Ethiopian Folktales

Narrated by Abdul Rahman Abdulahi

A long time ago there was a rich merchant. One day he hung a notice on his shop door saying, “I can buy anything the eyes can see.” When the king was walking in the city he visited the merchant’s shop and saw the notice.

One of his advisers said, “This merchant is very rude. By this notice he means that he can even bring your daughter to his house. So he is insulting you.”

So the king went into the merchant’s shop and asked him. “Do you mean to say that you can even obtain my daughter here as well as everything else?”

The merchant said, “Yes, I can. Set the date and on that day, if I’m not able to bring your daughter to this shop, let me be hanged as a punishment.”

The king agreed.

So the merchant goes to a goldsmith and says, “I am so rich. I’m going to buy as much gold as possible and I want you to make me a big golden cow with a very big stomach so that a person can sit in it.”

Then he began to show the golden cow to people by making them pay. It became very popular and the story spread through the town. People started to come from all over the place.

The princess, when she heard about this, she asked her father to bring the golden cow to the palace so that she could look at it. The king orders his soldiers to bring the cow to the palace. The merchant hid himself in the stomach of the cow. So the golden cow was put in the bedroom of the princess. When the princess saw the golden cow she ordered the people not to take it away, but to let it stay there. Then she went to sleep.

The merchant came out of the cow and exchanged his ring with the princess’s. Then he got back into the cow. When the princess woke up she found her ring was changed and pretended to be asleep again and began to watch to see what could happen. Then the merchant thought she was asleep again and crawled out of the cow, and the princess caught him. So he begged her not to betray him. She agreed and ordered the maids to bring her a lot of food to eat. The king was very happy to hear that his daughter had a good appetite.

So the merchant and the princess became very close friends and began to chat and became intimate and she fell in love with him. But the merchant wanted the golden cow to be returned to the shop but the princess refused. They stayed like this for one month in the princess’s bedroom. Then she agreed to let the cow go. The deadline for the merchant was two days away.

So the king called the merchant to his palace and said, “You will be hanged.”

The merchant said, “If I’m going to be hanged I want to be hanged with every citizen of the town watching my execution.”

So on the date of his execution with all the citizens gathered, the merchant took the princess’s ring from his finger and showed it to the king.

“Whose ring is this?” the merchant said.

So when the king looked at it, it was his daughter’s.

The merchant said, “I want your daughter to be asked whose child she is carrying in her belly.”

So she was brought to the place of execution and asked whose baby she was carrying. She admitted with all the citizens of the town as witnesses that she was carrying the merchant’s baby.

So the king was ashamed and said, “I should have given you my daughter as a wife in the first place.”

So he gave the princess to the merchant and after a while the merchant became king after the death of the king and ruled the city for a long, long time.