About 80 variants of the tale that is most familiar to us as "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" have been collected in Norway. It is arguably the best-loved of the Norwegian folk narratives that are recognised around the world, helped no doubt by the charming motif of the white bear that comes to take away the girl. There is a lot of scope for innovation within the general schema of the tale type. How the bear and the girl meet, how the girl is tested, how she loses and then recovers her husband may vary, but these five texts all very obviously tell the same story.