So, I now have “Ingjebjørg the Good” in English, and I want to show off how I ended the tale.
The record (which is all I have; the folktale was never recomposed) says, “even though the raconteuse ‘was there,’ as they say, she could by no means tell me...” and it goes off into an aside about narrative consistency (a lost cause in the case of folklore, if ever I heard of one). Recognising the ending as one in the vein of ”I too was at the wedding...” I came up with the following:
“I too was at this wedding. I hadn’t been invited, but they took me and stuffed me head first down the barrel of a canon, and shot me thither. And when I arrived, not one person paid me any attention before I began to tell this tale.”
Now, before you start overwhelming me with your admiration, I have just discovered something much more interesting: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen certainly read the folktale. Why should this be interesting?
This is a folktale with a in which #bisexualism and #polyamory resolve the conflict. It was collected by August Schneider from Thore Aslaksdatter in Gudbrandsdalen in 1870. Schneider sent it in a letter to Asbjørnsen, who must have found it interesting, for he took the opening line and pasted it on to the beginning of “White Bear King Valemon,” which Schneider collected from the same informant at the same time. The record of Valemon, which I also have, does not show the opening line of the published folktale (“Now once upon a time, there was, as well there may be, a king...”); the record of Ingjebjørg does, along with Schneider's remark: “all the folktales up there begin like this.”
Of course, Asbjørnsen sat on the Ingjebjørg tale; it has never been published.
I am at a bit of a stand concerning where to put it.