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.)