This is the founding collection of Norwegian folktales, Norske Folkeeventyr, a landmark in Scandinavian cultural history and also in folktale research. Asbjørnsen and Moe, longtime friends with wide-ranging scientific and literary interests, began collecting folktales in 1833, making this one of the earliest collections of tales from oral tradition. The tales were published and republished at various dates from 1841 onward, with frequent changes to the texts. The present translation is from the fourth edition (1867), the last one that was overseen by the two authors. A short “Translator’s Note” at the beginning of the present book provides biographical information and some background context.
Of the sixty folktale texts, roughly half are magic tales, a third are humorous tales and anecdotes, and the rest are animal tales. Some are aimed at children—The Three Billy Goats Gruff, for example. Others, for more mature audiences, have complicated adventures with a lot of excitement and travel, or include semi-erotic scenes. Sharp contrasts, both within a tale and between different tales, add drama. Wealth and poverty are described or demonstrated in many different ways. The range of characters is wide: kindness is evident but so is horrible violence. Some characters are resourceful while others are fools. Many are wonderfully competent: Kari Stave-Skirt (formerly Katie Woodencloak), with her companion the magic ox; and the Master Maiden, who tells her boyfriend how to acomplish impossible tasks and then arranges for both of them to escape from a troll. The rags-to-riches boy named Ash Lad appears in a number of tales (or, perhaps, this name applies to a series of different boys). He is sometimes a hero who rights wrongs and sometimes just a devious trickster.
These tales are well known to English-language readers through the translations of George W. Dasent (Popular Tales from the Norse, 1859 and later editions). His translations were so popular, and so often reissued, that few others exist. However, Dasent’s versions employ dated, peculiar diction: the Ash Lad character was named Boots; a chubby boy called Butterball was called Buttercup; a princess who tells lies was called a storyteller; the Devil in one tale was called a “Deil.”
This new translation by Tiima Nunnally is spare but still very readable. The syntax in the Norse text is rather simple and the English often matches it clause for clause. In some of the tales, many sentences are short and the text can seem choppy; however, an oral reader can easily insert “and” or “so” to enhance the flow. Names of characters are left as they are (Per and Paal, Lillekort, Gidske) or partly translated (Aase Goosegirl, Haaken Speckled-Beard).
Following the tales are forewords and notes to several editions of Norske Folkeeventyr. Of these, Moe’s introduction to the second edition is outstanding. He argues for the long continuity of Norwegian tradition by pointing out various striking motifs from medieval literature (the Eddas and sagas) that appear in these nineteenth-century folktales, and then some other folktale motifs that have gone through a Christian transformation. Another section of this introduction, in which Moe compares the Norwegian tales to those from other countries, has, inexplicably, been omitted.
There is a list, also taken from the second edition, that tells where each tale was collected and where else, as far as Moe was aware in 1852, that tale was known. There is no other folklore critical apparatus, nor is there any reference to subsequent folktale scholarship. Fortunately, the Wikipedia entry “Norwegian Folktales” provides a tale type number for each title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Folktales. This entry covers Asbjørnsen and Moe’s published work: the sixty tales here, another fifty in the sequel, Norske Folkeeventyr Ny Samling (1871, translated by Dasent as Tales from the Fjeld), and some legends and miscellaneous tales. The Types of the Norwegian Folktale, by Ørnulf Hodne (Oslo etc.: Universitetsforlaget, 1984), lists significant published and archived versions of each tale type, showing its geographic spread and relative popularity.
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[Review length: 648 words • Review posted on January 30, 2020]