A beautiful but poor servant girl was traveling with the family she worked for when robbers attacked them.

She should open an inner door, which will reveal a room full of splendid rings, but she should take a plain one.

He told her that the old woman was a witch who had turned him into a tree, and for two hours a day, he became a dove, and she had freed him.

The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 442, "The Old Woman in the Woods" (previously, "The Old Man in the Woods"): the heroine survives a robbers' attack by hiding up a tree; a dove flies in and gives her a key which she can use to open three nearby trees; the heroine then goes to the house of an old woman in the woods to fetch a ring; in doing so, the heroine releases a prince from an arboreal form.

The tasks that Lisbeth faces are slightly different from the original ones: she must go inside the house when the witch isn't home; look for a specific magical key in the witch's treasury, one whose handle is shaped like a human head; use it on a specific door (which turns out to be the nose of a skull placed on top of a rotating shelf); then find a gold ring and bring it to the owl.