The Old Dame and Her Hen

The Old Dame and her Hen (Om Konen som havde 3 Døttre og en Høne)
Man o' the Hill (or Troll) asks "Will you be my sweetheart?", by Theodor Kittelsen
Folk tale
Name	The Old Dame and her Hen (Om Konen som havde 3 Døttre og en Høne)
Also known as	The Hen is Tripping in the Mountain (Høna tripper i berget)
Data
Aarne-Thompson grouping	311
Country	Norway
Published in	Norske Folkeeventyr Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse

The Old Dame and her Hen is the English title given by Dasent to the Norwegian folk tale, Asbjørnsen and Moe’s number 35.

The tale's original title, Høna tripper i berget is more accurately rendered The Hen is Tripping in the Mountain, as given in Reidar Thoralf Christiansen ()'s translation.

This tale is categorized as Aarne-Thompson type 311, "Rescue by the Sister."

The Norwegian folktale had earlier been published under different titles in earlier editions of Asbjørnsen and Jorgen Moe's Norske Folkeeventyr: "Om Konen som havde 3 Døttre og en Høne" ("On the woman who had three daughters and a hen," first edition, 1843), "De tre Søstre, som bleve indtagne i Bjerget" ("The three sisters who were taken in the mountain", second edition, 1852).

But "Høna tripper i berget" was the title in Jorgen Moe's manuscript from 1838, after Lars Svendserud of Ringerike.

An old widow had three daughters, and only one hen for livestock. The hen had gone missing, and the widow she sent her eldest to find it, even if she had to go out in the hill above where they lived. After searching far and wide without success, the girl heard a voice call from a cleft in the rock:

„Hønen tripper i Bjerget!”
„Hønen tripper i Bjerget!”

"Your hen trips inside the hill!
"Your hen trips inside the hill!

and when she investigated, she stepped on a trap-door and fell underground. She went through a series of rooms, each room ever increasingly finer-looking as she proceeded, until in the innermost chamber she encountered a hideous-looking "man of the hill-folk" or "Man o' the Hill" (old spelling: Bjergmand; modern Bokmål/Nynorsk: ), also later on referred to as "the troll" (Troldet).

The troll asked her to be his sweetheart, and when she declined, he angrily wrung her head off. The middle daughter was sent out to look for her sister and the hen, but met the same fate. The youngest daughter too fell down the chute, but prudently did some exploring, so that when she opened the hatch-door to the cellar she discovered her dead sisters inside. Since she deduced what befell her sisters, when asked by the troll to be his sweetheart, she pretended to agree wholeheartedly.