The Death of Koshchei the Deathless

I found the story "The Death of Koshchei the Deathless" in Strange Travelers very entertaining. Although I could tell it was based on "fairy tale" material. I didn't recognize that it was from a specific story until I read the note at the end. The title did seem tantalizingly familiar until I got to that point however. The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang is available on line, if anyone is interested in reading the original story Wolfe based his on. It is interesting to see what he kept and what he changed. The Lang version of the story is also interesting in its own right. The story seems to have been cobbled together from bits and pieces and the pieces don't all fit. This URL should take you to a page that allows you to choose from variously compressed versions of a text file containing The Red Fairy Book: http://sailor.gutenberg.org/by-title/xx1352.html This URL is a direct link to download an uncomressed text version of the book (its about 663 kB): ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext96/rdfry10.txt William Ansley

Haven't read either the Wolfe or the Lang yet, but wasn't Koshchei the Deathless the grand-high-god-over-everything in James Branch Cabell's mammoth series The Biography of Dom Manuel? I believe he appears in Jurgen, among other novels. Ron H-E

He's definitely in Jurgen (I haven't actually read Jurgen or any other Cabell, but I was told this long ago by someone who did their Master's Thesis on Cabell when they noticed I was reading a Wolfe story with that title). From what I gleaned then, the Koscheis in question are from the same source/root, but radically differ. "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32