Swedish Folk Tales

Swedish folk and fairy tales have never had a strong English-language profile, unlike the Norse tales of Asbjörnsen and Moe which gained huge popularity through the nineteenth-century translations of Sir George Webbe Dasent. The best collection for adults is Swedish Folktales and Legends by Lone Thygesen Blecher and George Blecher (University of Minnesota Press, 2004, 0 8166 4575 2). The present volume is aimed at children, and reproduces fairy stories by early-twentieth-century Swedish children’s writers together with the contemporaneous illustrations of John Bauer.

Although Bauer’s name is not well-known here, most readers will recognise his glum trolls and winsome children. The fact that these pictures are now largely of historical interest is stressed by the extremely variable reproduction quality, ranging from some images glowingly reproduced from modern transparencies to others that look like poor copies from printed books or magazines.

What saves this book is not the pictures, but the stories, translated into lively English by Holger Lundburgh. In the first story, ‘When Mother Troll Took in the King’s Washing’ by Elsa Beskow, there is a wonderful moment when human neighbours decide to start mining in the mountain that is the trolls’ home: ‘When the first charge of dynamite exploded, Troll Father became so angry that he exploded, too; he really did. He lay like a large stone in all the rubble, and Troll Mother and her son were left alone in the world with no place to turn.’ This is real storytelling, and Lundburgh sustains a similar verve and momentum throughout this book.

The stories themselves are of varying quality, but they represent a hitherto-neglected tradition of the literary fairy tale, in bright readable English, with the added bonus of Bauer’s pictures for those who respond to the strength of his compositions and the humour of his line.