When I was preparing and publishing Erotic Folktales from Norway (2017), the lack of LGBTQ+ presence in the collection was one of the things that bothered me. Having said that, one tale in that collection does take up feminist, queer, and even transgender themes; “The Girl Who Served as Soldier and Married the King’s Daughter” is a well-established folktale, having been “continuously told for about three thousand years,” and widespread, with variants having been collected from “locations as distant from one another as Chile, Norway, and Russia.”¹ So the folklore is out there, despite any attempt to suppress it.

Knowing this, I was surprised when, a few years ago, a Forbes article popped upon my radar, “Why This Charming Gay Fairytale Has Been Lost For 200 Years,” the point of which was to promote the work of Pete Jordi Wood, and his book, The Dog And The Sailor (originally self-published, 2020; Puffin, 2024). My surprise was not that this folktale existed, but that it had allegedly already been published – twice in Danish, but also in Finnish, Finnish-Swedish, Dutch, Frisian, and German – and then “lost.”² How does that even happen? So, since I can read Danish, I went looking for the sources. I found one of the published variants on my bookshelf, and discovered that it was not obviously queer.³ In fact, once the hero has saved the prince and the king, he decides to take the reward and leave the country.

I had difficulty locating the second variant, and eventually gave up looking, assuming the gay stuff must be in there.

Fast forward to yesterday, when Liz Gotauco published a video promoting Wood’s book, which has now been picked up by Penguin imprint Puffin. I thought I’d have another look for the second variant, and this time I found it on Google books.⁴ And again, I am puzzled that the folktale as published does not reference any homosexual love. In this variant, the hero refuses half the kingdom, travelling home to his parents instead, where “they lived so well together, and perhaps do so still, even today.”

What then is going on?

I decided to look more into the work of Pete Jordi Wood, and discovered that his considerable skill in self-promotion has probably taken him into the realms of misrepresenting his source material. He is able to do this because his sources are in languages other than English, which relatively few Anglos can verify. (I also wonder how Wood went about “translating variations of the story from Danish, German, Frisian, and others.” Is he a polyglot? We deserve to be informed, if we are to accept the account of his method.) Puffin, which has also picked up Tales From Beyond the Rainbow, Wood’s collection of ten LBGTQ+ tales, is probably most forthright: “Pete Jordi Wood has combed through generations of history and adapted ten unforgettable stories” (my emphasis).

Assuming the rest of Wood’s account is more or less true (and however would he have found these Danish tales, unless he had waded through Thompson?) I think it probable that he has found ten folktales that are ripe for queer readings, then retold the stories from that perspective. Only this and nothing more.

In my (white, hetero, middle-age, middle-class) opinion, the misrepresentation of the material serves to undermine Wood’s achievement in writing and publishing these stories. He could stand forth as a modern, proudly gay Hans Christian Andersen, writing bold new fairy tales for his people, who sorely deserve to meet themselves in literature. Instead, he has decided to downplay his involvement, claiming that he has uncovered something “ancient.” Yet perhaps it is thus more difficult to summarily dismiss the stories as merely “gay.”

This morning, I sent off my prefaces for editing, which are the last of the texts from the annotated edition of The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe. When the edits are done, there will be nothing to stop me from publishing, which is at once an exciting and unnerving prospect.

In my prefaces, I have resisted the temptation to attempt an analysis of the collection; if I ever decide I am capable of doing such a thing, it will have to be at a later date. Instead, I write about the publication histories of the stories in collections, beginning in April 1837, when Asbjørnsen & Moe agreed to embark on their publishing project, and ending with the death of Asbjørnsen in 1885. I also write about the history of the folktales and legends in English translation, and how my intention has been to improve upon the efforts of translators who have not paid sufficient attention to the provenance of their original sources. So whilst they have attempted to denaturalise the folktales and legends, I have always had an eye to the foreign origins of these wondrous texts, and the greatest respect for the care and attention by which they have come down to us though the oral record.

For these are not mere stories. At some point back in time, a particular listener must have considered the folktales and legends they heard important enough to recount for a younger generation. And someone from that younger generation thought the same. And so on. In certain cases, we know that this line of storytellers goes back as far as 2000 years, and is distributed across the world, so that we find stories similar to those we have in Europe in places as far flung as India, Mongolia, China, and Korea. Storyteller by storyteller, these stories have been sent forwards in time, and spread to the corners of the earth. Perhaps each raconteur only thought of telling this tale to that person, but from our perspective at the end of the line, we can glimpse a broad, long-standing folk movement to spread these stories. I believe therefore that we are obligated to honour this aspect of transmission, and one way of doing so is by openly crediting the origins of the texts.

The entire collection of the folktales and legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe is comprised of up to 150 texts (the number I have included in my edition, three more than usually appear in Norwegian editions). The vast majority of these texts were, of course, written by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, but not all. A small number of folktales were added to the collection by Jørgen’s son, Moltke Moe, who aided Asbjørnsen editorially from the end of the 1870s.

We can’t be entirely sure when Moltke was inducted into “the old firm of A&M” (as he terms it). Biographers have claimed that he was involved in the composition of the five final folktales that Asbjørnsen added to the second edition of the second collection of folktales in 1876, but his name doesn’t appear on any published material before the first volume of Eventyrbog for Børn (Children’s Book of Folktales) in 1883.

Asbjørnsen died after the publication of the second volume of this work (1884), and Moltke took over the project to ensure that the third and final volume was published. (It eventually came out in 1887.) With both Asbjørnsen and his father dead, there was no one to stop him from inserting his own folktales into the collection. “The Three King’s Daughters in the Mountain Blue,” Moltke’s reworking of “Hans of Clubs,” one of Asbjørnsen’s early folktales that had never appeared as part of the collection, was included in this volume. But in Barne-Eventyr in 1909, he goes so far as to add two animal tales that he composed from collected sources: “The Pig and his Way of Life,” and “The Widow Fox.” Ironically enough, the latter folktale has subsequently become one of the most familiar and popular texts in the whole collection, thanks largely to Ivo Caprino’s puppet film adaptation. (See above.)

It is said that there was a nisse on the farm of Bure in Ringerike some time ago, who did the people there a lot of good. Not only did he groom the horses and tend the fire and lights, etc., but he even took on the job of a driver. Here’s how things went.

Once when he needed to travel to the mill at Hønefoss, and the farm boy (if I remember correctly) was absent, the farmer himself prepared everything on the evening beforehand. He loaded the cart and drove it under the bridge of the barn so that he could leave early the following morning.

The weather was grey and dark the next day, and so he slept in a bit, but just as he got out of bed, he saw the nisse bringing the horse out of the stable. He harnessed it and then, seating himself upon the sacks of grain, he drove it away.

He came back that evening, and by the morning after, everything was again in its proper place. The grain had been milled and the horse put away in the stable and provided with sufficient fodder, etc.

After that, the man always let the nisse drive to the mill, which he always did to his satisfaction.

Eventually, however, he noticed that the nisse was very ragged and poorly dressed. Winter was approaching, too, and he felt sorry for him. He therefore had beautiful new grey clothes sewn – and a knitted red hat, of course. He laid all this on top of the load that the nisse was to drive to the mill. He wanted to see how the nisse received his gift, too, so he hid himself.

The nisse immediately noticed the clothes and expressed his satisfaction with them by making faces and jumping around. After he had put the clothes on, he said with a wry laugh: “Well, I’m too fucking handsome to drive to the mill now!”

And nothing has been heard from him since.

– Peter Christen Asbjørnsen in
a letter to Andreas Faye, April 1835.

The time has come to finish this monster project, and release the results into the wild; I have therefore set a date for release – Sunday 1st September 2024.

For the first time ever in English, The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe is offered in two paperback editions. (Ebook will follow.)

• Click here to view the annotated edition.
• Click here for the unannotated edition.

 

The Annotated Edition

This flagship edition is the most comprehensive edition of Asbjørnsen & Moe that has ever been published in any language; its three volumes encompass the following:

• 150 published folktales and hulder tales and folk legends, including:
  • 122 folktales
  • 28 hulder tales and folk legends
  • A score of texts appearing in English for the first time
  • Three folktales added to the collection for the first time
• Original prefaces from eight editions
• Jørgen Moe’s substantial scholarly introduction to the Norwegian folktales
• More than 350 illustrations by Theodor Kittelsen, Erik Werenskiold, Otto Sinding, Hans Gude, Adolph Tidemand, August Schneider, Johan Eckersberg, etc.
• Asbjørnsen’s and Moe’s original notes on the majority of the folktales; these:
  • Note the variant(s) the collectors used to compose each folktale
  • Sketch out other variants they collected
  • Compare the Norwegian folktales with similar traditions from other regions
• Newly-researched editor’s notes on every folktale and hulder tale and folk legend; these:
  • Identify the collector responsible for the composition of each text
  • Note collection data, including tale type, geographical origin, collector, informant, and date of collection
  • Sketch biographical details of informants, where known
  • Give previous publication and translation details
  • Trace historical and literary sources
  • Draw attention to points of particular interest
• A comprehensive bibliography in each volume

 

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Just the Stories

For the first time in English translation The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe simply contains all 150 folktales and hulder tales and folk legends published by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812–1885) and Jørgen Moe (1813–1882), arranged according to the order of Samlede eventyr (3 vols. Oslo: Gyldendal. 1936), which has become the standard Norwegian edition. Three folktales have also been added to the collection for the first time.

This edition is fully illustrated with artwork by Theodor Kittelsen, Erik Werenskiold, Otto Sinding, Hans Gude, Adolph Tidemand, August Schneider, Johan Eckersberg, etc. Here, however, there are no introductions and no appendices of notes, following Asbjørnsen’s revelation that to many readers, “the scholarly appendices are an insignificant, unimportant, or incomprehensible ballast, which also makes such a book disproportionately more expensive.”

This edition will also be forthcoming in ebook format.