The Enchanted Knife

"The Enchanted Knife" is a Serbian folktale collected by the British scholar Andrew Lang in The Violet Fairy Book (1901). It is the eighteenth of the thirty-five tales in the English original, where it appears under the title The Enchanted Knife, and is known in Chinese translation as "The Enchanted Knife." At the start, a young man vows to marry none but a maiden of royal blood and summons the courage to enter the palace and ask for the emperor's only daughter. The emperor, unwilling to consent yet reluctant to be rude, sets an eight-day deadline: the youth must tame and bring back three horses no one has ever ridden—one pure white, one roan with a black head, and one coal-black with a snow-white head and four white hooves—and in addition present the empress with a gift of gold weighing as much as the three horses can carry. The young man leaves the palace in despair, unaware that the princess has heard every condition from behind a curtain and has secretly seen him. That night the princess takes the magic knife from her father's treasure chest and hides it. The next morning she sends her nurse to bring the young man to her room, and explains to him the details of the three-peaked hill, the sunlit meadow, and the cypress with copper-set roots and silver branches and golden leaves: when the horses will not be tamed, he is to raise the knife toward the sun, and its radiance will make the herd kneel and obey; then with the knife he can dig up the cypress roots and find sacks of gold. The story then turns on whether the young man can follow the plan and complete this nearly impossible task, and how the emperor will honor the marriage pact. It is a classic "suitor's tasks" folktale: the hero's strength comes not only from the treasure but from the princess's strategy and active help.