he paid to have it. In the Greek, the brother set out to Constantinople by ship. In the Norse, one day a skipper wanted to buy the hand-mill from him, and eventually persuaded him. In all versions, the new owner took it to sea and set it to grind out salt. It ground out salt until it sank the boat, and then went on grinding in the sea, turning the sea salty. Analysis The tale is classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index type 565, the Magic Mill. Other tales of this type include The Water Mother and Sweet porridge. Parallels It is a late parallel to the Old Norse poem Grottasöngr, found in Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál. Variants Georgios A. Megas collected a Greek variant The Mill in Folktales of Greece. Japanese scholar Kunio Yanagita listed some variants of The Handmill that Ground out Salt found in Japan, and even remarked that it was part of a group of tales speculated to have been imported into Japan. 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. Russian scholarship points out that the tale type is also "very common" among Slavic countries, as well as among Germanic, Celtic and Baltic, which seems to indicate a common shared myth about the nature of the sea. 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. Variants are also present in Estonia, such as the tale Wie das Wasser im Meer salzig geworden ("How seawater became salty"). Folklorist Wolfram Eberhard stated that the tale type is "found ... particularly in Scandinavia". References External links Why the Sea Is Salt, version by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe Norwegian fairy tales The Devil in fairy tales Hell in popular culture Salt production ATU 560-649 Asbjørnsen and Moe