Norske eventyr — the fairy tales Asbjørnsen and Moe saved
The Norwegian folk tales — the Three Billy Goats Gruff, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the Ash Lad — collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe in the 1840s. Darker than the picture books that followed, and the unlikely place a national written language got its start.
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe met as schoolboys at the rectory school at Norderhov and spent the 1840s walking the eastern valleys with notebooks, sitting at farmhouse hearths and writing down tales that country people had told aloud for generations and never written. The stories survive because the two of them went and got them before they were lost.
The first installment of Norske Folkeeventyr came out of Johan Dahl’s shop in Christiania in December 1841 — ninety-six pages, no title page, no editors’ names — with more to follow in 1843 and 1844. The model was the Brothers Grimm, who had done the same for Germany a generation earlier.
The tales were far darker than the picture books that came after. De tre bukkene Bruse — the Three Billy Goats Gruff — ends in the printed text with the biggest goat goring the troll’s eyes out with his horns, crushing him to bits, body and bones, and pitching the remains into the falls. Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne — East of the Sun and West of the Moon — turns on a white bear who is a man by night, a candle the heroine is forbidden to light, and the single drop of hot tallow that betrays her. Askeladden, the Ash Lad, the slow brother who lies in the cinders by the fire, is the one who wins the kingdom in the end — usually after his older brothers have been killed off for impatience or pride.
What reads now as a children’s book was also nation-building. Educated Norwegians in the 1840s still wrote in Danish, thirty years after the country had left four centuries of Danish rule, and the schoolroom language was Danish too. Asbjørnsen and Moe split the difference — Danish spelling carrying Norwegian words and Norwegian sentence-rhythm — and the compromise they invented to make trolls sound Norwegian on the page fed straight into Bokmål, one of the two written forms of Norwegian in everyday use today. From Berlin, Jacob Grimm called them die besten Märchen, die es gibt — the best folk-tales there are — and the second edition was dedicated back to him.
The images came later and never left. The first illustrated edition appeared in 1879; Erik Werenskiold brought in Theodor Kittelsen, and by 1900 Kittelsen had painted his twelve canvases of Soria Moria castle at his cabin in Sigdal. Norwegian children have grown up reading the tales with Kittelsen’s trolls on the facing page ever since.