Variants of most of the tales are, of course, to be found in other countries. Grimm’s The White Snake, for instance, is a variant of Zlatovlaska. My rule of selection has been to take stories that do not have well-known variants in other languages. I have to confess that The White Snake is very well known, but here I break my own rule on account of the greater beauty of the Slavic version.
In Grimm there are also to be found variants of A Gullible World (The Shrewd Farmer), The Devil’s Little Brother-in-Law (Bearskin), Clever Manka (The Peasant’s Clever Daughter), The Devil’s Gifts (The Magic Gifts), The Candles of Life (The Strange Godfather and Godfather Death), The Shoemaker’s Apron (Brother Jolly). In all these tales the same incidents are presented but with a difference in spirit and in background that instantly marks one variant Teutonic and its fellow Slavic. Moreover, as stories, the German versions of these particular tales are neither as interesting nor as important as the Slavic versions.
Both German and Slavic versions go back, in most cases, to some early common source. Take Clever Manka, for instance, and its German variant, The Farmer’s Shrewd Daughter. Clever Manka is very
