The poor brother promised; the rich one handed over the food and told him to go to Hel (in Lang's version, the Dead Men's Hall; in the Greek, the Devil's dam).
In the Norse version, a skipper wanted to buy the hand-mill from the no longer poor brother, and eventually persuaded him.
[5] Fellow scholar Seki Keigo reported 14 variants of the tale type in "Japanese oral tradition".
While recognizing that the story appears "widely told in Europe", he also claimed that no version was found in India, and only one in China.
[7] However, according to research Galina Kabakova, the tale type has been collected from the Russian populations of Lithuania and Latvia.
Also, the tale type shows a "sporadic" presence in Central Ukraine, apart from "a great number" of variants collected in Lithuania and Latvia.
[8] Variants are also present in Estonia, such as the tale Wie das Wasser im Meer salzig geworden ("How seawater became salty").