The fourth son sewed both the shattered eggs and the chicks inside them back together, so that when the eldest put the eggs back in the nest, again without the mother bird noticing, they hatched with the only sign being some red thread about their necks.
The king did not know which man to give his daughter to, because each one had played an essential part in the rescue.
[4] Folklorist Stith Thompson proposed that the Indian literary work Ocean of Story held "the probable original" of the European folktale.
[5] A Hindu collection known as the Vetalapanchauinsati (“Twenty-five Tales of a Demon”) has a story in which three young men with extraordinary powers compete to marry a princess.
[6][7] The oldest European version appears in the medieval collection of short stories Novellino.
[8] French author and conteuse Henriette-Julie de Murat wrote a literary version of the tale type, named Le Père et ses quatre fils ("The Father and His Four Sons").