Joseph Jacobs wrote that the "well-known Continental folk-tale" of The Seven Swans (or Ravens) became connected to the medieval cycle of the Knight of the Swan. Variants Distribution The tale type is said to be "widely recorded" in Europe and in the Middle East, as well as in India and in the Americas. In Europe only, there exist "over two hundred versions" collected and published "in folktale collections from all parts" of the continent. French scholar Nicole Belmont identified two forms of the tale type in Europe: one "essentially" present in the Germanic area and Scandinavia, and another she dubbed "western version". She noted that in this western version, the youngest sister, after she settles with the brothers, asks for fire from a neighbouring ogre, and a tree sprouts on their yard and bears fruit that causes the transformation. Variants have also been collected in Japan with the name 七羽の白鳥 (Romanization: Nanaha no hakuchō; English: "The Seven Swans"). However, Japanese scholarship acknowledges that these tales are restricted to Kikaijima and Okinoerabujima. Japanese folklorist Keigo Seki also found variants in Kagoshima. Literary predecessors A literary predecessor to the tale is The Seven Doves (Neapolitan: Li sette palommelle; Italian: I sette colombi), in Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone, where the brothers are transformed into doves. Number of brothers In the tale from the Brothers Grimm, there are six brothers and they are transformed into swans. In other European variants, the number of princes/brothers alternates between three, seven or twelve, but very rarely there are two, eight, nine, ten or even eleven, such as the Danish fairy tale collected by Mathias Winther, De elleve Svaner (English: "The Eleven Swans"), first published in 1823, or Ligurian tale Les onze cygnes. Hungarian folk tale collector Elisabeth Sklarek compiled two Hungarian variants, Die sieben Wildgänse ("The Seven Wild Geese") and Die zehn Geschwister ("The Ten Siblings"), and, in her commentaries, noted that both tales were related to the Grimm versions. A third Hungarian is titled A tizenkét fekete várju ("The Twelve Black Ravens"). Ludwig Bechstein collected two German variants, The Seven Crows and The Seven Swans. Commenting on the Irish variant collected by Patrick Kennedy, Louis Brueyre indicated as another variant the Indian tale of Truth's Triumph, or Der Sieg der Wahrheit: in the second part of the tale, the youngest child, a girl, witnesses the transformation of her one hundred brothers into crows. In a Lithuanian variant,