 Peter Christian Asbjörnsen |  Jörgen Moë |
Fairy Tales: Once Upon a Time
Who among us cannot remember loving fairy tales as a child? For some of us this affinity
endures beyond childhood into our adult years. What is it about these seemingly simple stories
that captures and holds our attention?
Speaking for myself, it is first and foremost the magical quality. Only in literature can one
experience the certainty of supernatural phenomena, talking animals, enchanted beings and
objects, and mythical creatures. The child in everyone wants these to exist. Fairy tales allow the
reader to enjoy these instances without demanding a reality check. Lovers of fairy tales
willingly, even unknowingly, suspend disbelief to partake of the feast of make-believe.
Another attractive aspect of such tales are the heroic deeds found therein. In a modern world
always in need of heroes, there is a sense of hopefulness in characters who behave with courage,
integrity, and exhibit nothing but virtuous qualities, especially in adversity. From a realistic
standpoint, this behavior is magical in itself.
Finally in most tales there is the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Oppressors are brought low
as the oppressed are elevated to their just reward. Greed is punished, while generosity is exalted.
Spite and meanness are penalized while kindness and charity are rewarded. Again, in our world
where the opposite is too often (once is too often) the case, tales of such triumph refresh and
replenish the reader's spirit.
Fairy Tale Origins
The aforementioned pleasures derived from fairy, or folk, tales offer clues to their raison d'être. From time immemorial, the human spirit has required the comfort and inspiration provided by tales of make-believe where the good guy always wins. Folk tales may have been the original escapist literature, oral collections handed down over generations to explain why things are the way they are, or how nature affects the lives of ordinary people.
While different cultures contain tales unique to that culture, may stories exist in parallel form across cultures. An excellent example is the Cinderella story. The Appalachia version is Ashpet; the English counterpart is Tattercoats. The most familiar comes from the French version, Cendrillon, which was adopted into that most well-known collection of fairy tales, the 19th century work of the brothers Grimm of Germany. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm took the oral traditions of folk legends, then edited them with a literary twist.
A lesser-known, but equally impressive and still popular collection of tales are those compiled by the Norwegian folklorists, Peter Christian Asbjörnsen and Jörgen Moë. These two friends took their cue of editorializing from the brothers Grimm as they collected material from ordinary people around Eastern Norway, preserved intact the essence of the tales, then retold them to appeal to a more literate audience. 1 Their respective backgrounds, that of zoologist/ forester and theological scholar, contributed to this dualistic representation of the body of Norwegian folklore. which was published in 1841 as Norske Folke-Eventyr (Norwegian Folktales). The Norse word, eventyr, meaning folktale, is actually a Latin borrowing of the word, "adventura,"2 whose meaning is clear to English speakers. The stories of Asbjörnsen and Moë have endured with numerous reprintings and translations into major languages. The best-known English translations appeared in 1859, the work of George Webbe Dasent, who endeavored to maintain the "literary flavor of the originals."3 Though other translations have appeared through the years, Dasent's are generally recognized as unsurpassed.
Peter Christian Asbjörnsen | Jörgen Moë |
East of the Sun and West of the Moon
This is perhaps one of the most beloved of Asbjörnsen and Moë's tales, and together with The Three Billy Goats Gruff, is certainly the most well-known. In selecting a version to annotate, I chose a translation, not by Dasent, but one no longer under copyright restrictions. This version is a translation written by a Norwegian immigrant to America, Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen. In her foreward to the collection of tales, she emphasizes the preservation of "the conversational style of the teller of tales," 4
In the text that follows, the links within the body are the annotations. Mostly these are comments on some aspect or motif I found intriguing or worthy of explanation. Some deal with symbols found throughout fairy tales and other works of literature. For the sake of readability, if you have not read this tale, I suggest reading it through once without skipping around before linking to the annotations.