Over the last week or so, I have been translating the last of Asbjørnsen’s prefaces I had left (the preface to the 1859 second edition of the first volume of Norske Huldreeventyr og Folkesagn). I thought it would be a trivial job; it's just a preface, after all. This particular preface is >5000 words long, though; it has proven to be quite a job, and I wish I had tackled it earlier. That said, the text is very interesting, and goes a long way towards documenting the link from contemporary accounts of witches, to legends of the Asgårdsreie (the Norwegian edition of the Wild Hunt), to the valkyries of Old Norse and other Germanic literature, and back to the goddess Freya (who obviously liked cats).

I won’t pre-empt publication here; I shall be including the preface in my third volume, later this year. Something I can write about, though, is the artistic production of the Norwegian painter and illustrator Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831–1892), who appears to have understood Asbjørnsen’s argument. This understanding may be seen in his artistic production.

Arbo began with a maiden of the slain, the Valkyrie we see above, in 1869. He moved on to depicting the Asgårdsreie in 1872, a wild procession across the sky, driven at times by Guri Ryserova, at times by Odin or even Thor. These legends represent the crossover from earlier mythology to later folklore – the figures from the old religion being replaced as we move into the modern ages.

Lastly here, he illustrated some of Asbjørnsen’s legends, beginning in 1879. Below is Arbo’s portrayal of a legend embedded in the hulder tale and folk legend, “Legends from the Mill,” in which a tailor who spends the night in a sawmill is thronged by a flock of cats which turn out to be witches.

This short series of images, reproduced here in chronological order of production, also demonstrates the folkloric development of the valkyries into sky riders into witches. Asbjørnsen’s preface tells the story that the pictures cannot, however: the connection between the concepts.

Back in the days when I was still considering a traditional publishing contract for The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, one of the questions agents and publishers often asked was “Why you?” meaning, I suppose, why does the author want to publish the submitted work. So I shall try to answer that question here.

The most obvious reason for my wanting to publish The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe is because it has never been done. There have been selections of the whole collection, yes, but no one before me has taken the trouble to immerse him or her­self in the material and see it through to the end. My most personal reason for doing it is that it deserves doing. The Per Gynt legends have never appeared in English before, despite the enthusiasm (especially in America) for Ibsen; the hulder folk (fairies/ elves?) have never been properly introduced to an English-speaking audience; the Norwegian cunning arts are more or less unknown; the troll, that cornerstone of Norwegian folklore, has never been portrayed in its fulness.

And then there is the sorry state of the translations that have appeared; unnecessary inaccuracies abound. In the original, the cat is a female, not a tabby; the horse is a buckskin, not a dapple; the goats have an old Norwegian name, not a repurposed English adjective, and humans take them to where they are going – they're not just wandering around by themselves. Lastly in this regard: THERE ARE NO GRIFFINS IN NORWEGIAN FOLKLORE.

Indeed, the job I have taken upon myself has never been done before, and it deserves doing and doing well.

So what makes me the person to do this job (another favourite question from publishers and agents)?

The answer is simple: I am best qualified and best positioned to do it. In a couple of months from now, I will have been living in Norway for 32 years. I lived in Sweden for about a year before that. I earned all of my education in Norway – most of my studying (literature/ philosophy/ religion/ education) was accomplished in Norwegian. (I also studied English for the three-and-a-half years.) I have lived with two Norwegian women (consecutively), brought up 4 + 2 children. I have taught several thousand Norwegian children, youths, and adults in the Norwegian school system. I read and write Norwegian and English at comparable levels. I would not consider myself a native speaker of Norwegian, but I’m as close as you can get without having been born here.

And of course, there is the love I have for the material. I heard the story of the billy goats and the troll as a child, of course, and I have some vague school memories of stop-motion puppets eating porridge, but it was while I lived in Bergen for six months in late 1992 that I was properly intro­duced to Asbjørnsen & Moe, through the medium of Ivo Caprino’s short animated films. I was hooked, and have been ever since. Geekily, nerdily hooked. I still wander around with my head full of tusses and trolls.

I am near completion of the project of publishing the full Asbjørnsen & Moe collection, and I can honestly say that every single session of translation, editing, and writing has been a pleasure. Unlike the epic journeys within the tales and legends, my road has been a straight one. Uphill at times, yes, but I have always been able to see my destination in the distance, and I have always known I am going to reach it.

At the time of writing, I have one introduction to complete. Then my introductions need editing. Then a last edit of the completed volumes, making sure the images don’t disturb the pagination, etc. And then the project shall have been accomplished.

Man, what a ride it’s been!

Jørgen Moe implies that the the phrase, “I think this is how it goes,” is an important mechanism of folklore development.

Or perhaps it’s, “Let’s see if I can remember this one…”

From his Introduction to the second edition of Norske folkeeventyr, 1852:

Still two things remain, which confirm that the folktales have been at home in our country for a very long time, even from the age of paganism. The first is the faithfulness and conscientiousness with which the best storytellers always recount the traditions – the fear they have of taking away, adding to, or even just changing the individual motif a little. This carefulness goes so far that when the story is recounted, it is told predominantly in the same words and phrases that were used the first time, certainly in the most important points and the dialogue. We find this when two people tell the story, one of whom having received it from the mouth of the other. By this conscientious accuracy we may be assured against any deliberate distortion of the original content, and this likewise suggests an instinctive respect for the folk literature’s ancient and domestic origins.

In their “Subscription Invitation,” before the initial publication of Norwegian Folktales, Asbjørnsen & Moe emphasised the urgency of their work:

Collection of these folk compositions is urgently needed at present, if it is ever to be possible. Among other things, our reawakened, newly outward-looking political life is by necessity hostile to legends and folktales. That these, which shortened many a long winter’s evening around the hearth, and many a long day behind the herds in the forest, should fall evermore silent in our mountain valleys is a fact that, while encouraging as a sign of increasing enlightenment, is certainly regrettable, if no one preserves them before they die on the lips of the folk.
– Published in Den Constitutionelle, 1840-02-23

Modern society is hostile to folklore, they claim; collection of folk narratives should therefore occur before they are lost on the tongues of their respective tradition bearers.

Beginning with Asbjørnsen & Moe in 1837, the collection of folk narratives in Norway had all but died out by 1940.

But is it not just as likely that the written publication of collected folktales and legends did away with the further need for the oral record? Why should we listen to grandma telling tales, when we can read them for ourselves in a book? Also, how can collectors working after widespread dissemination of folktales and legends in written form be sure that what they record from their informants is in fact an oral narrative rather than something the prospective informant has read in a popular book of tales?

I don’t suppose we shall ever be able to answer such questions. Whatever the case may be, though, modern society appears to be inconducive to the oral tradition of the old stories.

It's been a while since I had a weblog that served as a weblog; my old Blogger sites were places I posted my work, and little else. This site is something different, though, which brings me to the purpose of this post: what has this waning year brought, both positive and negative?

The year progressed as years often do, until June, when Wolf Thandoy (my editor) and I completed the main round of editing The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, paving the way for publication some time next year. This event came roughly twenty years after I translated my first folktale in the summer of 2003 (just to see if I could do so).

Although progress on Asbjørnsen & Moe was the most significant event, personally, the most obvious change in my sphere of activity, was the removal of my Blogger blogs, following reports of impending indiscriminate data theft in the name of “artificial intelligence” by some of the world's biggest corporations. Taking the blogs down was not a decision I took lightly, but it was an easy one. Although I had made my work in unedited form freely available for personal use, I refuse to work for Silicon Valley’s profits without explicit consent and significant remuneration.

Inspired by the end of the heavy editing, and as a reaction to the shock of realising the scope of this project (i.e. the heft of the books), I developed my publishing plan in new directions. Not only will there be a complete, annotated collection in three volumes (my original plan), but there will also be a three volume editon without annotations, and a single ebook edition, also without annotations. All of these editions will be illustrated with the images that every Norwegian expects to accompany their beloved folktales and legends.

Lastly, I registered and set up this very Website, and after fiddling around with wiki software, and refusing the Wordpress bloat, I have settled on the current format. I have little interest in bells, whistles, animated banners, and the rest of the stuff that makes surfing the Web so wearying, so this is what you get. I hope it is readable, and I strive to be informative.

The new year

The new year should see the resolution of the Asbjørnsen & Moe project, which should free more of my time to complete the projects I have temporarily placed on the back-burner. I have two volumes of Regine Normann’s nothern legends to edit and publish, as well as a volume of draug folklore and stories, and I have at least two essays that are in differing states of completion; I am looking forwards to seeing those in print. I have enough to keep me busy, you might say.

But first, the holidays! I hope yours is as relaxing as it can be.