Hello!  I am Thoth, although many of you probably have never heard of my tales or me before, I can’t wait to tell you about my favorite tale.  The story I will be telling today is a classic in my homeland of Romania and I was able to witness it first hand.  In my culture, the tale explains how humans and wizards live peacefully with one another today.
 
It all started a very long time ago, before the two worlds, the world of magic and the normal world, were combined.  There used to be a time when we wizards and magicians wanted to keep our life separate from the normal people.  In order to do this, we created a world separate from this one.
 
Now there was a very powerful wizard who liked to terrorize the humans in the other world.  He would go in between the two worlds and wreak mayhem- until one day, a prince from a far away land decided to put an end to this. 
 
One day, as the prince was on his journey to end the wizard’s reign, he came upon a man with no eyes in the middle of the road who was screaming in pain.  When the prince asked the man what was wrong, he simply replied, “The wizard.”
 
You see, the wizard had stolen the man’s eyes, because he had seen the secret that would allow one to enter into the wizard’s world.  Although all humans knew where this portal was, they did not know how to cross to the other side.  The secret seen by the blind man was that you had to fall backwards into the portal. 
 
The prince had had enough of the evil wizard’s tricks and took off to find him.  After months of traveling, he finally came to the portal to the other world.    When the prince came into the other world, he was surprised at how similar the two worlds looked.  It was as if the wizards had built their new world to be the same as the old, but a place for only their kind.  In the months he spent traveling to this spot, the prince had come up with a plan for how to find the wicked wizard.  The prince would ask, “Who was the most powerful wizard of all?”  From fear of the name, everyone would know the evil wizard was the most powerful.
 
His plan worked just as the prince intended.  Within a couple of days he found the home of the wizard.  When he saw the wizard, the prince was overcome with anger and charged at him with his sword.  Although this caught the wizard off guard, he was still able to cast a spell blocking the prince’s sword from striking.  The historic battle between the prince and wizard took place just as it is written in fairytale books, with the wizard world looking on.  The wizard cast one spell after another toward the prince, but the prince was able to deflect them with his shield.  In the end, the prince sliced the wizard’s wand in half and then pierced his heart.
 
Voldemort Casting a Spell, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Web Source: Photobucket

When the wizard had fallen, the prince found the blind man’s eyes in a container the wizard had worn around his neck.  Before leaving the other world, the prince spoke to the wizards and made plans to merge the two worlds together.  This merge turned out to be an easy transition, because the evil wizard had been the only wizard who wanted to keep the worlds apart.  When the two worlds were separated, the bad wizard could rule the one world and terrorize the other.  With the two worlds combined, people could join together and overthrow him.
 
With plans of merging the two worlds set in place, the prince journeyed back to the human world to return the eyes to the blind man and tell the rulers of his world about the campaign to merge the worlds. 
 
And this ladies and gentlemen, is how we now live together in peace among humans.  Without the heroic prince, we would still be under rule of the evil wizard.
 

Author’s Note:  Since the original tale was pretty short, I expanded on a lot of the ideas to add depth to my story.  
Gypsy folktales are very different than the traditional American folktales.  Their stories were passed down through word of mouth and are very short.  
In The Prince and the Wizard, a young heroic prince travels the world, trying to do good deeds when he comes across a man who has had his kidneys taken from him by a wizard.  The prince goes to get back the kidneys, meets some magic horses, and then he goes to the other world, gets the kidneys, and then gives them to the man.  The two men go together to defeat the wizard, and then continue on their journey, finding maidens who become their wives.     
I decided to retell this story from an onlooker wizard’s perspective.  This onlooker tells about the battle he saw between the wizard and the prince and the tales he heard about the prince.  Because I went into detail on the battle between the prince and wizard, I omitted the part in the original story about the prince looking for his future wife.  Instead, I decided to make the prince help merge the two worlds together.


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Bibliography: “The Prince and the Wizard” from Gypsy Folk Tales by Francis Hindes Groome (1899).