The hero is shut in the fire and does not burn. In the German witness gathered here, a discharged soldier and his five uncanny companions are lured into a locked chamber with "a floor of iron" and iron doors, sat down to a feast, and left to roast: the King orders his cook to "make a fire under the room until the iron became" red-hot (ws). But one of the six wears a cap that governs the weather, and when the heat climbs he answers, "I will cause a frost to come" before which the fire shall be ashamed and creep away. The doors are opened on all six "alive and well", the food frozen to the dishes. The tale is Grimm's Household Tales (collected 1812–1857, in this translation of 1884), Tale 71, and the burning is only the first of the King's failed murders.

The Finnish record raises the ordeal to a threefold death. In the Kalevala (compiled from oral tradition 1835–1849), the child Kullervo — feared from birth because he vows to avenge his slaughtered kin — is condemned to a pyre: his captors pile the brushwood high and "Set on fire the pile of brushwood", that "the boy might be cremated". It burns three days. When the heralds come to sift the ash they find the boy alive upon the coals, "On a pyramid of embers," a copper rod in his hand, "Raking coals of fire about him" as if to stoke them hotter, and "Not a hair was burned nor injured".

Fire is not the end of it. Kullervo has already survived drowning and will next be hung on an oak, and the burners are driven to a bleak conclusion — that since he will "not die by water, / Nor by fire, nor crucifixion", his body must simply be immortal. In both witnesses the killers act in cold policy, sure the flame will do their work, and in both the intended victim treats the furnace as weather to be waited out. When the fire that should end a life instead proves it cannot be ended, what has the executioner actually learned to fear?