Folktales of Norway

Often lacking the clear episodic structure of folktales about talking animals and magic objects, legends grow from retellings of personal experiences. Christiansen isolated some seventy-seven legend types, and many of these are represented here in absorbing stories of St. Olaf, hidden treasures, witches, and spirits of the air, water, and earth. The ugly, massively strong, but slow-witted trolls are familiar to English-speaking readers. Less well-known, but the subject of an enormous number of legends, are the more manlike yet sinister "huldre-folk" who live in houses and try to woo human girls. These tales reflect the wildness of Norway, its mountains, forests, lakes, and sea, and the stalwart character of its sparse population.

"The translation is excellent, retaining the traditional Norwegian style . . . the tales themselves will also appeal to the interested layman."—Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9780226375205

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1964 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved

Published 1964. Paperback edition 1968

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-226-10510-5 (paperbound)

LCN: 64-15830

08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99        10 11 12 13 14

ISBN: 978-0-226-37520-5 (ebook)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

FOLKTALES OF

Norway

EDITED BY

Reidar Christiansen

TRANSLATED BY

PAT SHAW IVERSEN

FOREWORD BY

Richard M. Dorson

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

Folktales

OF THE WORLD

GENERAL EDITOR : RICHARD M. DORSON

Foreword

Everyone in the English-speaking world knows the pioneer collection of folktales made by the brothers Grimm in Germany, but relatively few are familiar with the second major collection, assembled in Norway by Peter Christen Asbjörnsen and Jörgen Moe. In its day their Norske Folkeeventyr achieved a full measure of celebrity. On intellectual grounds it won fame for bolstering the thesis of Jacob Grimm, that an oral literature of the Aryan peoples had filtered throughout all the countries of Europe. The same tales discovered in Germany were now collected in Norway, and clearly their counterparts must exist in neighboring lands. Popular appeal may explain why Norwegian folktales have flourished ever since, translated and published under such enticing titles as East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

From its beginnings, Norwegian interest in folk materials coincided with the stirrings of nationalism and the vogue of romanticism. Norway gained her independence from Denmark in 1814 and throughout the nineteenth century sought to promote her national identity. In the wake of the Grimms, Norwegian collectors began to gather tales and songs of the villagers, supplying evidence for a living speech and an ancient mythology distinctively Norse. These newfound traditions were believed to mirror the craggy fjords and forest-covered slopes of the northern land. The question of landsmaal, or peasant speech, around which the debate over a national language raged, became deeply involved with the new science of folklore, for the oral literature of the people was expressed, and recorded, in the tongue of the people.

When the first book of Norwegian folktales was issued, by the minister Andreas Faye in 1833, under the title Norske Sagn (Norwegian Legends), it deplored the superstitions of the peasantry. By the time the second edition was issued in 1844, the rationalistic disdain of the uneducated, inherited from the eighteenth century, was yielding to the mellow romanticism of the nineteenth, which saw the humble cotter not as an ignorant peasant but as nature’s nobleman. Faye’s revised title, Norske Folke-Sagn, introduced in the word folke this new spiritual notion. Immediately, Faye was challenged by Peter Christen Asbjörnsen (1812–85), who considered Faye’s work unwarrantedly didactic. In the 1830’s Asbjörnsen had begun collecting traditions in the countryside, and when destiny threw him into contact with Jörgen Moe (1813–82), first at school in Norderhov, and later at the Royal Frederik University in Christiania, he found a kindred spirit. The two friends and collaborators were to follow quite different careers, for Moe became an ordained clergyman and finally a bishop, and Asbjörnsen earned his living as a zoölogist and forest-master. The quiet, reflective Moe wrote lyrical poems of some merit, and the outgoing, hearty Asbjörnsen translated Darwin’s Origin of Species into Norwegian, but their most zealous endeavors in the 1830’s and ’40’s were devoted to folklore.

In 1840 Moe published a collection of popular songs in local dialects, of which one-third came from oral, folk sources. In his native inland district of Ringerike, Moe had grown up in the midst of traditional lore. Asbjörnsen, a city youth from Christiania, also engaged in a preliminary effort, issuing in Christmas, 1837 a picture book for Norwegian children titled Nor, with Bernt Moe, a cousin of Jörgen. The first half, contributed by Bernt, dealt with celebrated Norwegian heroes of history and saga; the second half, by Asbjörnsen, presented folktales, and this section attracted the most favorable comment. Now the two friends, informed through the Grimms of oral peasant tales and sensitive to the rising spirit of Norwegian patriotism, prepared to launch their Norske Folkeeventyr. A prospectus written by Moe in 1840 stated, No cultivated person now doubts the scientific importance of the folk tales . . . they help to determine a people’s unique character and outlook.¹ And he promised to reproduce the stories as faithfully as had the Grimms in their admirable Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

In 1841 the first pamphlet of folktales appeared, in complete anonymity, lacking title, collectors’ names, foreword. Three more pamphlets followed in the next three years. Collectively they constitute the first edition of the Norske Folkeeventyr.

The ensuing years saw considerable and intensive fieldwork by the collaborators, who were assisted by university grants. Directly inspired and motivated by the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Asbjörnsen and Moe corresponded with and sought the assistance of Jacob Grimm. Seeking a renewal of his scholarship to study folklore, Jörgen Moe wrote Grimm for a letter of support to the members of the University Council. His request to Grimm has an eerily contemporary ring.

Last year I applied for and received such a stipend in order to study our folk poetry in relationship to that of related races. It was only with great difficulties that the scholarship came through, not because those in charge were in doubt of my competence but because this subject could not be brought under any academic discipline. Consequently many of our highly learned people were very much in doubt about the scientific value of such studies. (October 12, 1849)²

In the same letter Moe speaks of the common principles which he shares with his illustrious German colleague. He writes that comparative studies of folk poetry will yield as valuable results to the historian as to the student of comparative linguistics. Especially now may such studies be an actuality; with the awakening nationalistic strivings of peoples the particular poetic creations by the folk everywhere are more and more the subject for attention and careful collecting. Such a statement well reveals the synthesis of comparative and nationalist emphases, and the stress on fieldwork, that distinguish the work of both the German and Norwegian folklorists.

Turning aside from the wonder tales of magic to legends of spirit beings, Asbjörnsen on his own published Norske Huldre-Eventyr og Folksagn in 1845. He followed this with a second collection two years later, and in the ensuing years he re-edited and reprinted them (1859, 1866, 1870). In this work Asbjörnsen introduced the fictional device of a frame setting with an imaginary village narrator relating the olden stories. This manner of presentation, which did at least suggest the verisimilitude of the recited narratives, had been adopted by an early field collector, T. Crofton Croker, who in 1825 published Fairy Traditions of the South of Ireland. Jacob Grimm translated the book into German the following year as Irische Elfenmärchen, and Asbjörnsen spied it in that form. The fairies of Ireland corresponded to the huldre folk of Norway, belonging to the same order of bothersome goblins of house and field. In calling attention to traditional belief in demons, Asbjörnsen performed a valuable service, since this form of folk narrative is usually slighted in favour of fictions.

Four terms had now been introduced into the vocabulary of Norwegian folk-narrative: eventyr, sagn, folke, huldre. They were employed in various combinations, and tended to blend together—Asbjörnsen used all four in the title of his 1845 collection—but they contributed distinct concepts to the young field. Eventyr designated fictional tales or Märchen, usually called fairy tales in English, but the word was also used in a wider sense, like folktale, to cover all oral narrative. Thus it was possible to speak of huldre-eventyr. Sagn derived from the German Sagen and similarly meant legends connected with particular places, such as haunted castles. Huldre stood for a class of unnatural creatures, ranging from elves to monsters, which were sighted and encountered and talked about by village people. (Hulder in the singular signifies a wood nymph.) Folke indicated the oral and traditional as opposed to the polished and literary character of twice-told tales offered to the public.

Asbjörnsen and Moe claimed to offer scientifically accurate specimens of Norwegian folk literature in their Norske Folkeeventyr. They proposed to improve upon the Grimms’ methods, feeling that the brothers had taken too many liberties in rewriting oral texts. Nevertheless, the Norwegians shared with the Germans a belief in the artistic value of the tale set before educated readers. The sponsor of the tale acts not only as a faithful collector-reproducer, but also should serve as a writer-artist, who seeks to convey the personal style and mannerisms of the teller and the full sense of the story. Since the narrator can use gestures and intonations denied to the writer, a written tale needs additional words to compensate for these lacks. In the case of outstanding folk tellers, little interpolation is required, but an inept narrator yields a sketchy text on which the writer-reporter must elaborate. Asbjörnsen and Moe thought of the reciters of Icelandic sagas as the ideal and prototypical Norwegian storytellers, and sought to achieve this ideal standard when their informants fell short. They thereby deviated from the present-day view that all texts, garbled or ample, should be recorded literally. But their end product so appealed to Jacob Grimm that he described them as the best Märchen in print.

Directly related to the question of accuracy in printing oral texts was the matter of language. Could and should the local dialect forms be rendered? Here the issue of landsmaal, the native speech as opposed to the cultivated tongue, flared forth. In general the Norwegian collaborators strove for a middle ground, giving the flavour of the local phrasing without jeopardy to the sense. Asbjörnsen drew a clear distinction between eventyr and sagn, employing many more proverbs, sayings, and dialect expressions in the legends than in the Märchen, on the premise that legends were more firmly rooted in specific localities, where the fairy tales drifted about the general population.³

Language in turn involved nationalism; the speech of the landsman reflected his character, his character was molded by the fjords and forests, and so, according to the theory of nature symbolism, the eventyr and sagn embodied the deepest and purest strains of the Norwegian soul. They were nature poems, living specimens of the ancient Norse mythology, said Asbjörnsen. How then could the same peasant tales be found throughout Europe, as the Grimms’ hypothesis of a common Aryan origin specified and the evidence supported? Moe puzzled over this question in his introduction to the 1851 edition, and at length saw an answer: the plot outlines of the European tales did indeed mirror their common ancestry, but a given national stock, like the Norwegian, still expressed the special characteristics of the people transmitting, and transmuting, the traditions. The details of place and personality, and the metaphorical expressions, breathed the spirit of Norway.

The notion of separate racial heritages of folklore—Celtic, Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian—was first voiced by the poet Johann Gottfried von Herder in the late eighteenth century, and was avidly seized on by cultural nationalists. Norwegian intellectuals, smarting under the Danish domination which since the Reformation had foisted upon them a foreign clergy, bureaucracy, and burgher class, sought further to refine the Scandinavian inheritance by isolating unmistakably Norwegian elements. Moe endeavored to define these qualities. He spoke of the balance between humor and terror, arising from a self-assured people living on a harsh terrain. The youthful hero Askeladden, counterpart of the boy dragon-killer in fairy tales throughout Europe, in Norwegian folk-narrative exemplified the confidence of the landsman in a mysterious power on high guiding his destiny. As late as 1957 a newspaper article in Oslo described Askeladden as a crafty, clever, glib Norwegian farmer with the necessary sense and power to win half a kingdom.⁴

Asbjörnsen theorized chiefly about folk beliefs and legends. Following the nature-symbolical school of interpretation, he construed such figures as the hulder, the nisse, and the jutul as reflections of physical nature recast into eerie forms by the folk. Harsh, forbidding crags and fjords shaped the malevolent jutul, verdant hills and gentle slopes fashioned the wood-nymph called hulder. In the wake of Jacob Grimm he accepted the historical-evolutionary thesis that these supernatural creatures were further molded by the ancient Germanic pantheon, from which they had degenerated to their present forms. Yet a third reading, the historical-psychological, regarded non-rational folk beliefs as primitive conceptions of the race revived in the soul of the peasant during special moods and stages. The philological mythology of Jacob Grimm, the pastoral romanticism of Herder, and the evolutionary biology of Darwin were thus synthesized in Asbjörnsen’s thinking about folk beliefs in spirit beings and the tales they engendered. While these ideas were derivative, Asbjörnsen did introduce a new concept, the distinction between personal and general traditions. Individual accounts of dealings with spirit creatures he called huldre-eventyr. Oft retold narratives of personal and historic episodes took on an epic pattern over the centuries, and became egentlige sagn, or genuine legends. Unfortunately, the term eventyr was inappropriate, since it suggested invented tales rather than accepted beliefs.

During the 1850’s the reputation of the Norske-Eventyr rapidly grew, both at home and abroad. Asbjörnsen and Moe brought out a second, enlarged edition in 1851, with a one-hundred-and-fifteen-page appendix of comparative notes and an extended scholarly introduction by Moe. From this edition the English scholar George Webbe Dasent rendered a translation in 1858, Popular Tales from the Norse, destined for fame. In a letter to Jacob Grimm, Asbjörnsen commented on the difference in reception accorded the tales in England and in Germany.

Our Norwegian folktales seem to be much more appealing to the English than to the Germans. At Christmas a new translation was published in Edinburgh and London with, according to the reviews, a new and enlarged introduction which received fine reviews in the Times, the Athenaeum, the Saturday Review, and many other English papers and magazines. Already in March another and much larger edition was issued, from which it is indicated that the book will become very popular in England. In Germany, on the other hand, there still exists only the Bresemann translation from 1847 in the first edition and that at a price that is hardly more than 1/5 of the price of the English translation. (May 6, 1859)⁵

In the lengthy, impassioned, and eloquently Victorian Introductory Essay on the Origin and Diffusion of Popular Tales, by Sir George W. Dasent,⁶ we can perceive the intensity and even violence of the controversies aroused by the newly discovered oral literature of European peasants. The whole course of civilization is bound up with the theories of the origin and migration of folktales. Vehemently Dasent attacks the tyrannical classicists who assert Greco-Roman origins for Aryan institutions and traditions; the Jewish race, the most obstinate and stiff-necked the world has ever seen, who blocked Christianity and progress and tampered with the Old Testament; the Christian fundamentalists, who blindly deny the evolutionary truths of Natural Science; the Roman Catholic Church, which embraced idolatry in the eleventh century when Pope Gregory VII commanded the priests to celibacy. Even the highly cultured people of India, whose Sanskrit language and sacred writings are the fountainhead of the Aryan tongues and learning, suffered, according to Dasent, from a racial lethargy which permanently arrested their development. Only in the Aryan race and Protestant faith in Europe—where the miserable remnants of the Mongolian invaders, the Lapps, Finns, and Basques, had been swept aside—does modern civilization bloom and flourish.

And how did the popular tales of the Norse enter into this sweeping racial theory of the march of mankind? The key to the theory lay in the premise that the Indo-Aryan tongues were derived from Sanskrit. Nineteenth-century philologists believed that the history of a nation was found in its language. The corollary followed that India had sired the civilizations of Europe. Along the westward routes of the ancient tongues had traveled the popular tales now scattered from the Scots to the Chinese. Jacob Grimm had effectively documented for the folktales what Max Müller had proved for language, that India was the parent and the source. No longer should the traditions of the peasantry be regarded as fragments of the myths inherited from Greece and Rome. They came from the majestic East.

Upholders of the theory of Greco-Roman origins had still another powerful argument against the Sanskritists. For if they yielded to the overwhelming evidence of Indian and European parallels, still they contended that the fables and tales of the East had penetrated western Europe through two thirteenth-century translations, the Directorium Humanae Vitae and the History of the Seven Sages. Dasent vigorously criticized this copying theory, with examples of widely distributed tales that must have preceded such late translations. As instances of primeval stories, he cited the familiar traditions of William Tell, and his counterparts, who shot the apple from his son’s head, and of the faithful dog Gellert who saved his master’s babe from a wolf, and was charged with the child’s death by the false wife pointing to his bloody jaws. Both these events transpired in many places in different centuries. In the very collection of Norse tales he was translating Dasent found close connections with Sanskrit originals; the magic bowl, staff, and pair of shoes, which endowed their possessor with powers to fly and vanish, appeared in the eleventh-century Katha Sarit Sagara and in the nineteenth-century Norwegian tale of The Three Princesses of Whiteland (in this collection The Three Princesses in Whittenland).

If these Norse traditions, then, shared a common character with other Aryan tales all transmitted from a common source in India, what was particularly Norse about them? The national character of Norway was shaped by the ancient mythology and the towering landscape. Thus the isolated Icelandic settlement, and the late conversion of the people to Christianity, had nourished the old Norse mythology, which left its imprints on the modern popular tales. Here Dasent relied heavily on the doctrine of survivals in folklore inherited from early stages of cultural development, a doctrine developed by his countrymen with great persuasiveness. So Dasent saw magic wishing objects and animals as reflections of the Norse god Odin or Wish; God and St. Peter as Christian counterparts of early pagan wanderers; the Virgin Mary as a mythic guardian of the heavens in The Lassie and her Grandmother. The ancient Norse conception of Hel as a not overly unpleasant place was apparent in The Mastermaid. Survivals of heathenism from pagan times could be read in the incidents of witchcraft and transformation and the appearance of giants and trolls throughout the tales.

Dasent concludes his essay with a ringing pronouncement on the cultural traits discernible in the popular tales of all peoples.

The tales of all races have a character and manner of their own. Among the Hindoos the straight stem of the story is overhung with a network of imagery which reminds one of the parasitic growth of a tropical forest. Among the Arabs the tale is more elegant, pointed with a moral and adorned with tropes and episodes. Among the Italians it is bright, light, dazzling, and swift. Among the French we have passed from the woods, and fields, and hills, to my lady’s boudoir—rose-pink is the prevailing colour, and the air is loaded with patchouli and mille fleurs. . . . The Swedes are more stiff, and their style is more like that of a chronicle than a tale. The Germans are simple, hearty, and rather comic than humorous; and M. Moe has well said, that as we read them it is as if we sat and listened to some elderly woman of the middle class, who recites them with a clear, full, deep voice.⁷

But in contrast with these national varieties, Dasent, following Jörgen Moe, perceives a clear Norwegian stamp.

These Norse Tales we may characterize as bold, out-spoken, and humorous, in the true sense of humour. In the midst of every difficulty and danger arises that old Norse feeling of making the best of everything, and keeping a good face to the foe. The language and tone are perhaps rather lower than in some other collections, but it must be remembered that these are the tales of hempen homespuns, of Norse yeomen, of Norske Bönder, who call a spade a spade, and who burn tallow, not wax; and yet in no collection of tales is the general tone so chaste, are the great principles of morality better worked out, and right and wrong kept so steadily in sight.⁸

The pride of Norwegians in their folklore, so clearly voiced by Dasent, has continued unabated to the present day.⁹ Jörgen Moe’s son, Moltke Moe (1859–1913), achieved a fame as a folklorist equal to that of his father, and he perpetuated the work of the two pioneer collectors in a spirit of both filial and national piety. Beginning in 1878, as a youth of nineteen, he traveled each year through the villages in quest of oral traditions. On his first trip, to Telemark in the southwest, Moltke garnered a rich harvest of tales and ballads, including accounts of the oskorei, the army of specters and demons hurding across the mountain ranges during the storms of winter. That same year he provided detailed notes to the collection of eventyr made by Kristoffer Janson from the eastern province of Sandeherad. In 1886 members of the Storting invited him to serve as professor of the vernacular languages at the University of Christiania, and he accepted on condition that the post also include the responsibility to lecture on popular traditions. In 1899 his title was altered to professor of Norwegian popular tradition and medieval literature. The university chair gave an official sanction to his life work, the preservation and presentation of Norwegian folk materials; he prepared a standard edition of the Norwegian ballads, issued new printings of the fairy tales, and corresponded with collectors all over the country and accumulated their manuscripts in addition to his father’s and his own. His dedication to these enterprises has been set forth in a touching memoir by the eminent Danish folklorist, Axel Olrik:

I noticed from his books, his speech and everything, how closely allied Moltke Moe was not only to his own life-task, but also to that of his ancestors, to the work of his father, whom he had loved and followed with deep respect, and of Peter Christen Asbjörnscn, whose friendship during his youth had had such great influence on him, and had made intelligible to him the nature of the people and the popular poetry. Every step on their road was to him identical to a piece of Norway’s history; every notebook or leaflet a document for which he not only was accountable to them and to science, but of which he had charge on behalf of the Norwegian people, and of which he should draw forth an extensive biography, containing a thorough scientific, artistic and linguistic appreciation of the work of the two great narrators.¹⁰

As early as 1876 Moltke Moe began collaborating with Asbjörnsen on the successive editions of the eventyr, and after the latter’s death in 1885 Moltke continued the process of revision, according to testamentary provision, adding more and more flavour of the Norwegian dialects and striving still for perfected forms of the fictions. All the manuscripts and folklore books in his possession he bequeathed to the government for safekeeping, and these formed the basis of the Norsk Folkeminnesamling, established on his death in 1913 as a folklore archives in the university library. One can find today on its shelves the crabbed handwriting of a tale written by Jörgen Moe on horseback, or a volume inscribed to Asbjörnsen by Hans Christian Andersen.¹¹

Moltke Moe was succeeded by Knut Liestöl, who held the professorship of Norse popular tradition from 1917 to 1951. Liestöl edited the collected writings of Moltke Moe in three volumes (1925–27), and wrote a perceptive biography of Asbjörnsen (1947), analyzing closely his theories of legends and folk beliefs. He also prepared as co-author with Moltke Moe a selection of Norwegian ballads from the middle ages (1912). A major work of his own, available in English translation, is The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas (1930), a skilful treatment of oral narrative style and techniques as practiced by the reciters of Icelandic sagas. In his comment on the nature of oral historical tradition, Liestöl was able to draw from the accumulated knowledge of peasant storytelling in modern Norway. A memorial volume of ballads, folktales, and legends he had collected was edited in 1955 by his assistant and successor, Reidar Christiansen.

Reidar Christiansen has devoted a lengthy and productive career to the study of Norwegian traditional narrative. In 1921 he constructed a type index of eventyr, based on the system first proposed by the Finnish scholar Antti Aarne in 1910 for identifying traditional European folktales. When revised editions of Aarne’s type index were prepared for all Europe by Stith Thompson in 1928 and 1961, they duly incorporated the Christiansen references for Norway. Moving from the eventyr to the sagn, Christiansen in 1958 devised a completely new original type index, The Migratory Legends. The subtitle, A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants, indicated both the general and the restricted character of the work. Where Aarne had made an inventory of the whole European stock of fictional tales available to him, and identified popular tale-units which national collectors could recognize in their own countries, Christiansen constructed the legend index entirely from texts known in Norway, but intended that it too could guide legend cataloguers elsewhere in Europe.

This undertaking presented difficulties which had deterred earlier folklorists from attempting to classify the slippery materials of legend. Unlike the more firmly patterned animal and magical and romantic fictions, these retellings of personal experiences with ghosts and demons, or of exploits of local heroes and heroines facing invaders or robbers, lacked sharp and clear episodic structure. As the archives filled with all manner of local traditions, the evidence showed that many alleged happenings were in truth wandering fictions. To draw a line between the individual and the generic text, Christiansen employed a distinction already foreshadowed by Asbjörnsen and made explicit by the Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow with the terms memorates and fabulates. Many a villager or townsman might describe his or his neighbor’s encounter with a revenant, a witch, the Devil, a troll, and this formless account was a memorate; but frequent repetitions of such incidents gave them a definite sequence of motifs, and these were fabulates, or traveling legends. They fastened onto a churchyard, a boulder, a mound, a grove, a river, a fiddler, an old woman, a soldier on leave, as they moved from one community to another, and from one country to another. From this latter group Christiansen abstracted some seventy-seven legend types, many of which are represented in the present volume.

A wide-ranging scholar, Christiansen has not confined himself to the Norwegian repertoire, but has considered the relation of Scandinavian tales in general to Irish and Scottish lore, and of European narratives to their variants in the United States. A year as visiting professor of folklore at Indiana University in 1956–57, followed by a year with the Irish Folklore Commission in Dublin, contributed to the perspective of these comparative studies. In English alone he has published extensive monographs on The Vikjngs and the Vising Wars in Irish and Gaelic Tradition (1931), and a sequel, Studies in Irish and Scandinavian Folktales (1959), while a different line of comparison produced European Folklore in America (1962). These investigations departed from the customary style of tracing the life history of a tale by the so-called Finnish historic-geographic method, a method which Christiansen himself criticized as reducing the study of folklore to a dry list of statistical tables and charts. Instead, Christiansen has attempted, and succeeded, in viewing the similarities and differences in bodies of folktales as results of cultural and environmental circumstances affecting the narrator and his tradition.

It is only fitting that the present edition of Norwegian folktales be prepared by the leading folktale scholar of Norway, who continues the memorable enterprise commenced by Peter Asbjörnsen and Jörgen Moe.

RICHARD M. DORSON

Introduction

Both legends and folktales may be included under the term oral narrative tradition, in itself a province of the more extensive category of folklore. There is no universally accepted definition for folklore, but the suggestions listed in Funk and Wagnall’s Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend (1959–60) emphasize the traditional, unliterary origin of the elements involved. A precise definition may be useful, but folklore may also be considered as a special cultural complex, rooted in the distant past, yet persisting in the present because some of its main concepts are so deeply ingrained in the human consciousness that they still color the attitudes of a certain percentage of the population—especially in regions where the influence of modern industrial civilization has not been dominant. To us such traces seem irrational or superstitious, because they do not conform to what is taught in schools or to what is accessible in print. A better understanding of the relationship between the different branches of folklore may be obtained if they are considered as coherent parts of a special type of culture.

Every type of human society—savage or civilized, ancient or modern—has had some kind of emotional outlet as a relief from the problems of existence. One may call it art, in its broadest sense, without entering upon the vexatious question of origins. Music, with or without the accompaniment of dancing, and the drawing of rough pictures have this function, combined perhaps with some practical purpose. By analogy the folklore complex had its literature: poetry and prose. In our day both confront us in print (in folklore) as ballads and songs and folktales. The analogy may be extended to history—the record of what has happened or is believed to have happened. To us, history is a vast conglomeration of facts, speculations, and interpretations, too vast for any individual to master.

The urge to connect, somehow, the past to the present seems to be inherent in human beings at every stage of development. In the oral tradition, history has, as its counterpart, the legends. A better term is the one in use in some European countries—Sage, sagn, etc.—while legend is reserved for a religious, pious tale. The etymology of these terms indicates the difference between them. Sage is something told or spoken; legends are read, as in religious teaching and services.

Such generalized considerations serve to illustrate the essential difference between legend and folktale. The latter is akin to fiction, the former to history. Both, to a certain extent, may overlap, and a folktale may ultimately be founded upon a legend. In the main, however, both storytellers and listeners are fully aware of the difference, and where the telling of folktales still has a social function, it is addressed to adults, not exclusively to children.

The term fairy tale, used for folktale, is misleading and was coined in a milieu where the fairies no longer interfered effectively in the life of man, but, by literary influence, figured as diminutive ballet dancers, removed at a safe distance into an imaginary world. Actually, the fairies, or by whatever name they might be known, were legitimate denizens of this world, even if they might have a secret commonwealth of their own.

In classifying legends with history, one has to remember the essential change in the conception of Man, Nature, and the Universe during the last few centuries, especially on one important point: The implicit belief in the constant interference in everyday life by non-human powers has ceased to play a decisive part, even if traces of such belief may still color and influence the belief and behavior of individuals everywhere.

According to traditional, i.e., legendary, history, such powers interfere actively, and even if some legends do not refer to them, it is curious to note that legends primarily associated with some real event also have a tendency to introduce, at one point or another, a non-human factor. This tendency is probably connected with the function of the legend, which is to explain anything that seems to call for an explanation, corresponding, according to Malinowski, to the function of the myth in primitive society.

At the same time, however, a legend is told in a strictly realistic manner, as something which really did happen, but with the reference to the out-of-the-ordinary being the very reason for its being remembered at all. Legends may sometimes combine into a whole cycle, a saga, and when compared with documentary evidence, may turn out to be a fairly accurate reflection of a period, and even some insignificant and striking feature may turn out to have a foundation in fact.

Only rarely, however, do legends offer important additions to our knowledge of history, and the reason is obvious. Accounts in a fixed text remain unchanged, while in oral tradition the contents are subject to a further development. The surprising tenacity of folk-memory is well established, but in oral transmission a more or less unconscious rearrangement sets in, until a definite pattern is evolved in passing from generation to generation. The process is highly complicated, and, by