When Bruncvík, the son of the noble and wise Prince Žibřid, took over the rule of the Czech lands, the weight of his father’s glorious legacy lay upon him. For his bravery on Italian battlefields, his father had won a coat of arms with a black eagle for his lineage. The young prince, however, decided that he would earn an even more powerful coat of arms from foreign lands through his own bravery—the emblem of the lion, the king of all animals. He left his grieving wife Neomenie in their homeland, giving her a ring as a farewell gift with the promise of a swift return, and set off into the unknown accompanied by a large retinue. However, his expedition soon turned into an agonizing odyssey filled with terror, horror, and exhaustion. After his ship was permanently wrecked in a strange sea near the mysterious magnetic Amber Mountain, all his loyal companions perished one by one from starvation and exhaustion.

Only Bruncvík and the old knight Balád remained. Aware of the inevitable end, the old man advised dressing in a bloody horse skin. The prince was thus snatched by the most bizarre bird of prey, the Griffin, which carried him high and safely over the mountains into unknown rocks. In the mountains, the tired hero then stood face to face with a thrilling battle: a brave young lion was fighting bloodily with a repulsive nine-headed dragon. Bruncvík immediately drew his sword and, with its power like the blazing sun, fought off and defeated the giant monster. The wounded lion, on the verge of its strength, as a sign of gratitude, treated the hero’s bleeding wounds with forest herbs and brought him prey to eat. Lions do not betray out of gratitude, and so a friendship, literally of life and death, was formed between the knight and the beast.

The lion became the prince’s inseparable protector and companion. Together they set out on a small raft across the stormy sea, to the mysterious island of King Olibrius, and to the repulsive castle of the dragon Basilisk, from whose claws the knight, with the lion’s greatness, won a beautiful and half-snake daughter named Africa. Here, in an old dark and abandoned armory, he found a bizarre magical sword, which had the ability to strike off the heads of all wretched intruders at a single thought. With this breathtaking find, the magical ring on his hand and from the dragon maiden, he and his giant court and wild feline ally hacked their way back to the Prague Castle just at the moment when his old faithful wife, out of sorrow under the pressure of a suitor, was stepping into another wedding trap.

As soon as Bruncvík threw his signet and old farewell ring into the princess’s goblet of wine at the wedding feast, the celebration and forced domination were immediately stopped. The unwaveringly faithful prince stood victoriously before the nation and courtiers. And as he had nobly dreamed—from that unforgettable glorious moment, a gold-crowned lion breathed in his coat of arms, a jewel among jewels, from which his future heirs, the Czech rulers, began with pride after brave times to inherit the courageous and memorable animal legacy, and the determined story of immense animal loyalty and human courage.