Five Norwegian White Bear Tales: Norwegian Folklore

By Simon Roy Hughes

About 80 var­iants of the tale that is most fam­ili­ar to us as "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" have been col­lect­ed in Nor­way. This vol­ume pre­sents five of them – two of which may be fam­iliar; three which will certainly not be – all fresh­ly trans­lated into Eng­lish.

The included tales are as follows: 

• The Story of the Abandoned Princess
• East of the Sun and West of the Moon
• Sir Varivan
• White Bear King Valemon
• The Bear King Videvall

The tales are all illus­trat­ed, with images by H. J. Ford, Theo­dor Kittel­sen, Hilde Kra­mer, August Schnei­der, and Otto Sind­ing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eventyr Books
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393257837

Book preview

Introduction

About 80 variants of the tale that is most familiar to us as East of the Sun and West of the Moon have been collected in Norway. It is arguably the best-loved of the Norwegian folk narratives that are recognised around the world, helped no doubt by the charming motif of the white bear that comes to take away the girl. The five I have chosen to include in the present volume include the first published variant, the two variants which are best-known, and a couple of little-known versions, including one that has never before been published as a tale in its own right. I do hope you enjoy reading the tales, and that the peculiarities of each within the overarching structure of the tale type fascinate you as much as they do me.

Folklorists using the scholarly Aarne – Thompson – Uther classification give folktales of this type the number

ATU-425a, and the general title The Search for the Lost Husband. Together, these stories comprise a huge cycle of folk narratives, which encompasses tales from right across Eurasia. In the Romanian tale, The Enchanted Pig, collected by Petre Ispirescu, three princesses discover a prophecy concerning who each will marry; the youngest will marry a pig from the north. In the Spanish tale, The Sprig of Rosemary, collected by Dr. D. Francisco de S. Maspons y Labrós, the daughter marries a man who accuses her of stealing his firewood. In the Irish tale, The Brown Bear of Norway, collected by Patrick Kennedy, and the Scottish tale, The Red Bull of Norroway, published by Robert Chambers, the princesses name their own husbands in jest. In The Black Bull of Norroway, also by Chambers, a bull comes to take the daughter away. The Grimms published a few of tales of the same type; the plainest of these is The Iron Stove, in which the the princess fears she has to marry an iron stove, not perceiving the prince who has been enchanted inside. Jan-Øyvind Swahn has reportedly treated as many as 1,137 different variants in his comprehensive work on this tale type,¹ and has apparently found an early allusion to The tail of the thre futtiit dog of norrovay, a folktale of this kind, in The Complaynt of Scotland (1549).²

Ørnulf Hodne summarises the skeleton plot of ATU-425a as follows:

For certain reasons a girl is promised to a monster (white bear, wolf), a transformed prince who is a man at night. After a while she visits her home, but is warned against listening to her mother’s advice. She breaks the prohibitions (kisses him, shines a light on him) and loses him. She undergoes a sorrowful wandering to recover him, and receives the magic objects she needs and is helped to reach the ogre’s castle, where he is living with a witch. She succeeds in disenchanting him and regains him. The false bride is unveiled and dies.³

Although these tales are familiar as folklore, the result of oral traditions, they probably have their origin in literature. Indeed, the literary sources are much older than the oral traditions we know of. In Pintosmauto from Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone (1634), the girl Betta, who is dissatisfied with every suitor who attempts to win her, makes herself a husband out of Palermo sugar, almonds, and precious stones. She names him Pintosmauto, after bringing him to life by praying to the goddess of love, in imitation of the Pygmalion myth. Karen Bamford finds earlier evidence of the tale in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well (1623); it appears the Bard was familiar with the type, and Bamford speculates that he probably took the motif of the lost husband from Bocaccio’s Decameron (1353). As far as we are aware, though, the oldest of this kind of tale is the enormously productive story of Cupid and Psyche, embedded in Lucius Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass (circa 180 CE), the only complete novel that has survived from the Roman Empire.

Reading Cupid and Psyche today is an interesting experience: this ancient text – the mother, as it were, of every last one of the tales mentioned above, and with which we have grown up – reads like a pastiche of its offspring. The major difference is the divine participation in Cupid and Psyche, which does not feature in the folklore. Otherwise, the motifs that we find in the folktales are all present: the beast whom Psyche expects to marry, her abduction, the hidden husband, her pregnancy, the persuasion to discover the identity of the beast, the light that reveals his beauty, the drop of hot oil or tallow, the separation, and the girl’s ultimately successful quest to regain her love, aided by supernatural helpers along the way.

Whilst Ruth Bottigheimer makes a connection to the earlier The Girl Who Married a Snake, a tale from the Panchatantra (circa 300 BCE), she concludes that ‘Cupid and Psyche’ in its present form appears to be Apuleius’ own invention.⁴ M. J. Edwards has found an antecedent to Apuleius’ story in the Sumerian tradition of Ereshkigal, the goddess of the underworld, who marries Nergal, who in turn is named in the Old Testament, which pushes the tradition a further 600–700 years into the past.⁵ Edwards warns against leaping too rapidly from parallels to sources, but it is reasonably safe to assume that stories that resemble the Cupid and Psyche myth were in oral circulation when Apuleius wrote his novel, all those years ago.⁶

When we consider the relationship between Apuleius and the myriad of folktales his work has spawned, all of the folktales named above, as well as many others, apparently have their origins in a single work of literary fiction by a named author. There has been a lot of movement back and forth between oral and written sources, before they were recorded in the early 19th^ century, but the tales within this volume may well contain traditions that date back to the cradles of civilisation.

The Story of the Abandoned Princess

Camilla Collett

Camilla Collett (1813-1895), Norway’s first novelist, came into contact with Peter Christen Asbjørnsen in 1842, before she had published any work, while he and Jørgen Moe were compiling the second volume of their Norske Folkeeventyr. 2den Deels 1ste Hefte (Norwegian Folktales. 2nd^ part of the 1st^ volume, 1844). Evidently she promised to send Asbjørnsen a tale she knew from her former nanny, and when he received it, he forwarded it to Moe. Moe’s letter back to Asbjørnsen is how we