Tl;dr: Some books of fairy tales give no return on the invested effort.

Anna Winge (1860–1921) was born in Christiania, the niese of the national poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven on her mother’s side. She studied music and song under Thorvald Lammers and Desirée Padilla, then worked as a singing teacher. She founded a choir, wrote an opera, published a hymn book, and generally did musicky stuff.

In 1901, she published Prinsesser og trold: eventyr for børn, a brief collection of fairy tales for children.

Ever on the lookout for a new translation project, I picked up a rather worn copy of Prinsesser og trold so that I might investigate these stories; would they entertain enough today to warrant translation and publication? I have consequently translated two of the tales, “The Lily Princess” and “The North Wind and the South Wind,” which are the first and fifth texts respectively. (I find that translation is the most effective method of deep-reading, as it forces me to properly understand what I am reading before formulating the same thought in a different language – no shortcuts.) And I discovered that these stories will just not cut it.

In “The Lilly Princess,” as an example, the plot does not hold together. We begin with a lovely description of a castle garden in which grows an apple tree that bears golden apples (real gold) that the children of the kingdom gather every autumn, much to their and the king’s delight. And that’s the last we hear of that.

Now, there is also a tarn at the bottom of the king’s park (in which lies his garden, in which stands his castle), where dwelt a troll, perhaps a hundred years ago. The troll stole away the princess of the day, and the king her father struggled to banish the troll at last. There is a description of the cross that king erected to ward off the troll’s return.

Well, the prince of the present has to go out to look for a wife, but just as he is about to set out on his quest, his mother falls very ill, and apparently, there is a single nightingale in all the kingdom that can save her life. How he heard of the nightingale is not related.

Off he goes to find the nightingale; a princess for a wife can wait.

Anyway, this nightingale, which of course the prince does find, causes him to weep a tear, which falls on to a lilly growing at the foot of a linden tree. The lily turns into the princess abducted by the troll. The nightingale itself is apparently a singer who has been been enchanted by enchanter unknown for a hundred years. At the end of the hundred years, she will turn back into a singer and become world famous. But we hear no more about this. They all go back to the castle, the nightingale sings the queen better, there is a wedding, and they all live happily ever after.

So the apple tree at the beginning and the nightingale at the end are both narrative dead ends. Add to this major turn off the language that does its best to imitate Hans Christian Andersen’s pathos (but falls short), and perhaps you’ll understand why I gave this brief collection a pass.

The other tale I translated, “The North Wind and the South Wind,” doesn’t have a plot at all.

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.

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.

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!