Doctor Know-all explained

"Doctor Know-all" 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.

Analysis

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, 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, the tale type is reported to register 229 Lithuanian variants, under the banner Doctor Know-All.^[5]

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.

External links

• • • Doctor Know-all
• "Doctor Know-All and other folktales of Aarne-Thompson type 1641 about being in the right place at the right time"

Notes and References

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.
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. .