Fairy Tales: Asbjornsen and the Numinous North

The importance of Northern tales echoes through C.S. Lewis and Tolkien's lives and works. As they pointed out again and again, these tales arrived in England relatively "late." Norske Folkeeventyr, for instance, was collected in 1842-43 and translated into English by Sir George Dasent in 1859.

Western classics focused for many generations--going back to the Middle Ages--on antiquity. When Harvard and Yale came into being, its students studied Latin and Greek. Those myths thread through Western medieval tales and updated versions by writers like Hawthorne. When Shakespeare went classic, he went to Rome. When he went local, he went to Midsummer Night's Dream. 

Then the Grimm brothers made their collection followed by Andrew Lang with the English and Asbjornsen and others with the North. 

Although the collectors operated in the mid-nineteenth-century, for Lewis and Tolkien in the early to mid-twentieth century, the academic world still lingered in antiquity. They and others attempted to change that approach by doing really out-there stuff, like teaching Canterbury Tales and Beowulf. (I fail to understand why anyone considers higher academe "edgy" about anything--if it isn't "cool" and acceptable, it isn't going to show up in any "forward-thinking" professor's in-box until it is cool and acceptable. Lewis and Tolkien were considered outliers.)

Northern tales did begin to make themselves felt, most interestingly, in Disney. In the making of Snow White, Disney was influenced by illustrators such as Gustave Dore. He was influenced with Fantasia by Kay Nielsen (see book image above), specifically in the final two pieces, "Night on Bald Mountain" and "Ave Maria"--in which one can see both influences.

C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, of course, took everyone the final distance with unique classic tales steeped in Northern climes. 

My personal favorite picture book here is P.J. Lynch's East of the Sun, West of the Moon. In truth, I don't find the quest itself all that enthralling. It has all the requisite tropes and motifs--animal bridegroom, bargains with trolls, sleeping prince, resolute heroine. Its greatest strength, of course, is the winds, which mark the story's place much in the same way Beowulf's Grendel marks its tale by arriving from a boggy marsh in a cold climate. 

I adore Lynch's illustrations.