Note 40 — Chapter VI · The Grateful Dead and The Water of Life or Kindred Themes.

The first three of these variants clearly show in the subsidiary elements just enumerated their relationship to The Water of Life. They lack the quest for some magical fountain or bird, to be sure, but they preserve the quest for the lady, which is an important factor in the märchen. Of the three, Bohemian has the most extended and probably the best presentation of the details of the difficult courtship; and it gives the hero that power of metamorphosis which was noted in four variants of the type The Grateful Dead + The Water of Life simply. It may, therefore, on the basis of general and particular resemblance be classed with Polish, Hungarian I., Rumanian II., and Treu Heinrich.40 Along with it, of course, go the briefer Simrock I. and Simrock III. There is this important difference between the two sets of tales, that in the simpler form the princess is won by the hero’s success in bringing something from a distance, in the more complicated form by building and decorating. Yet the resemblance is sufficient to warrant the classification proposed.