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Overview
Three daughters of the slain Nāga King accompany a prince to explain his father’s dream. They ask to stand in a line and have their heads cut off in a single stroke. When he complies, a golden tree appears with a silver flower and a silver cock crowing upon it, reproducing the dream. Cutting down the tree brings the three princesses back to life, and they explain that they were the tree, flower and cock.
The sisters marry the king’s three sons. Their names and individual assignment to the three forms are not specified, so the transformation is recorded collectively. The cock is one princess’s form within this episode, not a separate unrelated magical bird. Parker attributes the telling to a Tom-tom Beater of the North-western Province; the comparative stories he appends have different transformed people and objects.
Origins & earliest records
Sri Lankan narratives collected and translated by H. Parker
Records & interpretation
Complete tale and all its printed variants/comparative notes read; relevant introduction passages on collection and translation directly read.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Village Folk-Tales of Ceylon, Volume I
No. 47, The Golden Tree, pp. 267–269
Family, evolution & connections
The Nāga king’s three daughters in The Golden Tree
Parker’s 1910 English collection, tale No. 47.
Scroll sideways to see all branches. With a keyboard, focus the tree and use the arrow keys.
Repeated explicit father–daughter statements in the named tale. Three daughters share one profile. No mother is identified, and daughter-to-transformation or daughter-to-husband mappings are unspecified. The human princes’ father is a different king.
Three human princes in The Golden Tree
The three Nāga princesses marry the three human princes after restoration. The narrative does not identify which princess marries which prince.
Princess Pepperina (Shâhzâdî Mirchâ)
Parker’s note compares the tale with Steel’s Princess Pepperina, whose two duck forms are beheaded together to restore her. The Nāga daughters instead become a tree, flower and cock, then return when the tree is cut. This is an attributed motif comparison, not proof of shared identity or causal borrowing.
Primary records and illustrations
Village Folk-Tales of Ceylon, Volume I
Volume I. No. 47, The Golden Tree, pp. 267–269
Complete section read including all printed variants, comparative notes and narrator attribution. Composite princess forms retained without invented mapping, unnamed king separated from Jataka comparison, and human Kinnara hunters not misclassified as celestial beings.
References
Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.
- Historical collected oral narrative translationParker, Village Folk-Tales of Ceylon I — No. 47, The Golden Tree, pp. 267–269Research access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.