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.”
The biggest billy-goat taunts the troll that has just threatened him, with a rhyme:
Come on, then! My two spears shall fly,
And they shall put out your eyes!
I have two great boulder-stones,
They shall crush both marrow and bone!
I suspected I knew the answer to my question about the indentity of the stones, but without some kind of corroboration, I wasn't going to mention genitals in reference to what many perceive as a children's tale.
So, here it is: a corresponding folktale from Germany leaves us in no doubt at all.
“Don’t worry,” I thought, “it's only a preface; it won’t take more than an evening to translate. Put it off until later.”
It’s later.
The preface is 22 pages long. The language is old-fashioned, the argument is convoluted. It’s taken me a week so far, and I’m still only ⅔ of the way through.
On the other hand, it is one of the most interesting texts I have ever read, documenting the connection between (modern) folkloric witches and their familiars, valkyries, and the goddess Freya. The #folklore, #mythology, and writing communities need to read it.
A footnote from the text: A German journalist and poet [Julius Hammer] states in truth: “There are no poetic flowers that are so difficult to imitate as folktales and legends. Artificial flowers of this kind betray themselves as soon as they are made, even if they come from the most skilled hand.”
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.
"Now Ingjebjørg felt regret for what she believed of her beloved, and she knew not what to do. She was already married, yet she did not want to lose her first love."
My thinking is moving towards the possibility of a second edition of Erotic Folktales from Norway. New material, re-edited, reintroduced...
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, and we were all told to stay at home indefinitely, instead of nurturing sour-dough starter, I translated Sigrid Undset's puppet theatre stage play, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, which I released under a Creative Commons licence in the hope that someone will take the time and trouble to stage it once again.
It has been freely available on Wikimedia ever since, but today I had the bright idea of uploading it to the @internetarchive, too.
#AmWriting a hitherto uncomposed #bisexual, #polyamorous#folktale collected in 1870, in Valle, Aust Agder, in southern #Norway. Nominally AT550 (the golden bird), though the only birds are two crow witches.
This folktale even escaped the attention of Oddbjørg Høgset, the editor of Erotiske folkeeventyr (which forms the foundation of my book from 2017, Erotic Folktales from Norway), because the record lives in a letter to Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, rather than in the folktale notebooks.
“When they were able to speak together, the king’s son told her how everything at come to pass. Now Ingebjørg felt regret for what she had believed of her beloved, and she knew not what to do. She was a married man, yet she did not want to lose her first love.”