[1] A poor man has twelve children and works hard to feed each of them every day.

The Devil asks to be the godfather, offering the child gold and the world's joys.

When the boy comes of age, Death appears to him and leads him into the woods, where special herbs grow.

The boy soon becomes famous, just as Death had foreseen, and receives plenty of gold for his amazing ability to see whether a person would live or die.

When the physician goes to see the king, he notices immediately that Death is standing at the foot of the bed.

The king promises his daughter's hand in marriage and the inheritance of the crown if the physician cures her.

Death explains that the length of each candle shows how much longer a person has to live.

The physician pleads with his godfather to light him a new candle, so that he may live a happy life as king and husband to the beautiful princess.

The second edition version of Kinder- und Hausmärchen included the part of Death pretending to light the candle and failing on purpose, killing the physician.

[1] Scholarship suggests that a predecessor of the tale type is attested in an Icelandic manuscript from 1339, probably based on a yet unknown Latin source.

[4] He argues that the 18th-century Occitan novella Jean-l'ont-pris [fr] is a comic, "encoded" version of "Godfather Death".