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Overview
A young woman sends her father repeatedly to King Bean to request marriage. He eventually agrees and supplies a bean with instructions to prepare three vessels containing milk and water, milk, and rose-water. Opening the bean at her balcony summons something flying from afar. After passing through the baths, a handsome youth emerges. Although Crane introduces the story among animal-husband narratives, the selected wording gives no specific bird species, feathers or bean-shaped body.
Her sisters put broken glass into the vessels, and his next visit leaves him wounded and fleeing along a visible trail of blood. The woman follows, shelters with a hermit and overhears witches discussing his condition. The tale’s remedy involves killing one witch and a dove, their blood and water hidden under a stone. She carries it out and treats the king while disguised as a physician. These are violent magical actions within a historical narrative, not a treatment proposed for real injury.
The recovered king wrongly believes his wife betrayed him. She asks him to write both their names on her palms before she leaves, then summons him again with the bean. He arrives with a dagger but recognizes the written hands and learns that her sisters caused the attack. His parents hear the account, accept her and celebrate the marriage. The prince’s mother and father are both explicit in this ending; no child or later dynasty is supplied.
Origins & earliest records
Crane, Italian Popular Tales (1885), III, King Bean, pp.12–17. The list of stories identifies Venetian collector Domenico Giuseppe Bernoni, Fiabe, No.17, El Re de Fava, and marks the tale as translated from dialect. No individual oral narrator is named in this English presentation.
Records & interpretation
The complete selected tale supplies flying arrivals, ordered baths, glass injury, the wife’s disguise, magical recovery and reconciliation. The form of the arriving flyer is unspecified; a comparative classification in the editor’s introduction does not supply absent anatomy.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Italian Popular Tales, III: King Bean, pp.12–17
Complete selected tale through the parental welcome and wedding; no named bird species supplied.
Family, evolution & connections
King Bean’s unnamed mother
The woman at the palace explicitly calls King Bean her son and offers her crown to the healer. The healer is his disguised wife, not his mother; no royal mother’s name is supplied.
Unnamed youngest daughter, King Bean’s wife
The narrator already calls the pair husband and wife before the broken-glass attack. His wife cures him in disguise, and a final wedding occurs at his parents’ palace. Her two older sisters, not the wife, placed the glass.
His wife’s two older sisters
The wife is the youngest of her father’s three daughters. Her two older sisters secretly put broken glass in King Bean’s bathing vessels, while the king initially blames his wife. Their relation is through his wife, not biological sisterhood with him; no names or shared parent with the king are supplied.
References
Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.
- Primary textCrane, Italian Popular Tales (1885): selected tale and source listResearch access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
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