Are you ready for a Norwegian Christmas tale featuring trolls, beheadings and two flowers? Tatterhood is another tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, although it never saw its way into Andrew Lang’s collections, and it’s weird, creepy and unsettling, but I also find it extraordinarily charming and has a really nice ending, […]
Today’s post on my Patreon is the outline of a Galician folktale: it tells the story of a guy born with supernatural strength from the unwilling union of a woman with a bear, who battles the Devil, goes down a well and gets the girl. Does it sound familiar? Well, if it does, it might […]
For Christmas Day, I have picked a Norse tale I didn’t get around to doing when I did my East of the Sun West of the Moon series: it’s called “The Cat on the Dovrefjell” and it takes place on Christmas eve. And it has a bear. What more do you need? You can read […]
Well, I already mentioned this tale a couple of times, talking about three-headed trolls, and now’s the time to feature it. These Sunday tales have been entertaining a lot of people and I’m really glad, considering that most of you come to my blog looking for entirely different things. So, let’s get to it. It […]
Well, Christmas came and went, my Advent Calendar is at an end, I’m endeavoured in the Twelve Days of Christmas and I did some bonus pieces on Disney’s Fantasia, but that doesn’t mean I’ll leave you without your weekly ration of Norse folk tales. The tale I bring you today is The Three Princesses of […]
Your Norse folk tale this Sunday is The Three Princesses in the Blue Mountain and you can read it here. 1. The Story The tale starts, as it often happens, with a king and queen who can have no children. The king is out on his porch, one day, brooding over the matter, when a […]
The Norse folk tale I want to bring you today is another rich one: The Princess on the Glass Hill. As the previous ones, it is part of the East of the Sun, West of the Moon collection I bought myself, with beautiful illustrations by Danish genius Kay Nielsen. 1. The Story As it happened […]
In this adventure story, a beggar woman and her son discover a magic Blue Belt. In possession of this talisman, the boy has superhuman strenght, and outsmarts his attackers again and again. In the process, he becomes engaged to the daughter of the King of Arabia. Brave and unrelenting in this fantastical world full of […]
Well, the North Wind is a cool guy, in Norse mythology. He has a crucial role in untangling the lovers’ troubles in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, as we have seen last time I got the chance to write about Norse mythology and about the illustrated book I have desired for […]
Yesterday I found myself writing quite an extensive piece about Kay Nielsen, che extraordinary Danish illustrator who prompted me to buy at last this long-wanted book. It is worth mentioning that, as a fan and amateur scholar of J.R.R. Tolkien in my younger years, the beauty of Nielsen’s work is not the only reason I […]