How the Devil Married Three Sisters
Encyclopedia
How the Devil Married Three Sisters is an Italian fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...

 collected by Thomas Frederick Crane
Thomas Frederick Crane
Thomas Frederick Crane was an American folklorist, academic and lawyer.He studied law at Princeton, earned his undergraduate degree in 1864, and in 1867 graduated with an A.M. After graduation, he studied law at Columbia Law School but moved to Ithaca when a relative there became ill...

 in Italian Popular Tales.

It is Aarne-Thompson type 311, the heroine rescues herself and her sisters. Another tale of this type is Fitcher's Bird
Fitcher's Bird
Fitcher's Bird is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 46.It is Aarne-Thompson type 311, the heroine rescues herself and her sisters. Another tale of this type is How the Devil Married Three Sisters. It is closely related to the tale Bluebeard...

.

Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy , the Cosmicomics collection of short stories , and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler .Lionised in Britain and the United States,...

 included a variant Silver Nose in his Italian Folktales
Italian Folktales
Italian Folktales is a collection of 200 Italian folktales published in 1956 by Italo Calvino. Calvino began to undertake the project that will lead to the Italian Folktales in 1954, influenced by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale; his intention was to emulate the Brothers Grimm in...

, a Piedmont version that was the only one to include the silver nose, but added elements from variants from Bologna and Venice.

Synopsis

Once, the devil decided to marry. He prepared a house, disguised himself as a fine gentleman, and wooed in a family with three daughters.The oldest agreed to marry him. When he took her home, he forbade her to look in a door, but as soon as he left, she did so, and hellfire in the door singed the flowers she wore. She could not hide what had happened, so the devil said her curiosity would be satisfied, and threw her into hell. A few months later, he wooed the second daughter, but the same fate befell her as her sister.

When he came to woo the youngest daughter she thought he had murdered her sisters, but the match was so good, she would try to do better. She put her flowers in water before she opened the door, and realized that she was married to the devil. She pulled her two sisters out and hid them. The devil, reassured when he saw her flowers still blooming, came to love her.

She asked him to carry three chests to her parents, without putting them down on the way, and he agreed. Whenever he hesitated, thinking she could not see him, the sister she had smuggled inside shouted,"Don't put it down; I see you!" When the third chest went, with her inside, she put a dummy on the balcony to appear to watch him. He returned and discovered it was only a dummy, but when he went to her house, he found that all three of his wives were alive, and the thought of three at once made him flee.

Since then, he has not wanted to marry.

Variants

In Calvino's variant, the devil has a silver nose, and the girls are not married but hired to do housework. The youngest sends him for news of her mother, and to carry a bag of laundry with him.

External links

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