breath to protect the hero, by inhaling the fumes or by cooling the mixture. When the kingly rival steps in, he is killed in the process. Likewise, as described by professor Susan Hoogasian-Villa, in Armenian variants, the sea horse's milk also grants youth to the character. In regards to a similar motif in Russian variants, Jack Haney suggested an oriental origin. Folklorist Alexander Krappe also noted that, in many variants, the hero quests for a water of life and a water of death. When the emperor or king uses the ointment or magical water, a mix-up happens: the maid or a lady-in-waiting accidentally breaks the flask and, in a hurry, unknowingly substitutes the broken vial with poison. This theme is also widespread in French literary and oral tradition, under the theme of La Jeune Fille aux cheveux d'or et l'Eau de la mort et de la vie: a king, emperor or sultan becomes enamored with a princess or lady of royal birth, famed for her golden hair, and sends an emissary (a knight, a page, an ambassador) to win her over in his stead. When the dame is brought before her would-be suitor, she seizes the opportunity to dispose of him, by performing an elaborate ritual involving the holy water, or bath. After the deed is done, her kingly suitor is (accidentally or deliberately) killed, and she is free to marry the emissary. Variants Origins Professor Stith Thompson remarked that the geographic distribution of the tale pointed to "an unbroken line through the Caucasus, the Near East, India, Cambodia, and the Philippines", which suggested an Eastern point of origin, "possibly from India". Its dissemination is also said to be limited "to Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey and India". A quantitative study, published by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani in 2016, seemed to indicate that the tale type shows a certain antiquity: based on a phylogenetic model, both researchers estimated that the ATU 531 type belongs to an ancestral tale corpora of the Indo-Iranian languages and the Western branch of the Indo-European languages. Literary connections Folklorist and comparative mythologist Alexander Haggerty Krappe, in a 1925 article, argued that the myth of Jason and Medea was a reworking of the widespread folktale The Quest of the Princess with the Golden Hair, by pointing parallels between the Greek myth and the tale type: the hero is helped by a