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- The Dead King and his Three Sons and The King's Sons Shooting at Their Father's Corpse are titles for a story sometimes depicted in medieval and Renaissance art, initially mostly in miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, and later in engravings, paintings and other media. A version is first recorded in the Gemara or commentary part of the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps compiled around 400 AD. Here it has rather different details, and the story may have an unrecorded history before this. In the version known to the Christian Middle Ages, a king wrote in his will that his corpse should be tied to a tree and his three sons told to shoot arrows at it. Whichever hit nearest his heart was to inherit the kingdom. The two elder sons shot arrows, but the youngest refused to do so, out of love and respect for his father. The appointed judges of the contest declared him the winner, and so the new king. This is found in the Gesta Romanorum, a Latin work of the thirteenth century that is a "collection of moralized anecdotes and tales intended as a manual for preachers". Solomon is the chief judge of the contest in many versions, and regarding the story as an example of the kingly settlement of disputes, led to it being illustrated in some lavish biblical illuminated manuscripts for the French and other courts. There it is often paired with the better-known Judgement of Solomon, which unlike this story actually appears in the Bible. (en)
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