It's been a while since I had a weblog that served as a weblog; my old Blogger sites were places I posted my work, and little else. This site is something different, though, which brings me to the purpose of this post: what has this waning year brought, both positive and negative?

The year progressed as years often do, until June, when Wolf Thandoy (my editor) and I completed the main round of editing The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, paving the way for publication some time next year. This event came roughly twenty years after I translated my first folktale in the summer of 2003 (just to see if I could do so).

Although progress on Asbjørnsen & Moe was the most significant event, personally, the most obvious change in my sphere of activity, was the removal of my Blogger blogs, following reports of impending indiscriminate data theft in the name of “artificial intelligence” by some of the world's biggest corporations. Taking the blogs down was not a decision I took lightly, but it was an easy one. Although I had made my work in unedited form freely available for personal use, I refuse to work for Silicon Valley’s profits without explicit consent and significant remuneration.

Inspired by the end of the heavy editing, and as a reaction to the shock of realising the scope of this project (i.e. the heft of the books), I developed my publishing plan in new directions. Not only will there be a complete, annotated collection in three volumes (my original plan), but there will also be a three volume editon without annotations, and a single ebook edition, also without annotations. All of these editions will be illustrated with the images that every Norwegian expects to accompany their beloved folktales and legends.

Lastly, I registered and set up this very Website, and after fiddling around with wiki software, and refusing the Wordpress bloat, I have settled on the current format. I have little interest in bells, whistles, animated banners, and the rest of the stuff that makes surfing the Web so wearying, so this is what you get. I hope it is readable, and I strive to be informative.

The new year

The new year should see the resolution of the Asbjørnsen & Moe project, which should free more of my time to complete the projects I have temporarily placed on the back-burner. I have two volumes of Regine Normann’s nothern legends to edit and publish, as well as a volume of draug folklore and stories, and I have at least two essays that are in differing states of completion; I am looking forwards to seeing those in print. I have enough to keep me busy, you might say.

But first, the holidays! I hope yours is as relaxing as it can be.

Here is just a short note to mention that I am adding information and links to the books I have already published. You’ll find a list of promotional articles behind the “Books” section (link up top), or follow this link to get to the same page.

I forgot to add the other day that there will be an ebook edition of The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends Asbjørnsen & Moe. Only one – with every folktale, legend, note, introduction, and preface from the complete collection (I figure there’s no trouble handling big digital books). Again, this edition will be fully illustrated, with the odd image reproduced in colour, for those who use iPads, etc.

This one is going to take a while, however, as I am putting it together manually, converting each text and footnote, etc. by my own fair hand.

ETA: After looking at the code of the notes that I would have to convert to plain text for inclusion in a ebook, I have come to the conclusion that it is a fool’s errand.

I mean, the code for this passage:

looks like this:

with frequent encoded calls to a bibliography, which I would have to manually convert into HTML for an ebook. This would take an inordinate amount of work, and the result would be vulnerable any number of typos, mistakes, and other errors.

So – change of plans. The ebook will be the tales and legends only. Notes, etc. will remain in print format, or perhaps even a .pdf that will be privately distributed.

In between fiddling with this website, I translate and edit and publish Norwegian folklore. Within the next year, I shall be publishing the end result of what has been my primary project for the last twenty years: The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, which will appear in three volumes. Every folktale published by Asbjørnsen & Moe, every so-called hulder tale published by Asbjørnsen, every note the duo published, and every preface, foreword, and introduction. It’s a big book, with a page count upwards of 1800 pages.

Two things have got me reevaluating my plan to simply publish and perish:

1. Someone on Mastodon mentioned that books of upwards of 600 pages are difficult to negotiate, and something less than enjoyable to read.
2. In his third edition, Asbjørnsen departed from the publishing model of the second edition, which he and Moe published with all the ancillary texts mentioned above. His reason was that a general readership is interested only in the folktales and legends; there is a limited interest in the notes and scholarly texts.

I ought to address these caveats. And so I have made some decisions, the most important of which is that there will be a full version as detailed above. This has been my goal from the very beginning, and it is something I would produce, even if no one else bought a copy. As it happens, though, scholars have been looking for such a beast. Quite soon afterwards, however, further editions will appear:

• A three-volume edition of just the folklore texts. This will follow a historical Norwegian publication, meaning the texts will appear in a different order, and a very few texts will be replaced with others (fully documented in the above edition).
• A three-volume children’s edition, which also follows a historical Norwegian publication. This edition omits the most explicit of the texts (sexual explicitness, that is; violence is fine, of course!), and features a larger type, more whitespace, and bigger images.

Speaking of images, all three editions will be fully illustrated with artwork by Theodor Kittelsen, Erik Werenskiold, Otto Sinding, Hans Gude, Adolph Tidemand, August Schneider, Johan Eckersberg, etc.

Which edition will you buy?

Today I have installed and uninstalled three wiki systems and not a few blogging engines. None of them gave me what I wanted: control. Textpattern seems to give me the basics of what I want (readable Web documents), and the rest is tweaking. Since this site is now linear in nature, you'll just have to come along for the ride.