Peter Christen Asbjørnsen

It comes from, uh, Norway, and it's the same country that Norse myths, uh, about gods like Odin and Thor come from.

Uh, this is a fairy tale, and it was collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, who are the, they're sort of like the Brothers Grimm of Norway.

They were the first two people to really collect fairy tales and publish them in a book and delight their entire country with their oral tradition.

All right, can you say their names again?

Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe.

Okay, wait.

Peter Christen Asbjørnsen.

I didn't say that right.

And there are still so many of these stories floating about the world from one person to another that if they were written down, they would fill a great library.

"Until the generation now lately passed away," says Mr. Goss in his introduction to that very interesting book, Folk and Fairy Tales by Asbjornsen, "almost the only mode in which the Norwegian peasant killed time in the leisure moments between his daily labor and his religious observances was in listening to stories.

It was the business of old men and women who had reached the extreme limit of their working hours to retain and repeat these ancient legends in prose and verse, and to recite or sing them when called to do so." And Miss Hapgood has told us that in Russia these stories have not only been handed down wholly by word of mouth for a thousand years, but are flourishing today and extending into fresh fields.

The stories made by the people and told before evening fires or in public places and at the gates of inns in the Orient belong to the ages when books were few and knowledge limited, or to people whose fancy was not hampered by familiarity with or care for facts.

Folktales Every Child Should Know, edited by Hamilton Wright Mabie.

Chapter eighteen, Hans, who made the princess laugh.

From the Norwegian tale of Peter Christian Asbjornsen.

Once upon a time, there was a king who had a daughter, and she was so lovely that the reports of her beauty went far and wide.

The existence of the Russian Skazki or Märchen was first made generally known to the British public by Mr. W.R.S. Ralston in his Russian Folk Tales.

That excellent and most engrossing volume was primarily a treatise on Slavonic folklore, illustrated with admirable skill and judgment by stories mainly selected from the vast collection of Afanasyev, who did for the Russian what Asbjornsen has done for the Norwegian folk tale.

A year after the appearance of Mr. Ralston's book, the eminent Russian historian and archaeologist Peter Nikolayevich Polivoy, well known too as an able and ardent Shakespearean scholar, selected from the inexhaustible stores of Afanasyev some three dozen of the Skazki and worked them up into a fairy tale book which was published at St. Petersburg in eighteen seventy-four under the title of Popular Russian Tales.

Mr. Polivoy did his work excellently well, and while softening the crudities and smoothing out the occasional roughness of these charming stories, neither injured their simple texture nor overlaid the original pattern.

The success of a fairy book, I am convinced, depends on the due mixture of the comic and the romantic.

Grimm and Asbjornsen knew this secret, and they alone.

But the Celtic peasant who speaks Gaelic takes the pleasure of telling tales somewhat sadly.

So far as he has been printed and translated, I found him, to my surprise, conspicuously lacking in humor.

The first was Andreas Feier, a clergyman, who in 1833 published his Norske Folksagen, the Norwegian Folk Tales, the early foundational collection of plays, legends, and folk belief.

And then from 1841 onward came the two whose names still sound like a single one to this day, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jörgen Mohe.

Der Norske Folkeventil, the Norwegian Folk Tales, became a traditional book.

Almost every troll tale we told last time is in it.

So I piled at least twenty chosen volumes on a table at the head of my bed, and I dare say it was nigh daylight when I fell asleep.

I began my entertainment with several pages from Keightley's Fairy Mythology, and followed it up with random bits from Crofton Croker's Traditions of the South Ireland, Mrs. Carey's Legends of the French Provinces, Andrew Lang's Green, Blue, and Red Fairy Books, Laboulaye's Lost Fairy Tales, Holles' The Inn of the Spazart, Julia Goddard's Golden Weathercock, Frere's Eastern Fairy Legends, Asbjørnsen's Folk Tales, Susan Pindar's Midsummer Fays, Nesbit Bain's Cossack Fairy Tales, et cetera, et cetera.

I fell asleep with a copy of William Maria's Fairy Stories in my hands, and I had a delightful dream wherein, under the protection and guidance of my fairy godmother, I undertook the rescue of a beautiful princess who had been enchanted by a cruel witch and was kept imprisoned by the witch's son, a hideous ogre with seven heads, whose companions were four equally hideous dragons.

This undertaking in which I was engaged involved a period of five years.

And there are still so many of these stories floating about the world from one person to another that if they were written down, they would fill a great library.

Until the generation now lately passed away, says Mr. Goss in his introduction to that very interesting book, Folk and Fairy Tales by Asbjørnsen, almost the only mode in which the Norwegian peasant killed time in the leisure moments between his daily labor and his religious observances was in listening to stories.

It was the business of old men and women who had reached the extreme limit of their working hours to retain and repeat these ancient legends in prose and verse, and to recite or sing them when called to do so.

And Miss Hapgood has told us that in Russia these stories have not only been handed down wholly by word of mouth for a thousand years, but are flourishing today and extending into fresh fields.

End of the Brahmin girl that married a tiger.

The Blue Belt in Myths and Legends Around the World, Collection 15 from East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Old Tales from the North by Asbjørnsen et al.

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The Blue Belt by Peter Christian Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe.

Once upon a time there was an old beggar woman who had gone out to beg.

She had a little lad with her, and when she had got her bag full, she struck across the hill towards her own home.

The success of a fairy book, I am convinced, depends on the due admixture of the comic and the romantic.

Grimm and Asbjornsen knew the secret, and they alone.

But the Celtic peasant who speaks Gaelic takes the pleasure of telling somewhat sadly.

So far as he has been printed and translated, I found him, to my surprise, conspicuously lacking in humor.