Fairytale Reflections (25) "Weird Tales From Northern Seas"

With the holiday weekend, I didn't highlight many of the interesting news articles and blog entries from late last week and early this one. So today I will catch up a little. First, since we will get a new one tomorrow, I wanted to highlight Fairytale Reflections (25) "Weird Tales From Northern Seas" at SMoST.

Katherine went a somewhat different direction with this one. I'll let her explain:

I think it's time for some fairytale reflections from you, you lovely and talented and sensitive people who come and read this blog and sometimes comment! So I'm putting up an entire story from one of the wonderful 19th century collectors and retellers of folktales whom I’ve met on the road through fairyland: Jonas Lie, a celebrated Norwegian author.

Here's a little bit of background: he was a contemporary of Ibsen, born 1833 at Hvokksund, Norway, not far from Oslo; but he spent much of his childhood at Tromsø, inside the Arctic Circle. He was sent to naval college, but poor eyesight made him unsuited for a life at sea, so he became a lawyer and began to write and publish poems and novels which reflected Norwegian life, folklore and nationalism.

I confess I haven’t read any of Lie’s novels, as most of them don’t seem to have been translated into English. But I do have a collection of his reworkings of Norwegian and Finnish legends about the sea. It’s called ‘Weird Tales From Northern Seas’. My edition was published in English in 1893 and consists of eleven short stories cherry-picked from a volume called ‘Trold’- 'Trolls' - and another called 'Fortaellinger og Skildringer ', which means something like 'Tales and Depictions, or 'Stories and Portrayals' (translations courtesy of the Bookwitch). How I wish I could read the others.

Go through to her post to read the rest...