[citation needed] Richard Chase presents a version from the Southern Appalachians, called "Wicked John and the Devil.

"[7] According to George Monbiot, the blacksmith is a motif of folklore throughout (and beyond) Europe associated with malevolence (the medieval vision of Hell may draw upon the image of the smith at his forge), and several variant tales tell of smiths entering into a pact with the devil to obtain fire and the means of smelting metal.

[8] According to research applying phylogenetic techniques to linguistics by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamie Tehrani,[2] "The Smith and the Devil" may be one of the oldest European folk tales, with the basic plot stable throughout the Indo-European-speaking world from India to Scandinavia, possibly being first told in Indo-European 6,000 years ago in the Bronze Age.

[10] However, according to historical linguist Václav Blažek: "The apparent fact, that there is no common designation of "smith" in the Indo-European lexicon, could be disappointing at first sight, but the same may be said about other crafts, including those using more ‘archaic’ technologies than smithery."

According to Blažek, the inherited designations for smith attested in the mythological context are "a witness of a remarkably important role of the institution of smithery in the period of disintegration of the Indo-European dialect continuum".