Jamaica Anansi stories

Chapter 356: 94. The King’s Three Daughters. [Story]

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About This Book

A collection of Jamaican folktales gathers short animal and trickster narratives centered on the spider Anansi alongside tales about tigers, monkeys, goats, and birds. Stories account for curious animal traits, stage comic reversals, and probe themes of cunning, justice, and social order through episodic plots and origin motifs. The volume also presents riddles, dance and song materials, and field-recorded music, arranged in thematic sections that compile variants, brief notes, and folkloric context for each tale.

[Contents]

94. The King’s Three Daughters. [Story]

This story may be a fragment of the hidden name series in which the song has lost the revelation of the name, and the introduction omits the trick to discover it. If so, it has become a fixed variant. P. Smith, 35–37, tells it much as in the present version.

The story has points of resemblance to the European tale of the boy who is admitted to the princess’s chamber in the form of a singing bird. See number 113 and compare Spanish-American forms, JAFL 25: 191–208; JAFL 27: 135–137.