The Three Languages

The tale was included in the 1819 edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen, replacing the earlier Der gestiefelte Kater ("The Tomcat with Boots").

Infuriated by his uselessness, his father ordered his people to take him to the woods and kill him, but they sympathised with him, and instead brought the count the eyes and tongue of a deer as proof of his death.

[2] Scholarship argues that the learning of the languages of frogs, dogs, and birds symbolically represents the speech of water, land, and air creatures.

Sir James Frazer listed some variants of the papacy prophecy connected to tale collection Seven Sages of Rome[7][page needed] and variations on the form of acquisition of animal speech.

[8][page needed] Joseph Jacobs attempted to reconstruct a protoform of the tale in his Europa's Fairy Book, titled The Language of Animals.

[9] In his commentaries, the folklorist argued that the story's original format involved a prophecy that the boy would become pope or king.

[13][14] Professor Ralph Steele Boggs listed as a Spanish variant of the ATU 671 the work of Lope de Vega: Novela 6, El Pronóstico Cumplido ("The prophecy fulfilled").