The Devil's Three Golden Hairs

A poor woman's son was born with a rare, lucky birth-caul, and a passing fortune-teller declared he was destined to marry the king's own daughter once he came of age. When word reached the king himself, he was so troubled by the prophecy that he purchased the infant from his poor parents under false pretenses and set him adrift in a locked box on a river, intending for him to drown.

The box, however, was found downstream by a kind miller and his wife, who raised the boy as their own, unaware of his strange origin. Years later, the king, traveling through the region and recognizing the now-grown young man by chance, tried again — sending him ahead with a sealed letter to the queen ordering the boy's immediate execution upon arrival. But robbers who sheltered him overnight secretly swapped the letter's contents, so that the queen instead read an order to marry him to the princess at once, which she promptly and joyfully carried out before the king could intervene.

Furious but unable to undo a completed royal marriage, the king set one final, seemingly impossible task: fetch three golden hairs from the devil's own head, or lose the princess and his life entirely. Along his journey, the lucky young man was asked by desperate townsfolk to solve three separate mysteries plaguing them, and cleverly obtained the answers — along with the three golden hairs themselves — through the unwitting help of the devil's own grandmother, who plucked the hairs from her sleeping grandson one at a time while pretending to scratch an itch, listening to his grumbled answers to explain each fresh yank. Returning triumphant, the young man's honestly earned answers solved every townsperson's mystery and made him wealthier than the king himself, exposing at last that a fate marked at birth, however hard someone works to prevent it, tends to arrive anyway — usually by a route far stranger than anyone trying to stop it ever imagined.