Prince Ring
Icelandic fairy tale

"Prince Ring" (Icelandic: Sagan af Hríngi kóngssyni) is an Icelandic folktale, collected by Jón Árnason.
Andrew Lang translated the tale into English as "Prince Ring" in The Yellow Fairy Book (1894).
Textual notes
"Sagan af Hríngi kóngssyni" ("the story of Hríngur, the king's son") is one of the Icelandic folktales that appeared in Jón Árnason's anthology, Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri Vol. 2 (1862–64).
It was later translated as "Ring, der Königssohn" by Josef Poestion in Isländische Märchen (1884), and subsequently by Adeline Rittershaus as "Snati-Snati" (1902), as provided by the bibliographical endnote in Hans Naumann's edition. The German translation by Hans and Ida Naumann in turn was entitled "Der Königssohn Ring und der Hund Snati-Snati" (1922).
Andrew Lang printed "Prince Ring" in The Yellow Fairy Book (first edition, 1894) without attribution except being "from the Icelandic", but elsewhere, he identifies his source for Icelandic tales as Poestion's German-translated anthology.
Synopsis
A prince named Ring (Icelandic: Hríngur) and his men hunted a hind with a golden ring on its horns. A darkness came over them, and they lost the hind and their way, and separated because they each thought they knew better the way back home. The prince came upon a woman on the seashore, next to a barrel.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prince Ring” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.