Since the release of The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, a year ago this month, I have been quietly correcting errors as I have become aware of them. Most of them are typos, some a misspelled word or the odd Norwegian spelling that has escaped the editing process, etc. Some have been of a more comprehensive nature; my first correction, for example, was a compilation error that resulted in the omission of the table of contents from one of the volumes. But now I am closing this chapter. Any errors that remain (and in a book of more than 2000 pages, overseen only by the author and one editor, there will be some) will just have to stay there.
My decision was prompted by my recent discovery of the collector and informant for the published version of “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” which I found deep in Asbjørnsen’ and Moe’s correspondance (see header image). My immediate impulse was to add the information to the existing edition, but I realised that doing so would disturb pagination, rendering the book unreliable as a source for others to cite. Consequently, I have begun collating additional information for a future second edition of my work. How long it will be before I have a critical mass of new notes, I cannot say; after all, it was nearly a year before I uncovered the names of the previously obscure collector and informant of a single folktale.
Watch this space, I guess.