"Doctor Know-all" (German: Doktor Allwissend) is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 98 in Grimms' Fairy Tales. It has an ATU index of 1641. Another tale of this type is Almondseed and Almondella.

Doctor Know-all
Folk tale
NameDoctor Know-all
Aarne–Thompson groupingATU 1641
CountryGermany
Published inGrimms' Fairy Tales

Analysis

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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

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  1. ^ "The All-Knowing One (Sarabjan)". In: Barua, J. Folk Tales Of Assam. 1963. pp. 84-93.
  2. ^ Seal, Graham. Encyclopedia of Folk Heroes. ABC/CLIO. 2001. p. 145. ISBN 1-57607-718-7
  3. ^ 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
  4. ^ Marzolph, Ulrich. Typologie des persischen Volksmärchens. Beirut: Orient-Inst. der Deutschen Morgenländischen Ges.; Wiesbaden: Steiner [in Komm.], 1984. pp. 233-235.
  5. ^ Skabeikytė-Kazlauskienė, Gražina. Lithuanian Narrative Folklore: Didactical Guidelines. Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University. 2013. p. 41. ISBN 978-9955-21-361-1.

Further reading

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  • 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.
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