Before Northern Fairy Tales was snatched away from me at The Twin Cities Antiquarian book fair, I had time to notice something interesting. The title page said, “Translated from P.Chr. Asbjørsen’s Norwegian Fairy Tales and H.C. Andersen’s Danish Fairy Tales.”

I find this fascinating because it shows that already in 1890 there was confusion about the difference between traditional fairy tales and literary fairy tales. Perhaps the introduction to the book addresses this issue but until I can lay my hands on it, I’ll have to stick to what I learned when I was a folklore student at the University of Oslo ages ago.

Actually the issue is a complex one and authors like Jack Zipes have devoted many a page to it (Zipes, Jack, ed. “Introduction: Towards the Definition of the Literary Fairy Tale,” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). So I’ll simply stick to the Norwegian and Danish stories because they illustrate the distinction nicely.

The Norwegian tales were collected from the oral tradition by Peter Christian Asbjørnsen and his good friend Jørgen Moe. That is to say, the collectors travelled the countryside gathering stories from storytellers, the so-called “folk,” and wrote down what they heard.

At that time, Norway’s official language was Danish, thanks to a 400 year union with that good country. The stories were told in local dialects, however, which meant there had to be quite a bit of rewriting to make them suitable for printing. While Danish and Norwegian are similar, they are certainly not the same, and many words and expressions are different. So are the cadences and rhythms. Asbjørnsen and Moe found a way to capture the voices of the storytellers, yet make them acceptable in writing. The result made publication history not just because the stories so very much captured the spirit of the Norwegian imagination but also because they were written in Norwegian, not Danish. So while Asbjørnsen and Moe did quite a bit of editing and shaping of the stories, they did not author them.

Hans Christian Andersen is another duck altogether. He famously grew up listening to traditional Danish folktales told in the kitchens and workplaces he frequented as a lonely child. When he turned to writing, however, he did not strive to capture the tales exactly as he had heard them. Rather, they were an inspiration for his imagination to create completely unique, original stories. The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Tin Soldier, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes feel like fairytales but are so clearly marked by Andersen’s own voice and feelings that it soon becomes obvious that they are a different species of story altogether. They are “literary fairytales.”

The distinction between literary and traditional folk/fairy tales is not always as clear as I am suggesting, but as a basic starting point it holds. Another great place to read about this topic is at www.surlalunefairytales.com

Happy reading. I’m off to the homeland. Maybe I’ll see some new trolls.