The Little Girl Sold with the Pears - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

"The Little Girl Sold with the Pears" 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 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,...

in 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...

, from Piedmont. Ruth Manning-Sanders

Ruth Manning-Sanders

Ruth Manning-Sanders was a prolific British poet and author who was perhaps best known for her series of children's books in which she collected and retold fairy tales from all over the world. All told, she published more than 90 books during her lifetime. The dust jacket for A Book of Giants...

included a variant, as "The Girl in the Basket", in A Book of Ogres and Trolls
A Book of Ogres and Trolls
A Book of Ogres and Trolls is a 1973 anthology of 13 fairy tales from around Europe that have been collected and retold by Ruth Manning-Sanders. It is one in a long series of such anthologies by Manning-Sanders....

.

Plot summary

A man had to pay the king four baskets of pears as rent, but one year, his trees yielded only three and a half, so he put his youngest daughter in the fourth basket to fill it up. The royal servants found her by the pears she ate, and she went to work as a servant. As she grew up, she and the prince fell in love. The maidservants grew envious.

In Manning-Sander's version, they said she had boasted of doing all the laundry in one day; with the prince's aid she was able to do it.

In both versions, the maids told the king that she had boasted she could steal the witch's, or ogress's, treasure. The king insisted that she do it.

Manning-Sanders had the prince told her what to do. Although Calvino found this in his original version, to increase her identification with the pears, she went and passed by an apple tree and a peach tree to sleep in the third

Rule of three (writing)

The "rule of three" is a principle in writing that suggests that things that come in threes are inherently funnier, more satisfying, or more effective than other numbers of things. The reader/audience of this form of text is also more likely to consume information if it is written in groups of...

, a pear tree. In the morning, a little old woman was under the tree.

In both cases, they gave her grease, bread, and millet. She went on, gave the millet to three women in a bakery, sweeping out the ovens with their hair, threw the bread to some mastiffs, crossed by a red river with a charm that the little old woman had given her, and greased the hinges of the witches' house. Then she took the treasure chest. The chest began to speak, but the door refused to slam on her, the river to drown her, the dogs to eat her, and the women in the bakery to bake her.

Curious, she opened the chest and a golden hen with her chicks escaped, or musical instruments that played on their own, but the little old woman or prince put them back.

The prince told her to ask, for her reward, for the coal chest in the cellar. When she asked and it was brought up, the prince was hidden in it, so they married.

Plot summary

See also