Popular Tales from the Norse

These are the tales that came before. Before Disney, before Grimm, before the polished versions that graced your childhood bedside table. Sir George Webbe Dasent gathered these from Norwegian oral tradition in the mid-19th century, preserving stories that had been told around hearth fires for centuries. Here you will find Trolls both cunning and cruel, peasant heroes who outwit kings and ogres through wit rather than swords, enchanted objects that grant wishes or destroy lives, and heroines as brave and clever as any prince. These are not gentle bedtime stories. They are the raw, often dark, always witty folk narratives that influenced everyone from Wagner to Tolkien. The same story-shapes appear here in their earliest recorded form: the princess hidden inside a mountain, the boy who wins a kingdom through honesty, the wife who saves her husband from certain death through quick thinking. For anyone who has ever wondered where the fairy tales came from, the answer lives in these pages.