The Wonderful Birch

The king gives a festival, inviting everyone, and the witch sends off the husband with her younger daughter, throws a potful of barleycorns in the hearth, and tells the older stepdaughter that if she does not pick barley corns from ashes, it will be worse for her.

When the witch returns home, she tells the stepdaughter that the king's son has fallen in love with her daughter and carries her about, only he had dropped her and broken her arm.

This time, the king's son breaks the witch's daughter's leg, and has the doorpost smeared with tar, so that her silver circlet is caught.

This time, the king's son kicks out the witch's daughter's eye, and has the threshold smeared with tar, so that one of her golden slippers is caught.

While stretching as a bridge in her grief, the younger sister wishes that a hollow golden stalk grow out of her navel so that her mother would recognize her.

In the forest, the widow sings to the reindeer, which then comes and suckles her child, and tells the woman to bring it again next day.

The child becomes extremely beautiful, and its father asks the widow if it is possible for his wife to regain her human shape.

The widow does not know, but tells him to go to the forest, and when the reindeer throws off its skin he is to burn it while she is searching his wife's head.

On their return to the castle, he orders a huge fire to be made under the bath with tar, and its approach to be covered with brown and blue cloth.

[1] In the ending to Andrew Lang's version of this fairy tale, after the stepdaughter is turned back into a human, after being asked that she would not be eaten up, the witch and her daughter both run away, and if they have not stopped still, at a great age.