The Tsar — Russian fairy tale character
The Tsar is the all-powerful character of the fairy tale’s sub-plot.
Very often, the young hero will meet the Tsar before his great adventure begins. Tsars always seem to lack beautiful brides, Firebirds or fearless stallions. And thus the Tsar is always dispatching young heroes – his own son, some knight in his entourage, or a newly arrived traveler – to distant realms, where the very thing the Tsar needs is to be found.
It also happens that our hero gets an audience with the Tsar in the middle of the story, putting a new twist in the tale and posing some new quest for the hero. We meet Tsars in tales such as “The Firebird and Vasilisa the Beautiful,” “The Frog Princess” and many others.