The Project Gutenberg EBook of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, by
Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Engebretsen Moe
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Old Tales from the North
Author: Peter Christen Asbjornsen
Jorgen Engebretsen Moe
Illustrator: Kay Nielsen
Release Date: January 15, 2010 [EBook #30973]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EAST OF THE SUN ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Dan Horwood and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
* * * * *
[Illustration: He too saw the image in the water; but he looked up at
once, and became aware of the lovely Lassie who sate there up in the
tree. Page 70]
* * * * *
EAST OF THE SUN AND
WEST OF THE MOON
OLD TALES FROM THE NORTH
ILLUSTRATED BY
KAY NIELSEN
NEW YORK
GEORGE H DORAN COMPANY
* * * * *
PREFACE
A folk-tale, in its primitive plainness of word and entire absence of
complexity in thought, is peculiarly sensitive and susceptible to the
touch of stranger hands; and he who has been able to acquaint himself
with the _Norske Folkeeventyr_ of Asbjoernsen and Moe (from which these
stories are selected), has an advantage over the reader of an English
rendering. Of this advantage Mr. Kay Nielsen has fully availed
himself: and the exquisite _bizarrerie_ of his drawings aptly
expresses the innermost significance of the old-world, old-wives'
fables. For to term these legends, Nursery Tales, would be to curtail
them, by nine-tenths, of their interest. They are the romances of the
childhood of Nations: they are the never-failing springs of sentiment,
of sensation, of heroic example, from which primeval peoples drank
their fill at will.
The quaintness, the tenderness, the grotesque yet realistic
intermingling of actuality with supernaturalism, by which the
original _Norske Folkeeven
|