The name Peter Christen Asbjørnsen is familiar to folk-narrative scholars as the co-author, along with collaborator Jørgen Moe, of the classic nineteenth-century collection Norske Folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folktales). The work began appearing in 1841, a couple decades after the publication in Germany of the collection of folktales made by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1812–15), upon which it was modeled, and within a few years of the publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairytales in neighboring Denmark (1835–42). In the English-speaking world Asbjørnsen’s and Moe’s collection is best known in the translation made by George Webbe Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse (1858), which itself went through several editions.

What is less well known, outside of Norway at least, is that Asbjørnsen also made a compilation of legends, Norske Huldreeventyr og Folkesagn (Norwegian Huldre-Fairytales and Folk Legends), hereafter NHF, a work of national romanticism that attained the status of a classic in its own land. Asbjørnsen’s compilation has been neglected both by literary scholars, who regard it as folklore, and by folklorists, who consider it primarily a work of literature. In the book under review Marte Hult attempts to illuminate and appreciate NHF as a literary, cultural, and folkloric document.

Whereas Asbjørnsen’s and Moe’s Norwegian Folktales is a collection of tales, Asbjørnsen’s NHF is a collection of legends and memorats embedded in twenty-seven short stories. The short stories typically feature an educated urbanite telling in the first person of an encounter with a number of rural persons, who in the course of their conversation recount several legends. The legends derive from Norwegian folk tradition, but the frame narrator, the internal narrators, and the narrative situations are improvisations of the author. His model for the frame tales was probably T. Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, which Asbjørnsen had read in a German translation by the Grimms.

Asbjørnsen’s narratives are not the grand historical legends of Norwegian tradition—accounts of St. Olaf, the Black Death, famous battles, etc.—but so-called mythical legends, reports of human encounters with the supernatural beings of the woods, fields, and mountains. The stories came from his own fieldwork, from texts sent to him, and from printed sources. Like his contemporaries Asbjørnsen treated his texts freely, improving the texts of poor informants and creating synthetic narratives from different versions of the same story.

The device of the frame tale allows Asbjørnsen not only to make his texts more attractive reading by embedding them in narrative situations, which he recounts in engaging ways, but also allows him to distance himself from the legends by attributing them to others, in this case to uneducated persons. He tends moreover to subvert the legend narrators in different ways such as by making the internal narrator a drinker or by having a member of the audience call the speaker a liar or by having the narrator disclaim his own report. Although Asbjørnsen loved a good story, he deplored folk beliefs and indeed was part of a movement to enlighten the common people. The tension between pleasure and folly that Asbjørnsen felt is perhaps emblematized in the word “huldreeventyr” that he coined for the narratives in NHF. “Eventyr” is the ordinary Norwegian word for “fairytale,” whereas “huldre” (“hidden folk”) refers to any one of several kinds of supernatural beings who typically appear in legends. The term thus suggests that the internal stories are at once belief-stories and entertaining fictions.

Hult analyzes the content of the 117 embedded narratives according to character, situation, and theme, and also provides fascinating tallies of the narrators. To give a sense of the latter: most of the fictive narrators are male, and most of the protagonists in their stories are also male; fewer fictive narrators are female, but the majority of their protagonists are also female. Do we have reliable ethnographic data here? Surprisingly, or perhaps disappointingly, the answer is no, for the gender of the literary narrators does not always agree with the gender of the narrators from whom Asbjørnsen got his narratives, which in most cases appears to be known. Sometimes he preserves the original gender, and sometimes he changes it, in no predictable pattern: females become males, and vice versa. Nor does he take pains to retain the source-narrator’s class, for he attributes all his legends and memorats to rustics and socially marginal persons such as gypsies, although he got some of the texts from educated persons, including his friends.

Hult has written an interesting book that accomplishes its goals of calling attention to NHF as a neglected work of folkloric literature and of situating it illuminatingly in its principal contexts, including the nineteenth-century Norwegian struggle for a sense of national identity. The author is a Scandinavianist with academic training in folklore, which she puts to good use here.

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[Review length: 795 words • Review posted on February 16, 2006]