I am now thoroughly disillusioned with everything and anything to do with publishing and distribution. Insert rant here – blah blah! Anyway, here are some new plans for the books I have published thus far, timeframe uncertain.

1. Produce a reformatted edition of Asbjørnsen & Moe – with narrower margins, smaller type, reduced line height, and so on, to bring the page count down. I will offer these volumes on non-monopolistic POD services. This point is going to prove the bottleneck; repagination is going to take quite a bit of time, especially since my energy has also to go into producing new books.
2. Sell .pdf copies of the original annotated edition for a reasonable price on Ko-fi.com.
3. Bump up prices on Amazon so that I receive a royalty comparable with the money I receive through Ko-fi. (I’ll be withdrawing the non-annotated edition from Amazon.)
4. Investigate the viability of deluxe hardcover volumes for private distribution.

I don’t expect I will sell more books by making these changes; what I will ensure, however, is that readers have good alternatives to buying from monopolists

Two goats once met on a bridge. One was white, the other black. The bridge was so narrow that neither one could pass the other. They stood for a while on opposite ends of the bridge and looked across at each other.

“I will not stand aside for you,” said the white goat.

“Nor will I for you,” said the black one.

“I have as great a right to the bridge as you,” said the white one.

“But no greater,” said the black goat.

They continued to look scornfully at one another, and neither would give way.

“We shall quarrel about this,” said the white one.

“Yes indeed, come on, then!” said the black one.

And then they rushed at each other, and butted at one another, and they both fell headlong into the river. And then they both had to get out again.

I was working on my forthcoming volume of legends concerning the draug, or sea draug, and rediscovered my notes concerning the description of the (as yet unnamed) creature, as early as 1704.

In December 1704, Reinhold Friderik Tønders, who was betrothed to Sophie Amalie Krogh (1686–1735), the daughter of the bishop of Nidaros, Peder Nielsen Krog, drowned at sea. Two poems were written on the occasion of his death, one by his fiancée, and one by Petter Dass (1667–1707), parson at Alstahaug in Nordland, whose parish was at the time presided over from Nidaros (Trondheim). Both poems use imagery that is reminiscent of later decriptions of the draug.

Krogh:

The sea took the spoils
You fared the way of all flesh
Like Jonah, about your head
You wore a cap of kelp

Dass:

But now you must contented be
with a coffin made of kelp,
and a shroud prepared of seaweed
enveloping your head.

Krogh’s reference to Jonah is interesting, for it transpires that both poets have appropriated a biblical image to portray their hapless drowning victim. From inside the fish, Jonah laments: “The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.” (Jonah 2: 5)

A similar description subsequently becomes widely associated with the reanimated sea dead, here exemplified by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen: “Instead of heads and hair, they had knots of seaweed.” (The Tufte Folk on Sandflæsa)

More to look forward to in The Draug, forthcoming later this year.

I have closed
my accounts
that were on
the Internet

and which
were certainly
datamining me
for Big Tech

Forgive me
they were increasingly
frustrating
and so much hard work

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.