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.
