of her daughters and told them that if they ever had to separate and after some time needed to find each other or someone of their own blood again, they could be recognized by means of these rings. “And so, after saying good-bye they took their leave. The falcon carried Fabiella, the first sister, to the top of a mountain so terribly high that its dry head rose above the border of clouds to a place where it never rains, and there he showed her to a splendid palace, where he kept her like a queen. The stag carried off Vasta, the second of the daughters, to a wood so entangled that when they were summoned by Night the shadows that lived there didn’t...

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