In 1851, Benjamin Thorpe made an ill-considered statement, doubting the authenticity of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's Norwegian Hulder Tales and Folk Legends.
In his preface to the second edition of the first volume of these Norwegian stories (1859), Asbjørnsen takes issue with Thorpe's comment, demonstrating a provenance of European folklore that goes back to the worship of Freya among the Germanic peoples.
165 years later, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's defence of the Norwegian legend has all-but negated my ability to suspend disbelief when reading modern fantasy or fairy tales. Many of these stories, disconnected from their folkloric roots, now ring hollow.
“The Girl Who Stole the Troll’s Bellweather Cow” is an unpublished variant of “Askeladden Who Stole the Troll’s Silver Ducks, etc.” in which there is very little male participation; the lead is a girl who is advised by a crone in the forest to travel to a troll’s mountain, where she kills the troll’s daughter, the troll’s wife, and then the troll, before taking the sun back to the king. There is no romantic interest.
#WritersCoffeeClub 15. June: Is your work child or teen-friendly, or does it contain themes more suited for mature audiences?
Let me see: Prejudice. Racism. Familial treachery. Mockery. Bullying. Sedition. Heresy. Astrology. Necromancy. Satanism. Pre-marital sex. Implied cross-species sex. Misogyny. Kidnapping. Accidental and intentional injury. Death by misadventure. Torture. Murder. Dismemberment. Decapitation. Accidental and intentional cannibalism.
So yes. It is certainly child- and teen-friendly, for it contains themes more suited for mature audiences. We still read folktales and legends for our children, n’est-ce pas?
This time, I write briefly about the provenance and transmission of the folktales and legends we know so well, and how I believe that the great age and broad distribution of the stories obligates us to treat the old stories with the greatest respect.
Please define your terms, and differentiate what you are calling fairy tales from myths, legends, folktales, and even wonder tales. If you can't (and we know you can't – no one has been able to), do at least acknowledge the fuzzy, overlapping, organic scope of the concepts.
There is no such thing as a fairy tale. There are, however, many fairy tales. – paraphrasing Jack Zipes (I think) from memory.
The three volumes of The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, the non-annotated edition, are all-but ready. All the folktales. All the legends. All the illustrations.
This edition will be published at roughly the same time as The Complete Norwegian Folktales and Legends of Asbjørnsen & Moe, the annotated edition, which is only waiting for the final editing of my prefaces. All the folktales. All the legends. All the original prefaces and introductions. All the notes, both original and newly researched.
This huge translation and writing project I am fitting together in its final form is too big to fit in my brain all at once. I must therefore trust the decisions that numerous iterations of me from the past made. I have to resist the urge to revisit every detail, just because I may have had a bad night's sleep. In this way, I expect be able to publish a work bigger and more comprehensive than any I ever imagined producing, while still retaining some semblance of my sanity. That's the hope.
Did you know that the first choice of title for Asbjørnsen & Moe was an imitation of the Grimms’: “Norwegian Folk- and Children’s Tales”? Did you know their publisher wanted them to publish by subscription (crowd funding)? Did you know the publisher withdrew support when too few subscriptions were sold?
#WritersCoffeeClub - 3. May: Does your work include pictures, maps or other custom graphics?
Yes. More than 350 illustrations by various Norwegian artists, such as August Schneider, Erik Werenskiold, Theodor Kittelsen, P. N. Arbo, Hans Gude, Otto Sinding, Vincent St. Lerche, Adolph Tidemand, and Johan Eckersberg.
Parts of the whole Asbjørnsen & Moe collection have been translated and published before me. I am critical of every one that I have seen (which doesn’t necessarily mean I hate them). I am also critical of nearly every review of these translations I have read.
Any work of translation is a statement from the translator, and should therefore be approached with scepticism. Reviewers ought not comment on matters they know not of, such as faithfulness to the original, publishing histories, original editions, etc.
“There is no mention of the devil in the oldest accounts of these women who fare abroad in Holda’s company by night; he was only introduced later. But the whole thing is reminiscent of Odin when the witches are called caped riders. Their intercourse with the devil, and his choice of the one he likes best as witch queen on Walpurgis night is probably associated with the wedding feasts of Odin and Freya, which were celebrated at these times. It is likely that folklore has attached to these wedding dances the idea that the witches dance the snow off Bloksberg on the night of 1st May.”