The folktale is widespread "throughout Europe, India,[1] Asia, some parts of Africa" and in the Americas.[2]
Commenting on the tale repertoire of female storyteller Argyro, a Greek refugee from Asia Minor, Greek scholar Marianthi Kaplanoglou stated that she knew a story of the tale type ATU 1641, a "common" type to both "the Greek and Turkish corpora".[3]
German scholar Ulrich Marzolph [de], in his catalogue of Persian folktales, listed 10 variants of the tale type across Persian sources, with the title Der falsche Wahrsager ("The False Soothsayer").[4]
According to Professor Bronislava Kerbelytė [lt], the tale type is reported to register 229 Lithuanian variants, under the banner Doctor Know-All.[5]
References
^"The All-Knowing One (Sarabjan)". In: Barua, J. Folk Tales Of Assam. 1963. pp. 84-93.
^Seal, Graham. Encyclopedia of Folk Heroes. ABC/CLIO. 2001. p. 145. ISBN1-57607-718-7
^Kaplanoglou, Marianthi. "Two Storytellers from the Greek-Orthodox Communities of Ottoman Asia Minor. Analyzing Some Micro-data in Comparative Folklore". In: Fabula 51, no. 3-4 (2010): 257. https://doi.org/10.1515/fabl.2010.024
^Marzolph, Ulrich. Typologie des persischen Volksmärchens. Beirut: Orient-Inst. der Deutschen Morgenländischen Ges.; Wiesbaden: Steiner [in Komm.], 1984. pp. 233-235.
^Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė, Gražina. Lithuanian Narrative Folklore: Didactical Guidelines. Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University. 2013. p. 41. ISBN978-9955-21-361-1.
Further reading
Retherford, Robert. ""Suan the Guesser": A Filipino Doctor Know-All (AT 1641)". In: Asian Folklore Studies 55, no. 1 (1996): 99-118. Accessed April 6, 2021. doi:10.2307/1178858.
