Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen (1812–85) and Moe, Jørgen (1813–82) have, justifiably, earned acclaim as the major collectors of Norwegian folk tales. They met as students, and once they realized they shared an interest in folklore, they decided that, together, they would try to do for Norway what the Brothers Grimm had done for Germany.
Their romantic initiative was, however, tempered by an inclination that would not have interested the Grimms: Asbjørnsen and Moe insisted on keeping the language as close as they could to that of their informants, and they successfully managed to give the reader of their published tales the illusion of listening to a language that retained the presence of the genuine storyteller. In that sense they are more in line with Hans Christian Andersen, who, similarly, created the illusion that many of his tales were rendered in the vernacular.
Asbjørnsen and Moe's initial plan was to report tales told to them verbatim, but they eventually began mixing and fusing variants. Instead of inserting their own additions to the tales or adding details, however, they retained the plots of the traditional oral tales, and they retold them with a keen sense of the difference between literature and folklore.
That similitude to veracity proved to be most successful. The tales recorded and retold by Asbjørnsen and Moe have achieved a popularity exceeding that of any other Nordic collection. Perhaps the fact that 19th‐century Norway was only marginally a bourgeois country may account for the fascination with the tales told in the vast countryside. Norway's historical situation increased their popularity, for it had suffered under Danish rule since the Middle Ages and had achieved semi‐autonomy only after it was ceded to Sweden in 1814. That new status, coinciding with romantic notions of folk character, gave way to an urge—among both intellectuals and the bourgeoisie—to discover or create a national identity.
Today Asbjørnsen and Moe may receive less attention for contributing to a sense of national identity than do the sagas for Iceland or Kalevala for Finland, but there can be little doubt that the tales recorded by them are still tremendously popular in Norway. Many editions include Theodor Kittelsen's and Erik Werenskiold's fascinating drawings (as do numerous selections translated into English). Werenskiold's drawings underscore the humour found in many tales, whereas Kittelsen manages to make the supernatural come hauntingly alive in Norwegian nature.
Asbjørnsen and Moe, traversing the Norwegian countryside, collected numerous tales from various informants. They published their first collection of tales, Norske folkeeventyr (Norwegian Folktales) in 1841, and there were three more collections to follow (1842–4). While Moe, a theologian, was the theorist—he wrote the scholarly introduction to an edition published in 1851—Asbjørnsen was a man who loved roving the countryside, and he shared little of Moe's romantic leanings, for the legends he published as Norske huldreeventyr og folkesagn (Norwegian Fairy Tales and Folk Legends, 1845–8) include tales that scarcely conform to romantic ideology. Asbjørnsen often created a frame—an old trick used in Boccaccio's Decameron and in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—for the unrelated stories he wanted to retell, and in those frame stories the reader gains a glimpse of an eager folklorist culling tales from people who have absolutely no awareness of any romantic awakening. In one instance, the folklorist locates a glum gravedigger who, when first prodded by bribes in the form of chewing tobacco, relents to tell a series of tales about witches.
The tales collected and published by Asbjørnsen and Moe span from the marvellous magic or wonder tales to the Schwank (anecdote) or trickster stories, texts that may be diametrically opposed in terms of world view: the hope vested in humankind in such optimistic magic tales as ‘De tre prinsesser fra Hvidtenland’ (‘The Three Princesses from Whittenland’) or ‘Prins Hvidbjørn’ (‘Prince White Bear’) is contested by the egoism and immorality of the protagonists of ‘Store Per og Vesle Per’ (‘Big Per and Little Per’) and ‘Peik’. If those texts reflect the contrastive world views of Norwegian folk tales—or of folk tales everywhere—the legend may posit a middle ground that explores existence on an ad hoc basis: for instance, its view of the Norwegian huldre—those who live in the mountains—is telling, for they vary from legend to legend, from malevolent demons to benevolent beings and even to ambivalent figures. Some of the informants obviously believed in the huldre, while others used them as allegorical figures representing ‘otherness’. If the outcome of the magic tale and the trickster stories is fairly predictable, the listener or reader cannot know what turns the legend will take, and, consequently, the legend is the more realistic and ambivalent—and the least formulaic—of these genres.
The impact of Asbjørnsen and Moe's collections on later Norwegian literature was profound. Young Henrik Ibsen worked as a collector of folklore, and his Peer Gynt (1867), based on a folk tale, is suffused with folk beliefs. Many of Ibsen's later plays use such beliefs and motifs, as the title of Fruen fra havet (The Lady from the Sea, 1888) may suggest. In Trold (Weird Tales from Northern Seas, 1891–2), Jonas Lie used the plots of the folk tale to chart the irrational workings of the human mind. Beliefs from Norwegian folklore appear in Sigrid Undset's famous novel Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–2) and in those of numerous 20th‐century authors. In America, the folk beliefs in the tales collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe echo in O. E. Rölvaag's pioneer epic Giants in the Earth (1927) and in Ethel Phelps Johnston's retelling of a number of tales within a feminist scenario in Tatterhood and Other Tales (1978). The title tale and the concluding ‘Mastermaid’ (‘Mestermøy’) are both free adaptations of well‐known tales collected by those two eminent Norwegians, who knew that the illusion of the presence of a storyteller must be retained on the printed page.
Bibliography
- Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen and Moe, Jørgen, Norwegian Folktales (1960).
- Christiansen, Reidar (ed.), Folktales of Norway (1964).
- DesRoches, Kay Unruh, “‘Asbjørnsen and Moe's Norwegian Folktales: Voice and Vision’”, in Perry Nodelman (ed.), Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children's Literature: Fairy Tales, Fables, Myths, Legends, and Poetry (1987).
- Solheim, Svale, ‘Die Brüder Grimm und Asbjørnsen und Moe’,
Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Ernst Moritz Arndt‐Universität Greifswald: Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Reihe , 13 (1964).
— Niels Ingwersen
