Summary
Two poor Woodcutters, struggling home through a frozen pine-forest and lamenting their poverty, see a bright star fall behind some willows. Hoping for gold, they find instead a sleeping child wrapped in a cloak of gold tissue embroidered with stars. One would leave it in the snow, but the other carries it home. His wife protests that their own children lack bread, until the cold wind through the open door, and his question whether a bitter wind does not always come into a house where a heart is hard, soften her. The cloak and an amber chain from the child's neck are put away in a chest.
The Star-Child grows up white and golden among the dark village children, and his beauty makes him proud, cruel and selfish. He calls the other children his servants, stones beggars and lepers, and blinds a mole with a sharp reed, ignoring the Woodcutter and the old priest when they beg him to show pity. Ten years after he was found, a ragged beggar-woman rests under a chestnut-tree, and he stones her too. Learning that he was found in the forest, she recognises the cloak and the amber chain and claims him as the son robbers stole from her. He calls her too foul to kiss, and she goes away weeping.
At once his face becomes like a toad's and his body scaled like an adder's, and his playmates drive him away. Believing this is the punishment for denying his mother, he sets out to find her. The Mole he blinded, the Linnet whose wings he clipped and the Squirrel whose mother he killed will not help him. For three years he wanders, mocked and stoned, until at the gate of a walled city he is sold as a slave, for the price of a bowl of sweet wine, to an evil Magician.
Three times the Magician sends him into a wood outside the city for a piece of gold, white, then yellow, then red, threatening him with beatings, slavery and death. Each time a Hare he freed from a trap leads him to it, and each time a leper at the gate begs for it and the Star-Child gives it away. The last time he says, 'Thy need is greater than mine', though he believes the Magician will kill him for it.
Instead the guards bow and the people call him beautiful. The priests and high officers hail him as the King's son they have been waiting for, and in a shield he sees that his beauty has returned. He refuses the crown until he has found his mother, then sees her in the crowd beside the leper. He kisses her feet and begs forgiveness; both tell him to rise, and they are revealed as a Queen and a King. The Star-Child rules with justice and mercy, rewards the Woodcutter and banishes the Magician, but dies after three years, and his successor rules evilly.