That night, the youngest princess woke to find herself in a grand hall, and a handsome prince on his knees before her, asking her to marry him.
They had three children in succession, but an eagle, a greyhound, and a lady took each one, and the princess, after losing the last child, told her husband that she wanted to visit her family.
At the second night, they found a house with their daughter, and he gave her a comb that would make pearls and diamonds fall from her hair.
At the third night, they found a house with their third child, and he gave her a hand-reel with golden thread that has no end, and half their wedding ring.
He told her that once he entered a wood the next day, he would forget her and the children utterly, unless she reached his home and put her half of the ring to his.
The wood tried to keep her out, but she commanded it, by the gifts she bore, to let her in, and found a great house and a woodman's cottage nearby.
She invited the head footman, the most persistent, and asked him to pick her some honeysuckle; when he did, she used the gifts she bore to give him horns and make him sing back to the great house.
in this tale type, the heroine is a human maiden who marries a prince that is cursed to become an animal of some sort.
[8][9][10] According to Jan-Öjvind Swahn's study on some 1,100 variants of Cupid and Psyche and related types, he concluded that the bear is the "most usual" form of the supernatural husband in Germanic and Slavonic areas.
[11] According to Hans-Jörg Uther, the main feature of tale type ATU 425A is "bribing the false bride for three nights with the husband".
[12] In fact, when he developed his revision of Aarne-Thompson's system, Uther remarked that an "essential" trait of the tale type ATU 425A was the "wife's quest and gifts" and "nights bought".
She visits the houses of the Sun, the Moon and the Wind, whose mothers give her an almond, a chestnut and a pomegranate in exchange for each of her daughters.
However, a witch who lives in a castle atop a mountain curses the man into a wolf form during the day.
The wife visits her brothers-in-law: two give her a magical accordion and a comb; the third advises her to ask a blacksmith to fashion a pair of iron shoes to climb the mountain.