[3] A version of the tale also appears in A Book of Witches[4] and A Choice of Magic,[5] by Ruth Manning-Sanders.
The elder daughter was named Tatterhood, because she wore a tattered hood over her unruly hair.
One Christmas Eve, when the girls were half grown, there was great noise in the gallery outside the queen's rooms.
When Tatterhood demanded to know what was causing the noise, the queen reluctantly reveals that it was a pack of trolls (in some versions, witches) who come to the palace every seven years.
Tatterhood, being headstrong, decides to drive the trolls off and instructs her mother keep the door tightly shut.
This is repeated with the tattered hood, which is turned into a golden crown, and with Tatterhood herself, whose beauty she declares to surpass her sister's, which it then does.
The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 711, "The Beautiful and the Ugly Twin(sisters)".
[8] The tale type is reported to exist locally in Scandinavian countries, in Norway (6 variants),[9] Iceland, Denmark and Sweden.
[11][12][13] Folklorist Hasan M. El-Shamy stated that the tale type was confined to the European continent, but variants were reported to exist in Turkey.