This morning, I sent off my prefaces for editing, which are the last of the texts from the annotated edition of The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe. When the edits are done, there will be nothing to stop me from publishing, which is at once an exciting and unnerving prospect.

In my prefaces, I have resisted the temptation to attempt an analysis of the collection; if I ever decide I am capable of doing such a thing, it will have to be at a later date. Instead, I write about the publication histories of the stories in collections, beginning in April 1837, when Asbjørnsen & Moe agreed to embark on their publishing project, and ending with the death of Asbjørnsen in 1885. I also write about the history of the folktales and legends in English translation, and how my intention has been to improve upon the efforts of translators who have not paid sufficient attention to the provenance of their original sources. So whilst they have attempted to denaturalise the folktales and legends, I have always had an eye to the foreign origins of these wondrous texts, and the greatest respect for the care and attention by which they have come down to us though the oral record.

For these are not mere stories. At some point back in time, a particular listener must have considered the folktales and legends they heard important enough to recount for a younger generation. And someone from that younger generation thought the same. And so on. In certain cases, we know that this line of storytellers goes back as far as 2000 years, and is distributed across the world, so that we find stories similar to those we have in Europe in places as far flung as India, Mongolia, China, and Korea. Storyteller by storyteller, these stories have been sent forwards in time, and spread to the corners of the earth. Perhaps each raconteur only thought of telling this tale to that person, but from our perspective at the end of the line, we can glimpse a broad, long-standing folk movement to spread these stories. I believe therefore that we are obligated to honour this aspect of transmission, and one way of doing so is by openly crediting the origins of the texts.

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

 

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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.

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.

I have finished writing the introductions, and there is now nothing left for me to do but edit a few incidental texts before publication. I hope this editing will be done before summer commences, and I am hoping to publish before the beginning of autumn.

What a wild ride it’s been!

Even for a Londoner, Norwegian folktales have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. At home, Vera Southgate’s “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” from 1968 was my first introduction. Robert Lumley’s illustration of the troll climbing on to the bridge (shown left) is forever etched into my psyche. I have vague recollections from school, of puppet films that include characters eating what appeared to be wallpaper paste, but which was called porridge; I had never seen porridge like that. Funnily enough, I can date these recollections, for I only attended that particular infants’ school for a year, so it must have been 1976. (The huge Betamax video player in the audio/ visual room also made an impression.)

Fifteen years later, I saw these films again, this time at an exhibition of Ivo Caprino’s work in Bergen, Norway. It was at this exhibition that I was at last made aware of the Asbjørnsen and Moe collection. I wanted to read it all.

Another ten years passed. I had by this time fathered three children, and taken far too much education. I was looking around for something to occupy my mind while I worked a part-time job and weighed the pros and cons of embarking on an academic career. It was my tenth year of living, studying, and working in Norway, and I wondered if I was competent enough to translate something from Norwegian to English. I decided a short trial would suffice, and had a go at one of Asbjørnsen’s folktales: “Bamse Brakar,” which I called “Goodman Bear.” I found the work satisfying, and translated a further handful of tales. Then I discovered that the whole collection had never appeared in English. And I realised I could remedy that situation.

The rest is really history, except that life intervened for another ten years, and it wasn’t until 2015 that I seriously attempted to complete the collection, with the support of the fine folk of #FolkloreThursday to cheer me on.

That was all half a million words ago, now.

Back in the days when I was still considering a traditional publishing contract for The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, one of the questions agents and publishers often asked was “Why you?” meaning, I suppose, why does the author want to publish the submitted work. So I shall try to answer that question here.

The most obvious reason for my wanting to publish The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe is because it has never been done. There have been selections of the whole collection, yes, but no one before me has taken the trouble to immerse him or her­self in the material and see it through to the end. My most personal reason for doing it is that it deserves doing. The Per Gynt legends have never appeared in English before, despite the enthusiasm (especially in America) for Ibsen; the hulder folk (fairies/ elves?) have never been properly introduced to an English-speaking audience; the Norwegian cunning arts are more or less unknown; the troll, that cornerstone of Norwegian folklore, has never been portrayed in its fulness.

And then there is the sorry state of the translations that have appeared; unnecessary inaccuracies abound. In the original, the cat is a female, not a tabby; the horse is a buckskin, not a dapple; the goats have an old Norwegian name, not a repurposed English adjective, and humans take them to where they are going – they're not just wandering around by themselves. Lastly in this regard: THERE ARE NO GRIFFINS IN NORWEGIAN FOLKLORE.

Indeed, the job I have taken upon myself has never been done before, and it deserves doing and doing well.

So what makes me the person to do this job (another favourite question from publishers and agents)?

The answer is simple: I am best qualified and best positioned to do it. In a couple of months from now, I will have been living in Norway for 32 years. I lived in Sweden for about a year before that. I earned all of my education in Norway – most of my studying (literature/ philosophy/ religion/ education) was accomplished in Norwegian. (I also studied English for the three-and-a-half years.) I have lived with two Norwegian women (consecutively), brought up 4 + 2 children. I have taught several thousand Norwegian children, youths, and adults in the Norwegian school system. I read and write Norwegian and English at comparable levels. I would not consider myself a native speaker of Norwegian, but I’m as close as you can get without having been born here.

And of course, there is the love I have for the material. I heard the story of the billy goats and the troll as a child, of course, and I have some vague school memories of stop-motion puppets eating porridge, but it was while I lived in Bergen for six months in late 1992 that I was properly intro­duced to Asbjørnsen & Moe, through the medium of Ivo Caprino’s short animated films. I was hooked, and have been ever since. Geekily, nerdily hooked. I still wander around with my head full of tusses and trolls.

I am near completion of the project of publishing the full Asbjørnsen & Moe collection, and I can honestly say that every single session of translation, editing, and writing has been a pleasure. Unlike the epic journeys within the tales and legends, my road has been a straight one. Uphill at times, yes, but I have always been able to see my destination in the distance, and I have always known I am going to reach it.

At the time of writing, I have one introduction to complete. Then my introductions need editing. Then a last edit of the completed volumes, making sure the images don’t disturb the pagination, etc. And then the project shall have been accomplished.

Man, what a ride it’s been!