Trusty John

German fairy tale

"Trusty John", "Faithful John", "Faithful Johannes", or "John the True" (Der treue Johannes) is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1819 (KHM 6). Andrew Lang included it in The Blue Fairy Book. It is Aarne Thompson type 516. Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson catalogued about 500 tales under this type, of which over 200 were Irish, and the remainder, from the rest of Europe and European colonies in America. Such tales include In Love with a Statue, How to find out a True Friend, The Man of Stone, and Amis et Amiles.

The tale was published by the Brothers Grimm in the second edition of Kinder und Hausmärchen in 1819. Their source was the German storyteller Dorothea Viehmann, from the village of Niederzwehren near Kassel. Australian folklorist Joseph Jacobs pointed out, in his commentaries on his own reconstruction (John The True), in his work Europa's Fairy Book, that the story showed striking parallels with tales of Indian literary history and suggested them as a possible point of origin, due to the antiquity of the sources, such as Panchatantra and Somadeva's The Ocean of Stories. Folklorist Stith Thompson seemed to concur with Jacobs's analysis and cited the works of Erich Rösch and Kaarle Krohn, who each have posited that, respectively, the material to form the tale came from India, or the tale, in complete form, travelled westward from India.

According to scholar A. K. Ramanujan, the tale type shows a "motif cluster": the three perils that menace the couple and the faithful servant that overhears the birds' talk.

Graham Seal pointed out that Faithful John is a "figure of European and Asian folktales" who demonstrates the virtues of loyalty and trust. Indeed, variants of the tale have been collected from "all over Europe", as well as from India, Turkey, Middle East, South America and the West Indies. In a German variant, the three speaking ravens are actually three witches in disguise that converse among themselves the plan to kill the royal couple.

Croatian folklorist Maja Bošković Stulli noted that the theme was explored as the subject matter of a Serbo Croatian epic song: Pero Vitkovic offers to bring the Banica of Misir (the margravine of Egypt) as bride to Viennese Prince Karlo, despite his mother's objections. On the way there, Pero overhears a carrier pigeon describing the three perils Karlo and the margravine will have to face until their wedding, and notices that the carrier pigeon belongs to Karlo's mother, the Empress. Pero Vitkovic rescues the prince and the margravine from the perils and becomes stone, due to the bird's omens. She also reported versions of the song that contain the motif of the false merchant expedition as the protagonist's disguise to kidnap the foreign princess.

Trusty John is a supporting character in the long running comic book series Fables.