Piscis
The Fisherman and the King
It is known throughout the kingdom that the king loves fish. A fisherman presents the king with an enormous fish, and the king rewards him with 4,000 dirhams. The queen reproaches the king for this extravagance, however, pointing out that giving such a huge sum to a lowly fisherman may cause resentment at court. Should any nobleman ever receive less than 4,000 dirhams from the king for future services, the queen suggests, their pride will be injured and conflict will arise. The king agrees to create some pretext to take back the reward, and his wife advises him to ask the fisherman the sex of the fish - and claim that whetever the answer may be, male or female, the king desires only the alternative. The king calls the fisherman before him, and asks whether the fish is male or female, but the clever fisherman, sensing a trick, replies that it is neither - this fish is a hermaphrodite. Delighted by the fisherman's cleverness, the king gives him a still greater reward (600,000 dirhams), and the fisherman leaves weighted down with a great sack of gold. As he departs, however, he pauses to pick up a single coin that had fallen into the dust. The queen seizes upon his, decrying the fisherman's greed and covetousness; only a grasping miser would stoop to scrape even the smallest coin from the dirt when carrying a great fortune. However, when he is questioned, the fisherman replies that he picked up the coin not out of greed, but out of respect - for the king's face is stamped upon the coin, and the fisherman would not let it be trampled carelessly underfoot. The king is delighted, and proclaims that women's advice brings only misery.
| Note |
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Nishimura notes that this motif (ATU 922B: The King’s Face on the Coin) has relevant analogues in: Analogues: Arabian Nights, Night 391, ‘The Story of Khusraw the Great, Shirin, and the Fisherman’; Jaḥiẓ, Le Livre des Beautés et des Antithèses (Al-Maḥasin wa’l-Aḍdad) (Vloten, pp. 252~255); Anwar-i Suhaili, 11.4 ‘The Hunter and the Fish’; Uighur Folktale, ‘Male or female?’ (According to Takeuchi Kazuo, Mondern Uighur in Four Weeks, pp. 333-339); Afanasjew, Russische Volksmärchen, 321-323 ‘Das Rätsel’. Additional bibliography: Chauvin V164. |
| Critical Literature |
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| Nishimura (2001), Marzolph and Chraïbi (2012) |
| Piscis appears in the following versions and secondary versions |
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| Piscis is narrated in the following occurrences |
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| No recorded narrations available. |
| Piscis appears in the following manuscripts |
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| This inset story appears in no manuscripts of the database |