I have two variants of “Askeladden, Who Stole the Troll’s Silver Ducks…” One of these variants has a heroine, whose “call to adventure” is a familiar tale of sibling rivalry followed by a crone in the forest. This variant is incomplete in that there are only two (not three) challenges; one of these, however, is to retrieve the sun from beneath the troll-wife’s apron, after which the tale ends quite abruptly. In other words, the family relations, the fact that the protagonist is a girl, and the sun as a possession of a troll are the points of interest.
The other variant has a conventional hero – one of three brothers. His helper is a goat, and instead of a magic bridge, he passes through a waterfall “that separates the land of the trolls from the land of the Christians.” This tale has three challenges, one of which involves a misspelled musical instrument, and a bit of troll cannibalism, before it ends with a wedding that the sketch forgets to forebode.
Neither of these variants is wholly satisfactory, but each has eye-opening elements. So what if I combine the records, and produce a composition using the interesting elements of each? Something similar has been done before, even by Asbjørnsen & Moe, so it’s not as if I’m cheating in an unprecedented manner…
I have made no decision yet, but would very much like to keep the girl, the goat, the waterfall, the quest for the sun, and the cannibalism. We'll see if I can keep my nerve in altering the source material to such a degree.