Isn't It Good...Norwegian Folktales

A book of Norwegian fairy tales, East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Other Tales, was mentioned in The Paideia Program by Mortimer Adler, which is how I first became aware of it. I found my way to The Paideia Program through reading most of what I could by Adler back in the 1980’s, and became infatuated with his proposal for reforming education long before I had children of my own.

East of the Sun and West of the Moon and Other Tales is a collection of folk tales, gathered by P.C. Asbjornsen and Jorben E. Moe, who were the Norwegian Brothers Grimm, apparently, as they collected folk tales from Norway, and put what were mainly oral stories into a written form. Some of the stories are very familiar, but some are very unusual. As a good Midwestern boy of German heritage, my fairy tales tended to be straight out of the Brothers Grimm, so this was the first time I’d heard some of these Norwegian tales.

Among the familiar stories were “The Husband Who Was to Mind the House”, “The Princess on the Glass Hill”, and “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. The first is a good example of the feminist element that appears in some of the stories, as a husband learned the hard way how difficult his wife’s job of “minding the house” actually was. The second was familiar, but I think I must have heard a different version of it as a child, as the story didn’t quite set up as I remember it. The third was a favorite of mine when I was a child. In fact, my boys liked it so much that we would sometimes act it out together when they were quite little, with each of us taking turns at being the troll, or the biggest Billy Goat Gruff.

Most of the stories, however, were new to me, and some of the elements seemed very unusual. (Of course, the fairy tales I grew up on are weird, too, it’s just that their weirdness is familiar.) Among the ones I especially enjoyed were “The Lad Who Went to the North Wind” and “The Blue Belt”.

“The Lad Who Went to the North Wind” is about a boy who formally complains to the North Wind after losing the meal he had gathered for cooking to a blast of air from the north. The North Wind is very accommodating, and keeps giving the lad gifts to make up for the missing meal, though an unscrupulous innkeeper steals one gift after another before finally getting caught, and punished.

“The Blue Belt” is an odd, rambling story about the son of a beggar woman, who, upon finding a magical blue belt, becomes heroically strong. It reminded me of “The Brave Little Tailor”, though the details differ significantly. What they have in common is a surplus of plot lines. A more cautious, less frivolous author would have been less careless with story ideas and would have created three or four stories out of the elements in this one story.

If you’re not familiar with these folk tales, I can definitely recommend them.