Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen

Framing a National Narrative: The Legend Collections of Peter Christen Asbjornsen. By Marte Hvam Huit. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003. Pp. 260, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth) In Framing a National Narrative, Marte Hvam Huit, a scholar of Scandinavian studies, has written the first serious English-language literary analysis of Peter Christen Asbjornsen's collection of Norwegian legends, Norske huldreeventyr ogfolkesagn [Norwegian folktales and legends], originally published between 1845 and 1847. Asbjornsen (1812-1885) is best known for his part of the "Asbjornsen and Moe" folktale collecting collaboration with poet Jorgen Moe, which had led to the publication of the famous collection of folklore, Norske folkeeventyr [Norwegian folktales] a few years before. But in Framing a National Narrative, Huit focuses her attention exclusively on Asbjornsen's work and his literary approach to retelling Norwegian legends and tales. She writes that her study provides "a new perspective on Norshe huldreeventyr ogfolkesagn, showing that the elements of nature, folklore, and language form a totality that insists on the reassessment of this text as an autonomous literary work, and one that has had enormous influence on the development of not only modern Norwegian prose but on the entire cultural narrative of Norway, becoming part of the nation's collective diary" (194). It is Hult's conviction that Asbjornsen's contribution to Norwegian nation-building through his work with oral tradition, separate from Moe, has been neither appreciated nor examined in detail to the extent that it deserves. For folklorists, the value of Hult's study lies primarily in its examination of Asbjornsen's literary adaptations and his stylistic choices in the presentation of Norwegian oral literature in the context of mid-nineteenth-century national romanticism and of the search for a national identity in Norway. It is clear that, as in Germany and elsewhere in Europe at the time, mid-century Norwegian folktale collecting and publishing ventures not only became immediate popular classics, but were also used by cultural theorists to uncover what they felt were indigenous national truths and modes of expression that represented the worldview of the common folk. At the same time, though popularly understood to be the direct product of a national collective folk spirit, these publications were quite heavily edited and stylized to suit literary conventions of the day and to conform to an idealized and uniform view of the folk. Here Huit explores Asbjornsen's recreated literary presentation of Norwegian oral literature through a variety of framing techniques and narrative devices. Among other things, she shows that Asbjornsen invented folk narrators and contextual embellishments for his tales and legends, reformulated and restructured narrative details, privileged supernatural narratives, and incorporated Norwegian dialect, idiomatic phrases, and his own representation of its vernacular orthography into a printed literary language that had, until that time, only been represented in Danish. …