The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs

A poor boy, born with a lucky caul predicting he would marry a princess by age fourteen, caught the attention of a passing king who, disturbed by the prophecy, secretly bought the infant from his parents and set him adrift in a box on a river, hoping to be rid of him. The boy survived, rescued by a kind miller, and grew up entirely unaware of his strange fate.

Years later, the same king, discovering the boy still alive and now a young man, tried again — sending him with a sealed letter to the queen ordering the bearer's immediate execution. Resting at an inn along the way, robbers switched the letter while the boy slept, rewriting it to instead order his marriage to the princess upon arrival, which was carried out exactly as the forged letter commanded before the king could intervene.

Furious but unable to undo a completed marriage, the king set one final, seemingly impossible task: bring back three golden hairs from the devil's own head, or lose the princess and his life. Through cleverness and the honest kindness of villagers he helped along the way, the young man succeeded, tricking the devil's own grandmother into plucking the hairs while he slept, and returned triumphant with answers to riddles that made him wealthy besides. The king, trying one last time to have him drowned crossing a river, was mistaken for the boy himself by a ferryman bound by an old curse, and vanished into that same fate instead — the prophecy having found its way to fulfillment despite every attempt to stop it.