Reygoch is a Croatian Fairy Tale written by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić and included in her "Croatian Tales of Long Ago" 1916 collection (found here
).
A group of farmers fall asleep while watching their horses in a meadow. A group of fairies takes advantage of their sleep to descend from the clouds and play with the horses. One young and tiny fairy called Curlylocks is delighted to come down to Earth for the first time, and loves the feeling of riding like a whilrwind, so she spurs her black horse until he is running like mad. Black rushes out of the meadow, crosses fields and mountains, gallops through a golden valley with two white villages whose beauty delights Curlylocks, and comes to an endless icy plain. After spending seven days galloping nonstop, Black arrives at the legendary city of Frosten, and Curlylocks hops off her steed.
Curlylocks starts exploring the empty city and bumps into Reygoch, a kind giant who has lived in Frosten for ages, doing nothing but counting bricks. Curlylocks convinces him to leave the city and explore the wide world, starting off with the golden valley she saw and loved earlier. In order to bypass the frozen plains, Reygoch kicks a hole into the ground, and he and Curlylocks go underground.
After having several adventures travelling beneath the Earth, Curlylocks and Reygoch surface in one glen between the two white villages, startling a group of herd boys and girls from both towns. Despite the initial scare, Curlylocks quickly befriends the kids and starts playing with them; however, a kid named Lilio declines to join in their games and decides to talk Reygoch about something he is extremely worried about.
It turns out that, despite being neighbors, the two villages in the valley hate each other as a result of constantly bickering about everything since forever. Nonetheless, the children from both villages usually ignore their parents' feud and enjoy gathering together to play as herding their cattle. Their parents dislike their games, but one elderly couple -a great-grandfather and a great-grandmother- who lived in one of the villages argued the children should be allowed to play together; so the shepherd boys and girls kept on coming with their sheep to the same field, and the adults eventually stopped bothering about their kids' games.
Unfortunately, both villages never stopped hating each other. In fact, Lilio overheard his village's leaders talking the last night, and he found out they are going to pierce the dyke which holds back the River Banewater tonight so that the dam breaks and the enemy town becomes overflowed. The councillors think their own village will be totally safe because it is built on a hill, but Lilio knows his village is not so high, and he is afraid those maniacs are about to drown them all.
Right then, an ear-deafening noise rumbles across the valley. Standing up, Reygoch can see the waters of the Banewater rushing out of a large hole in the dam and beginning to overflow the valley. The giant gathers up all children in his hands and quickly runs towards the broken dam, followed by the children's flock, to try stop the flood.
Reygoch sets the kids and their sheep down on a nearby hillock, already surrounded by water, and sets out to repair the dyke. However, Reygoch cannot stop the water, despite their best efforts. Both villages are already overflown, and the water level keeps rising. The children and their sheep crowd up higher and higher upon the hill, and Curlylocks takes off her veil, so that the herd girls can tear it into strips and knot them into long ropes so everyone are bound together.
Suddenly, Curlylocks comes up with an idea: Reygoch is big enough to plug the hole by sitting on it. Reygoch follows the fairy's advice, and as sitting down he grabs handfuls of earth and starts rebuilding the dyke.
However, the shepherd children feel their troubles are not over. Their valley has become an enormous lake, and their villages are flooded up to the rooftops. Reygoch stomps on the ground, breaking a hole to drain the water off the valley, but there is one major problem left: all adults seem to have died in the flood. Both villages hated each other so badly that they didn't care about dying as long as their enemies also perished, so they did not even try to save their lives. All herd boys and girls are now orphans, but even though they saved their villages' livestock, they don't know how to farm the land to grow their food.
Fortunately, Curlylocks discovers two persons have survived: great-grandfather and great-grandmother, who were the only people in both villages with sense enough to take refuge in their home's attic.
Curlylocks and her friends race to the village to reunite with the elderly couple, but Reygoch stands behind. He has run into nothing but trouble since he left his beloved city, and now his friends are safe he wants nothing but going back home; so that he jumps down into the hole and runs away back to Frosten.
Back in the valley, Grandma and Granddad teach the young folk how to farm the land. The young folk ploughs the fields and builds one single village so there will be no more jealousy or strife. And in the town's center one tower is erected, where Curlylocks lives and cultivates her garden. Since she could not return to the sky after sacrificing her magic veil, the fairy chose to move with her new friends to the valley she loved. And on the evening, the herd boys and girls climb up her tower to play, dance and sing around the fairy.
On his part, Reygoch returned to Frosten; and he still lives there today, counting stones and praying God to not be again tempted away from his huge, desolate and peaceful city.
The tale is in the Public Domain and can be read here.
Tropes:
- Bag of Holding: Subverted. Curlylocks owns a bag filled of pearls which she can transform into anything she desires. However, their number is finite and Curlylocks tends to spend them liberally, so she runs out of magic pearls right when she needs them the most.
- Beneath the Earth: A vast network of caverns, passages and subterranean streams lies beneath Frosten and the endless snowy plain surrounding the ancient city. As exploring the caves, Curlylocks and Reygoch find treasures which had been swallowed by the earth long ago: castles, ships, weapons, buried treasures...
- Bittersweet Ending: Reygoch giant is unable to stop the flood in time to save two villages, and most of villagers get drowned. However, Reygoch manages to save all children and their cattle, which proceed to build a new village, hopefully free of the hate and envy which plagued their forefathers and caused their self-destruction. And although Curlylocks cannot go back home because she sacrificed her magic veil to save the children, she has now a new home and many new friends.
- Buried Alive: As exploring the maze of underground caves, Curlylocks removes a staff which happened to be keeping a pillar upright, accidentally causing a landslide and trapping her between walls of rock. Fortunately, Reygoch remembers about her and removes the boulders trapping her.
- But Now I Must Go: After saving both towns' kids from the flood, Reygoch quickly jumps back into the underground maze and rushes back to Frosten, determined to never leave his beloved, lonely -and above all quiet- city ever again.
- Call to Agriculture: Curlylocks helps save the children of two villages from drowning in a heavy flood, losing her magic tools which allowed her return home in the process. So she moves into the village, makes a garden and dedicates herself to grow oranges and olives.
- Clothes Make the Superman: Curlylocks owns a magic veil which lets her fly, and a bag containing magic pearls which she can transform into anything. Despite being a fairy, though, she has no magic of her own.
- Face Death with Dignity: When Curlylocks becomes trapped in a cave, she becomes convinced that she is going to die, so she calms herself down, lies down and wait to die.
- The Fair Folk: Curlylocks and her cloud-dwelling fairy kin seem more mischievous than evil, coming down to Earth every night to mess up with the men's livestock only for fun.
- Ghost City: Legen (translated as "Frosten") is a massive five-gated magical stone city situated in the centre of a vast and remote snowy plain. While exploring the city, Curlylocks notes it is terribly cold and she cannot see anything but crumbling walls, or hear anything except for the whistling of the wind and the cracking of frozen stones. Finally she runs into Reygoch, a giant who has been living alone in Frosten for a thousand years, counting the stones of the city. Legen (as well known as Ledan/Ledjan, meaning "frozen"), can be found in many Croatian folk-tales and ballads.
- Ghost Town: After the flood, the survivors decide to abandon their destroyed villages and build a new single town.
- Girl in the Tower: Subverted. Fairy princess Curlylocks ends up living in a high tower after becoming trapped in the human world, but she does not mind her situation.
- The Great Flood: The council of one village decides to destroy their enemies by piercing the dyke damming up the River Banewater and starting a flood, expecting their own houses will not overflowed because they are built on a hill. However, the flood becomes way worse than they thought, burying both villages and flooding the whole valley.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The elders of Lilio's village cause a flood to try to destroy the enemy village, and die drowned when the waters overflow their own village.
- Impoverished Patrician: Curlylocks, a fairy of royal blood, ends up losing her magic, moving into a little village and looking after a garden. Nonetheless, she doesn't seem to mind much.
- Odd Friendship: Small, clever and nosy fairy Curlylocks and huge, dumb and lazy giant Reygoch befriend each other, even though the giant would rather keep counting stones in his ghost city forever than to be dragged by the maverick fairy into another bothersome adventure.
- One-Word Title: The story is named after one character who has only one name.
- Our Fairies Are Different: Curlylocks is a human-sized fairy who lives over the clouds and owns a flying veil and a magic bag containing pearls which she can turn into anything.
- Our Giants Are Bigger: The titular character (whose name can also be transcribed as Regoč or Regoc) is a giant of Croatian folklore (being mentioned, among others, by 18th century Dubrovnik poet Ignač Gjorgjić in Marunko i Pavica (1730)). "Bigger than the biggest oak in the biggest forest", Reygoch is gentle, good-natured...and pretty dim, being prone to forget quickly whatever he was doing.
- Rule of Seven: Curlylocks rides her black steed for seven days and seven nights through an icy, barren plain until reaching the city of Frosten.
- Rule of Three: Reygoch stomps on the ground three times to make a fissure which lets him and Curlylocks leap into the underground realm.
- Secondary Character Title: Albeit the story is named after the titular giant, Curlylocks is the point-of-view character who drives the plot forward.
- Shockwave Stomp: Reygoch can shake the land and cause fissures simply by stomping on the ground.
- Uncertain Doom: Curlylocks forcefully rides Black through a barren, icy plan for seven days and into the city of Frosten before hopping off him. Her steed keeps gallopping around the abandoned city's walls until finding the northern gate and racing out and back into the vast frozen desert...and no one knows what happened to Black afterwards.
