Page:Christmas Fireside Stories.djvu/7

 This is what the author of these tales has done in Dano-Norwegian. He has cast to the winds the rules of composition, the balance of clauses, the affected town-phrases, and all the artificial forms hitherto deemed requisite in Danish prose, and he has had the courage to note down the fine idiomatic speech of the mountaineer in its native freshness. So much for the outer form of these stories, a husk which our translation must needs crush off and winnow away, but which adds, in a native ear, much sweetness and strangeness to the narrative.

To understand the inner worth of the tales, we should know, perhaps, something of their author's career. Education made him a zoologist, but nature stepped in, and claimed him for a poet; he has dutifully stretched out a hand to the one fostermother and to the other. Peter Christen Asbjörnsen was born at Christiania on the 15th of January, 1812. Of his life at school his biographers have told us nothing, and yet there must be something worth telling about it, for there, when a very little boy, he met a child still younger than himself, with whom he formed a close friendship that has lasted ever since, and has left strong traces on his intellectual development. This friend was the charming lyrical poet Jörgen Moe, now Bishop of Christianssand. Before they were twenty years of age these boys began to put down in writing the bogie-tales and old-wives' fables which they had heard in the nursery, and as many more as the folks around them would consent to recollect. The pastime became a passion; whenever they went out fishing