Customer Reviews

Norwegian Folktales (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library)

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My 9-year old was enthralled with the stories in this book, begging for more every night until we finished it. I disagree with his Freudian interpretation, but Bruno Bettelheim is right that folktales touch something wired within us, fulfilling an innate need children have to comprehend the adult world.

Although not as well-known as the German Grimm's collection in the United States, this book is widely revered in Norway. Both are teutonic cultures, but these stories are different in character and feel from the Grimm Brother stories. While they contain elements common to all european fables, this book is filled with trolls, and the reformation seems like a recent event. Norsk tales have a unique and compelling charm.

My favorite fable is in this collection--the one about the mill that explains why the sea is salty. Read it yourself--I don't want to spoil the ending.

From a purist point of view, drawings detract from stories such as these, but two of Norway's most most well-known illustrators are represented, and the artwork is compelling.

This paperback is a reprint of the original English-language translation from 40 years ago. I have that original text packed away somewhere lost, so it was a real treat to be able to buy a new copy to share with my son.

...alongside the fjords, is its literary tradition, beginning with the Viking romances and sagas, at full flood in the works of Ibsen, but flowing like an underground river through its grotesque folk tales - eventyr - as collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and the Møes father and son. Asbjørnsen began collecting tales in 1834, in isolated rural areas of Norway, a country whose geography has guaranteed isolation through most of history. The publication of the Grimm Brothers' collection of folk tales sparked further enthusiasm amongst Norwegians, but the 'eventyr' are different in many ways from the traditions rescued by the Grimms, and radically different from the literary fairy tales that soon infiltrated Europe and consigned folk tales in general to the realm of children's literature.

Readers familiar with the Icelandic sagas will find many similarities in these hard-minded and hard-handed stories of peasant kings, eerie maidens, and of course trolls, with their peculiar shrewd stupidity. The pleasure of hearing/reading most of the eventyr is in the sardonic humor, the joy of seeing the come-uppance of the rich and powerful. It's interesting to note that stories collected from men are chiefly rough and humorous, and naturalistic, while those collected from women, as translator Pat Shaw reports, "kept to deep, mystic, or eerie themes."

The original illustrations by Erik Werenskiold and Theodor Kittelsen are reproduced in this collection. Black-and-white pen sketches and etchings, they match the eventyr in wry humor and spooky trollishness. I remember them well from my own childhood, when my grandmothers held me on their laps and read to me in Swedish. These are indeed wonderful, memorable stories to read to children, but they shouldn't be limited to laps, not even the laps of Lapps. Adults will enjoy them equally. Most of them are quite short, especially compared with the wordy Grimm tales, and can be relished a few at a time.

I've reviewed three Norwegian items in the past week - music by Harald Saeverud and novels by Borgen and Christensen. You may wonder why a good Swedish fellow like me would be reviewing works by Norskis. Well now, I'm just trying to show that I'm comfortable with diversity.

I'm a middle-aged English professor, but I love this book now, as I did when I was a kid. If I had to whittle my personal library down from its present size (maybe 3000?) to a hundred books, I'm sure I'd still keep this one. I read these stories now to my children and remember how I loved the stories when I was their age. When I'm a senior, I'll remember how I shared this book with my kids, as well.

I lived near Oslo from Aug. '85-Jan. '86. One fall Saturday, at the checkout counter in a bookstore across from Slottsparken, I said to the clerk in Norwegian "You speak English like an American!" Her sharp tongue shot back "You speak Norwegeian like an American!" She responded to my questions why she (American) was there with "I was married to one of them" and couldn't "go back" because she didn't fit anymore. She recommended a book and also told me she'd translated some Norwegian Folk Tales into English. My host told me later it was Pat Shaw.

My daughters (then 8 and 12) read the book from cover to cover many times. Without the availability of an English grade school library filled with teen and preteen romances my daughters read pretty much whatever was placed on the coffee table. They enjoyed Shaw's translation very much, although I also occaisonally translated directly (with effort) from Asbjørnsen and Moe. This translation gives us in English a look at 'the soul of the Norwegian people', as a good friend describes the folk tales.

There are not enough good words to describe this marvellous book! The Norwegian tales are unsurpassed in everything from folk humour to literary value. The plots are very diverse, always surprising, with very skillfully depicted characters, the stories flow easily, as from the pen of a master writer. The drawings accompanying this particular collection are simply enchanting, so simple, yet so telling. Do buy this book and you'll be glad to have discovered a jewel of the world folklore.

The Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library is usually excellent, and this book is no exception. It is well worth the money and is a good read. Interestingly, one of the illustrators also provided illustrations for Snorre Sturlasons Heimskringla or The Lives of the Norse Kings. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1990.

Clearly, the Norwegian peasants enjoyed quite the literary gift. The folktales in this collection are surprising for their sophistication of plot, strong commonalities among the individual tales notwithstanding. (The Trinitarian influence, especially, is blatantly evident: the hero must obtain three magical charms, steal three items from the trolls castle, rescue three princesses, or walk through three castles [of brass, silver, and gold--but, of course!] before proceeding. [By the way, in Native American--particularly Western--myth, it's _four_ that's the magic number.]) One also descries considerable pagan Norse influence: giant eagles (= Hræsvelg), tree-dwelling serpents (= Niðhöggr, if you will, vice Satan-in-the-Garden), and the tortured, bifurcate identification of lightning now with Þórr Óðinsson, now with St. Michael. It's interesting--given that many of these tales cannot date back far beyond the sixteenth century (because of otherwise resultant anachronisms, e.g., muskets and post-medieval kitchen technologies)--that the tenth-century Uppsålan tension of Christian versus pagan Viking is still strongly evident between the lines (even if Nornagest per se does not people any of the tales!).

Believing strongly in the Årne-Thomasson taxonomy of fictive archetypes, one detects considerable similarity among some of the tales with the Swedish tradition (not surprising), the German tradition (also not surprising--just across the gulf), and the Russian tradition (a bit more surprising, given both Russia's geographic isolation and, indeed, its cultural isolation until the entrenchment of the legacy of Peter I in the early to middle 1700s). Personally, it gives me a chuckle to be able to ferret out such common "skeleta," as it were, of various tales, whereby one can select a common middle and slap on, e.g., a Norwegian beginning and a Norwegian ending.

One thing I don't understand is the considerably wider array of supernatural characters in the Swedish than in the Norwegian corpus. Given especially that Norway is rather more rural than its eastern neighbor (witness its one-half the Swedish population in nearly the same land area), I cannot fathom why the Norwegian tales offer only trolls and the occasional manlike giant while the Swedish counterparts also offer elves, markedly non-manlike giants, witches, water spirits (call them nixies, Irish kelpies--even Japanese kappa, if you wish!), and--for that matter--zombies! But I digress. The collection is terrific, the plots are satisfyingly complex (for folktales, at any rate), the symbolism is clever, and the earthy, realistic tone is very, very satisfying as well as convincing that the folk literature actually matches the folk!

If you like Norwegian tales, you'll love this book which retells them in a fun and informative way!

This is an interesting collection of Norwegian folktales. It is filled with trolls, magically transformed princes and princesses, spirits of the dead, and so forth. In a few cases, what seem to be pagan gods and goddesses can be detected in the stories.

The only thing that I don't like about this collection is that it is fairly small and some of the stories are rather redundant (though this redundancy can be interesting from a folklore studies perspective). In some cases, I found myself skipping over troll sword/strength draught/beheading scenes since they seemed so similar. It is not a "large book" but it has lasting value.

However, this is offset by the fact that few sources seem to provide larger compendiums of these stories.

Those who like this book but miss stories like The Three Billygoats Gruff" will also probably want to get "The Troll with No Heart In His Body" (I forget the author's name).

I was disappointed that this book lacks the Three Billy Goats Gruff, which is what I was looking for when I got this book.