The doctor, philologist, and translator Gotthelf Anton Dietrich (1797-1868) primarily relied on cheap prints that circulated in Russia in the early 19th century for his compilation of Russian folk tales, which disseminated the fairy tale texts. A focus of the compilation is on the stories about the mythical knight of the Kievan Round Table, Ilija Muromer (Ilja Muromez). The volume is preceded by a foreword from Jacob Grimm discussing the differences and similarities between German and Russian fairy tales.