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

 

---

 

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.

By the autumn of 1838, Asbjørnsen & Moe had enough material to to justify looking for a publisher. Asbjørnsen approached Carl August Guldberg, who agreed to do the work, on the condition that the collectors should be able to attact enough subscribers to make the venture worth his while.

A “Subscription Invitation” was published in the Christiania newspaper, Den Constitutionelle, 23. February 1840. After representing the significance of folk literature, the collectors explain the importance of their project, before the details are given by the prospective publishers.

Few subscriptions were sold, however, and Guldberg withdrew his undertaking to publish the work.

Tl;dr: Some books of fairy tales give no return on the invested effort.

Anna Winge (1860–1921) was born in Christiania, the niece of the national poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven on her mother’s side. She studied music and song under Thorvald Lammers and Desirée Padilla, then worked as a singing teacher. She founded a choir, wrote an opera, published a hymn book, and generally did musicky stuff.

In 1901, she published Prinsesser og trold: eventyr for børn, a brief collection of fairy tales for children.

Ever on the lookout for a new translation project, I picked up a rather worn copy of Prinsesser og trold so that I might investigate these stories; would they entertain enough today to warrant translation and publication? I have consequently translated two of the tales, “The Lily Princess” and “The North Wind and the South Wind,” which are the first and fifth texts respectively. (I find that translation is the most effective method of deep-reading, as it forces me to properly understand what I am reading before formulating the same thought in a different language – no shortcuts.) And I discovered that these stories will just not cut it.

In “The Lilly Princess,” as an example, the plot does not hold together. We begin with a lovely description of a castle garden in which grows an apple tree that bears golden apples (real gold) that the children of the kingdom gather every autumn, much to their and the king’s delight. And that’s the last we hear of that.

Now, there is also a tarn at the bottom of the king’s park (in which lies his garden, in which stands his castle), where dwelt a troll, perhaps a hundred years ago. The troll stole away the princess of the day, and the king her father struggled to banish the troll at last. There is a description of the cross that king erected to ward off the troll’s return.

Well, the prince of the present has to go out to look for a wife, but just as he is about to set out on his quest, his mother falls very ill, and apparently, there is a single nightingale in all the kingdom that can save her life. How he heard of the nightingale is not related.

Off he goes to find the nightingale; a princess for a wife can wait.

Anyway, this nightingale, which of course the prince does find, causes him to weep a tear, which falls on to a lilly growing at the foot of a linden tree. The lily turns into the princess abducted by the troll. The nightingale itself is apparently a singer who has been been enchanted by enchanter unknown for a hundred years. At the end of the hundred years, she will turn back into a singer and become world famous. But we hear no more about this. They all go back to the castle, the nightingale sings the queen better, there is a wedding, and they all live happily ever after.

So the apple tree at the beginning and the nightingale at the end are both narrative dead ends. Add to this major turn off the language that does its best to imitate Hans Christian Andersen’s pathos (but falls short), and perhaps you’ll understand why I gave this brief collection a pass.

The other tale I translated, “The North Wind and the South Wind,” doesn’t have a plot at all.

When Asbjørnsen & Moe went into the field, they recorded the folklore as well as they could, as their respective raconteurs told them their legends and tales. Not having voice recorders, the collectors relied on their ability to make notes of what they heard, for later recomposition into more or less polished narratives suitable for publication. As they collected, they repeatedly heard stories that resembled one another, and although they recorded them all, they chose to compose and publish only the strands of tradition that best suited their sensibilities. The other variants were relegated in note form to their records, to which they refer from time to time.

Outlines of some of these variants found their way into the notes appended to the second edition of the first collection of folktales (1852). Some were recovered later by other editors, and published – either in reconstituted form or as sketches – in the twelve-volume Norsk eventyrbibliotek (Norwegian Folktale Library, published between 1967 and 1981) or other, more minor editions.

Working on The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, I have come to appreciate how entertaining some of these alternative variants would have been, had they been written out in full and published. And then I thought: Why shouldn’t I have a go at doing just that?

My first foray into writing – reconstituting – folktales was “Sir Varivan,” a white bear/ East of the Sun type folktale I published in my Five Norwegian White Bear Tales in 2019. It was fun to do; and having immersed myself in the language of the folktale – the eventyrstil – for so long, I found the idiom came quite easily. So I have continued to work on them, from time to time. There will soon be enough to fill a volume of stories, which I will publish in due course.

So what is different about these tales? Well, how about a variant of the billy-goats and the troll under the bridge in which the confrontation takes place as the goats return home in the late summer, having already eaten their fill? It makes much more sense that way. How about a tale of “Faithful and Unfaithful,” where the talking animals accuse a squirrel who lives in the tree of telling their secrets? This one brings to mind the squirrel Ratatoskr, which lives in Yggdrasil. A variant of “Grim Buckskin” called “ Bucephalus”? A mashup of “The Three Princesses in Hvittenland,” “The Swan Maidens,” and “The Seventh Father of the House”? Or how about a confusing tale with the remarkable title, “The Princess Who Should Commit Fornication and Murder” in which the moral character of the stepmother is ambiguous? Exciting stuff, indeed!

As ever, watch this space. The book is forthcoming.