Hermod and Hadvor
Hermod and Hadvor is an Icelandic fairy tale. Andrew Lang included it in The Yellow Fairy Book.
Synopsis
A king and queen had a daughter, Hadvor, and a foster son, Hermod. One day, the queen died, after asking her husband to marry no one but the Queen of Hetland the Good. He agreed.
The king set to sea and found a beautiful woman with another, younger woman, both finely dressed, and a third woman, a maid. This woman told him that she was the Queen of Hetland the Good and had been driven from her land, but she would marry him. They married. Hadvor and Hermod took little note of her stepmother, but Hadvor became friendly with the maid, Olof. The king went to war, and the new queen told Hermod that he had to marry her daughter. He refused, and she cursed him to go to a desert isle and be turned to a lion by day and a man by night, never to be freed until Hadvor burned his skin. He cursed her to, as soon as he was free, become a rat and her daughter a mouse, and they would fight until he killed them.
Olof told Hadvor what had happened, and that the queen wanted to marry her to her brother, a three-headed giant in the underworld, whom the queen would turn into a handsome prince. When this giant arrived, he would come through a hole in the floor; if Hadvor had plenty of burning pitch ready, she could pour it in.
The king returned. The queen's brother came, and Hadvor killed him by pouring the pitch on him. The queen found the body and laid a spell, so that it became a handsome prince, and Hadvor was unable to defend herself from any charges. The king agreed to let her punish Hadvor, but Olof warned her how to defend herself. The queen had her buried with the body. When the giant came back to life, he asked Hadvor to cut pieces from his legs to feed his dogs, which Hadvor refused until he told her how to find Hermod. Then he let her get on his shoulders to get out of the grave mound; he tried to grab her, but she wore her cloak loosely, and he got only that.
She made her way to the sea. In a dream, a woman told her that she was leaving her a rope to climb the cliffs, a thread to follow to find Hermod, and a belt to keep her from going faint with hunger. She found these when she woke. With them, she found a cave. Hermod came there in the evening and shook off his lion skin; Hadvor burned it. A witch with fifteen sons gave them a boat to get back, and warned them that the giant had become a whale to drown them, but they could call on her name for aid. When they got to sea, the whale did attack, but when they called on the witch it was attacked by another whale, plus fifteen smaller whales, and they got home. They found there the rat and the mouse, and Hermod killed them. They told her father the whole story. Her father married the two of them, and resigned his kingdom.
Olof married a nobleman.