I am now thoroughly disillusioned with everything and anything to do with publishing and distribution. Insert rant here – blah blah! Anyway, here are some new plans for the books I have published thus far, timeframe uncertain.

1. Produce a reformatted edition of Asbjørnsen & Moe – with narrower margins, smaller type, reduced line height, and so on, to bring the page count down. I will offer these volumes on non-monopolistic POD services. This point is going to prove the bottleneck; repagination is going to take quite a bit of time, especially since my energy has also to go into producing new books.
2. Sell .pdf copies of the original annotated edition for a reasonable price on Ko-fi.com.
3. Bump up prices on Amazon so that I receive a royalty comparable with the money I receive through Ko-fi. (I’ll be withdrawing the non-annotated edition from Amazon.)
4. Investigate the viability of deluxe hardcover volumes for private distribution.

I don’t expect I will sell more books by making these changes; what I will ensure, however, is that readers have good alternatives to buying from monopolists

I have closed
my accounts
that were on
the Internet

and which
were certainly
datamining me
for Big Tech

Forgive me
they were increasingly
frustrating
and so much hard work

I have two variants of “Askeladden, Who Stole the Troll’s Silver Ducks…” One of these variants has a heroine, whose “call to adventure” is a familiar tale of sibling rivalry followed by a crone in the forest. This variant is incomplete in that there are only two (not three) challenges; one of these, however, is to retrieve the sun from beneath the troll-wife’s apron, after which the tale ends quite abruptly. In other words, the family relations, the fact that the protagonist is a girl, and the sun as a possession of a troll are the points of interest.

The other variant has a conventional hero – one of three brothers. His helper is a goat, and instead of a magic bridge, he passes through a waterfall “that separates the land of the trolls from the land of the Christians.” This tale has three challenges, one of which involves a misspelled musical instrument, and a bit of troll cannibalism, before it ends with a wedding that the sketch forgets to forebode.

Neither of these variants is wholly satisfactory, but each has eye-opening elements. So what if I combine the records, and produce a composition using the interesting elements of each? Something similar has been done before, even by Asbjørnsen & Moe, so it’s not as if I’m cheating in an unprecedented manner…

I have made no decision yet, but would very much like to keep the girl, the goat, the waterfall, the quest for the sun, and the cannibalism. We'll see if I can keep my nerve in altering the source material to such a degree.

A Profound Thought™ struck me when I recently re-read Thrond Sjursen Haukenæs’ Old Christmas Customs, and I have been reading myself into a rabbit hole ever since. I haven’t yet read enough to be able to unravel the question at the end of this post. I’m working on it, though I doubt the answer is out there.

We begin with Christmas in rural Norway, which by the beginning of the 20^th century, was typically celebrated the same way throughout the country. The baking was completed in the first half of December, the beer had been brewed after the barley harvest, and a goat, a lamb, or a pig was slaughtered close to Christmas Eve, so that the Christmas meal should consist of fresh meat.

Now, when we compare these customs with the way in which The Saga of Haakon the Good says the Norse folk marked their sacrifices, the similarities are quite interesting.

It was an old custom, that when there was to be sacrifice all the bondes should come to the spot where the temple stood and bring with them all that they required while the festival of the sacrifice lasted. To this festival all the men brought ale with them; and all kinds of cattle, as well as horses, were slaughtered, and all the blood that came from them was called “hlaut”, and the vessels in which it was collected were called hlaut-vessels. Hlaut-staves were made, like sprinkling brushes, with which the whole of the altars and the temple walls, both outside and inside, were sprinkled over, and also the people were sprinkled with the blood; but the flesh was boiled into savoury meat for those present.

Quite similar in a number of points.

Of course, the different ways in which a community can celebrate a holiday are limited, and feasting seems to be widespread, but here’s the interesting bit: the yearly slaughter on Norwegian farms took place in the autumn – after the now fat billy-goats came down again from the saeter. The meat from the autumn slaughter was preserved (salted, cured, dried, pickled) for the coming year; why should meat eaten at Christmas be fresh?

So is this custom of slaughtering and eating fresh meat at Christmas a bloody remnant of old Norse religions, which may have survived through to the beginning of the industrial period?

In my latest post, on the forthcoming volume of legends of the undead draug, I write: "I am still meditating on how to include in a paperback the information behind the links." These links give useful background information on the geography of this part of the world, folkloric figures generally unfamiliar to readers of English, and more or less obscure heroes of Norse literature. Additionally, some links point directly at the source literature in Old Norse or Danish translation. To include all this kind of material on paper would require an annotation apparatus that risks overshadowing the texts themselves, which would be quite unfortunate.

So how do I deal with this matter? Do I publish in ebook format only? Or do I cut down the amount of information included in the printed book? Or do I move the notes to a place in the book where they may be overlooked while the texts are being read? I am leaning towards the latter solution – writing brief introductions to each text or group of texts, in which I can address potential difficulties a reader of English might face. Of course, a bibliography will have to serve in lieu of links to the original literature.

One of the consequences of this solution is that the contents of the ebook and physical edition will diverge to a degree, with the ebook having direct links to independent information and the paper version containing my own ruminations. But still, isn't it about time we employed the many possibilities that hypertext affords us in serious non-fiction?