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Overview
The princess receives three blue stones as a childhood keepsake before a great bird carries her away. Later she bears three sons, each secretly removed by the prince’s mother while the girl is falsely accused of eating them. During her punishment she asks the prince to retrieve the stones from the drawer of her old garden table. Printed page 119 explicitly identifies those objects as the three boys she bore.
Placed before their mother, the stones knock against one another and speak, confirming each account of the infants’ removal. Their testimony prompts the prince to investigate and vindicate her. The printed chronology leaves the relationship between the earlier keepsake and later births unexplained; no intermediate transformation is narrated. The ending reports recovery and marriage of the princess, but never states that the stones become human children again.
Origins & earliest records
Consiglieri Pedroso, Portuguese Folk-Tales, translated from the original manuscript by Henriqueta Monteiro, London: Elliot Stock for the Folk-Lore Society, 1882; tale XXIX, pp. 116–121. The selected account does not identify an individual narrator or collecting locality.
Records & interpretation
The located 1882 English translation presents this figure within a complete collected narrative. Pedroso’s introductory pp. 1–2 describe the thirty published selections from his larger collection.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Portuguese Folk-Tales XXIX: The Three Little Blue Stones, pp. 116–121
Printed119 names stones as sons;120 supplies movement and speech;121 ends with parents’ reunion/marriage, without a child-restoration scene. Exact119 scan inspected.
Family, evolution & connections
The princess and her three blue-stone sons — Pedroso XXIX
Complete selected English translation, XXIX, pp. 116–121.
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- Unnamed king and queen (princess’s parents)
- Their unnamed princess daughter
Explicit mother and three separately narrated male births; grandparents follow the opening royal household. The earlier keepsakes are later identified as the boys, but no transformation mechanism or coherent chronology is supplied. No human restoration is narrated. Fatherhood is not assigned merely from the prince’s partnership. The maternal queen is distinct from the prince’s hostile mother.
Unnamed princess of The Three Little Blue Stones
The princess bears three boys in separate episodes. Page 119 expressly identifies the earlier blue keepsakes as those boys, without explaining how the chronology or change of form works; the ending never restores them to human form.
The other two blue-stone boys
All three boys are explicitly born to the same princess. No individual names are supplied. The prince’s relationship with their mother does not substitute for an independently explicit paternity statement.
Princess’s unnamed king and queen parents
The opening identifies the princess as the king and queen’s child, and the ending reunites her with them. They are distinct from the prince’s hostile mother and sister.
References
Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.
- Primary textPortuguese Folk-Tales, original 1882 edition scan and transcriptionResearch access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.