him. The king's daughter agrees and finds her way back to her father. She explains the situation to the king, but he disagrees with sending her back to the stove. So he orders a miller's daughter, then a fisherman's daughter in her stead. Each maiden return without releasing the prince. The king's daughter goes herself to the stove and liberates the prince from the stove. She goes back to the castle to say goodbye to her father, but says more than three words and the prince disappears. The king's daughter tries to search for him and finds a hut in the woods, where toad-frogs live. After spending a night there, the toad-frogs give her two needles and a plough-wheel - to use to climb a glass mountain - and three nuts. The king's daughter climbs the glass mountain and hires herself as a cook in a castle. The king's daughter discovers the "stove prince" is living there and is soon to be married to another wife. The king's daughter cracks opens the nuts to produce dresses she uses to bribe the false bride for three nights with the stove prince. In popular culture The Iron Stove is featured in Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, but it has many changes. The prince's bride does not exist and is instead replaced by a creature known as the imp fairy (who resembles a succubus), and she takes place as the princess' love rival for him. The prince is put in a trance rather than to sleep, and the princess breaks said trance by going through a thorny mountain, crossing a lake without a boat, tricking guards with a nut that contains diamonds, refusing to believe that the prince would choose the fairy over him even when the fairy taunts her about it, and finally by openly telling him that she loves him. When the prince is disenchanted, she jumps off from a huge flight of stairs towards him; her love for him creates protective shields that let her reach him, and then deflect the fairy’s magical powers and cause her to fall through the ground into a bottomless abyss. See also Black Bull of Norroway East of the Sun and West of the Moon The Brown Bear of Norway The Singing, Springing Lark References External links Full text of The Iron Stove from The Fairy Book Iron Stove Iron Stove ATU 400-459