The steward questioned the father and the older son, and told the princess that nothing had happened to them, but admitted he had not asked them all.
Niels, who had guessed this was a way to discover him, wanted to escape, but they found the sword, and searched him, finding the handkerchief and slipper.
[2] According to scholar Kurt Ranke, tale type 304 occurs in Europe (Central, Northern and "especially" Eastern) and is "frequent" in Turkish tradition.
[4] In some variants of ATU 304, before the hero enters the castle of the princesses and kills the giants, he meets a personified being (an old man or an old woman) that controls the day and night cycle, either with balls or yarns (a black one symbolizing the night, and a white one representing the day).
[5] He takes advantage of the cloak of darkness to lure the giants (robbers, in other variants) to the castle to kill them.
[6] This secondary sequence was identified by Herbert Halpert and J.D.A Widdowson as existing in "Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Georgia,[7] Armenia [from Detroit immigrants], Bashkir, and Persia" and in two African variants.
[8] Professor Raluca Nicolae adds Albanian and East Bohemian tales where the motif appears.
[9] In addition, Richard MacGillivray Dawkins described this sequence in regards to Greek variants of tale type ATU 552, "The Girls Who Married Animals": the hero stills finds a person who alternates day and night by manipulating balls of white and black yarn or skeins, whom he ties up a tree, and later finds a cadre of robbers or giants who intend to invade a nearby king's castle.
[10] In turn, Hungarian-American scholar Linda Degh argued that the tale type 723* "was formed specifically in the Hungarian folk tradition".