The Two Caskets

The Two Caskets is a Scandinavian fairy tale included by Benjamin Thorpe in his Yule-Tide Stories: A Collection of Scandinavian and North German Popular Tales and Traditions. Andrew Lang included it in The Orange Fairy Book.

It is Aarne-Thompson type 480, the kind and the unkind girls. Others of this type include Shita-kiri Suzume, Diamonds and Toads, Mother Hulda, Father Frost, The Three Little Men in the Wood, The Enchanted Wreath, The Old Witch, and The Three Heads in the Well. Literary variants include The Three Fairies and Aurore and Aimée.

A woman had a daughter and stepdaughter. One day she set them to spin while sitting on the edge of a well, giving her daughter good flax and her stepdaughter coarse, unusable flax, and declared that whoever's thread broke first would be thrown in. When her stepdaughter's thread broke, she threw her in.

The girl fell to a wonderful land. She walked on and came to a tumble-down fence, overgrown with vines. It pleaded with her not to hurt it, because it did not have long to live, and she carefully jumped over it where the vines were less. She found an oven full of loaves, and it told her she could eat what she liked, but begged her not to hurt it. She ate a loaf, thanked it for such fine bread, and shut its door. She came to a cow with a bucket on its horns; it said she could milk it and drink, but asked her not to hurt it or spill its milk. She agreed, and when a drop of milk was left, the cow told her to throw it over its hooves and hang the bucket back up.

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