The following is a guest post by the fantastic Daniel A. Rabuzzi that we knew our readers would LOVE – particularly as we know there are some favorites among the modern fantasies he mentions! We’re especially delighted with his connecting the Alder-Maid of George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858) to the huldra, a link that has always particularly intrigued us as well. Enjoy!

This essay was originally published in Norwegian this month in Folkeminner, the magazine of the Norsk Folkeminnelag (Norwegian Folklore Society). 

“I have often thought how much I should enjoy being given an empty house in Norway, what pleasure it would be to walk into those bare wood-smelling chambers, walls, floor, ceiling, all wood, which is after all the natural shelter of man, or at any rate the most congenial.” – Sylvia Townsend Warner (1946)¹

“Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh.” – Kelly Link (1996)²

“Travel to Scandinavia if you can, the older cats told me, the queens in their raftered kingdoms. The coffee there, they said, is bitter as an old lie. The Norsemen are beautiful, their women even more sublime, but most importantly, they are quiet.” – Cassandra Khaw (2018)³

The Eddas and sagas – and Viking era culture more generally –  have for over 250 years (using Percy’s first translations of “runic poetry” in 1763 as a starting date) influenced English-language literature, and then films, music, and video games.⁴ Interest has surged over the past fifty years, particularly within fantasy fiction. J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, two of the most prominent writers who mine Norse mythology, are household names across the anglophonic world. Thor, Loki, and Odin live on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and in an ever-rising tide of fiction and games. This phenomenon is very well known to readers, players, and scholars alike; the latter have produced a great deal of sophisticated and deeply researched work on the reception, reinterpretation, and repackaging of Viking and medieval Scandinavian literature in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the USA.⁵ On the other hand, post-medieval Scandinavian folklore (sagn, folkeskikk, og folketro) and fairy tale (eventyr) appear to have had little influence on English-language fantasy literature. Why such a precipitous drop-off in interest occurs among modern fabulists puzzles me, not least because they make avid use of folklore and especially fairy tales of other European traditions (as well, increasingly, of such traditions outside of Europe). In a short essay, I can do no more than sketch the disconnect, raising more questions than answers. I welcome corrections and comments to help future explorations.⁶  

Two possible explanations can be dismissed at the start: (a) that modern English-language writers of fantasy have little available post-medieval Scandinavian source material to work with, or (b) that they are ignorant of or indifferent to such material. 

English translations of this material are plentiful, English-language scholarship on the material flourishes, and the Internet makes available many items (including archival originals with summary translations and/or commentary) that were previously difficult to view outside Scandinavia. With George Webbe Dasent’s 1859 and 1874 translations of Asbjørnsen & Moe’s Norske Folkeeventyr, Norwegian fairy tales entered the world of English letters, and have been a staple ever since (I first read Dasent in a 1970 Dover reprint edition, complete with Kittelsen and Werenskiold illustrations added from later Norwegian re-issues of Asbjørnsen & Moe).⁷ Tiina Nunnally’s 2019 translation and Simon R. Hughes’ of 2024 are further evidence of Asbjørnsen & Moe’s lasting influence. Likewise, Danish folkeeventyr have been available in English since at least 1900, when translated from the Svend Grundtvig collection by Jane Mulley. H.C. Andersen is a special case, his Kunstmärchen having enormous impact on English-language authors.⁸ Peer Gynt was translated in 1892, Strindberg’s Svanevit and Kronebruden in respectively 1913 and 1916, and Hauptmann’s adjacent Die versunkene Glocke in 1899.⁹ Danish ballads have been translated into English since Robert Jamieson in 1806, right through to David Broadbridge in 2011.¹⁰ Pat Shaw Iversen translated Reidar Th. Christiansen’s Folktales of Norway in 1964. Jacqueline Simpson’s Icelandic Folktales and Legends appeared in 1972,  Ørnulf Hodne’s The types of the Norwegian folktale in 1984, Reimund Kvideland & Henning Sehmsdorf’s Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend in 1988, Timothy Tangherlini’s Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories in 2013, John Lindow’s Trolls: An Unnatural History in 2014 … to name just a few of the many relevant works published in the past half-century, ample fruit for fabulistic wine-presses. 

Moreover, some fantasy writers in English can read the originals. American Poul Anderson, whose seminal novel The Broken Sword (1954) derives from the Eddas, was fluent in Danish. Fletcher Pratt (co-author of 1940’s Eddic romp The Roaring Trumpet) taught himself Danish. Some anglophone authors have degrees in medieval or Old Norse studies, or in modern Scandinavian folklore.¹¹ Most remarkably, many Scandinavian fantasy authors either write in or translate their own work into English (!).¹² A very special case are authors in the Shetland and Orkney Islands, whose language and lore are heavily inflected by their Norwegian past.¹³ And are there echoes of the Manxian Viking past in Zoe Gilbert’s Folk?¹⁴

More impressive still is the great care with which most fantasy writers research the folklore and fairy tales they use in their fiction and poetry, regardless of whether or not they can read them in the original language. As best-selling John Gwynne notes:

“I was mindful that I didn’t want to copy Norse mythology, in that I didn’t just want to write about Odin and Thor and Loki, or write about them with different names. I wanted to use Norse mythology and history as a springboard into a new world, one that would hopefully feel historically authentic, uniquely Norse, but also one that felt fantastical, with a seeping, pervading sense of rune-magic and danger.  […] … I read a lot about the vaesen, which is a Norse term that covers all those creatures of Scandinavian folklore and mythology, such as trolls, wights and draugr. I found a few that were less well known, such as the nacken and the froa…”¹⁵

Brian Evenson expresses similar concerns about his retelling of “Grimsborken” (“Dapplegrim” in English): “The result is, I hope ….something true to the original, which despite maintaining the original setting, feels contemporary in attitude, mood, and thrust.”¹⁶ Tina LeCount Myers worked with Ulf Bjorklund and Max Bloomquist on the audio version of her Scandinavia-inspired fantasy, and they in turn conferred with Thomas DuBois, professor of Scandinavian Studies & Folklore at the University of Wisconsin.¹⁷ Jane Yolen, the prolific and award-winning author of fantasy for adults and children (who knows Norwegian fairy tales very well indeed), has been particularly thoughtful and eloquent on the need for speculative writers to read folklore, fairy tales, and myths and not just “retreads of retreads of retreads.”¹⁸ These are not isolated examples; most modern fantasy authors delve respectfully into the old tales, affectionately reshaping them for our current age. Many are reflective practitioners as well, conversant with the theoretical debates within folkloristics, narratology, and literary history, comfortable wielding the Arne-Thompson-Uther Index and other scholarly tools.¹⁹ 

Despite all this engagement, the harvest is meager in terms of post-medieval Scandinavian folklore and fairy tales within modern fantasy. While English-language authors in the last fifty years have turned to fairy tales for inspiration, with a boom in retellings, and a wave of critical scholarship, they’ve focused largely on stories gathered by Basile, Perrault, d’Aulnoye, the Grimms, and those from Celtic, English, and Russian traditions.²⁰ “Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne / “Kvitebjørn kong Valemon” is an exception that highlights the tendency, popular since it was first translated in 1849 by Swedish-born Anthony R. Montalba.²¹ I know of six retellings, many novel-length; there may be more. One of the indelible images from Philip Pullman’s widely read His Dark Materials trilogy is that of the young heroine Lyra riding across the snowy wastes on the back of the white bear king Iorek Byrnison. Perhaps the Disneyfication of fairy tales makes American readers wary of the harsher elements of the original Scandinavian versions, and thus makes the latter less attractive to modern fantasy writers –? As Sadie Stein says:

“Norwegian fairy tales are, even by the genre’s grim standards, dark, thematically and often literally, too (e.g. “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”). For an American audience, accustomed to tall tales that focus on the heroic, and devils who rarely do anything worse than argue with sharp-witted Yankee lawyers, Norway’s fairy tales are downright scary.”²² 

Encounters with trolls and elves feature more prominently, in stories that feel like fleshed-out memorates based on local sagn – often conveying social commentary about modern issues. The polymathic Harriet Martineau launched the fictional sub-genre in what we today would call a “young adult novel,” Feats on the Fiord (1841), which had at least nine subsequent editions, culminating in lavish publications in 1914 (with Arthur Rackham illustrations) and 1924 (with illustrations by Boris Artzybasheff). Deriving her knowledge from travel accounts by Samuel Laing and Henry David Inglis, Martineau spun a yarn of 18th-century adventure along the Saltdalsfjord and in the “seaters” on Sulitjelma in Nordland, paying great attention to Norwegian folklore and folk customs, and painting vivid pictures of the topography.²³ Much of the conflict centers around the clash between modern scientific reasoning and the persistence of folk belief – with battles by plucky young villagers against pirates thrown in for good measure. One chapter humorously describes a purported encounter with a nisse in the barn, another the supposed depredations of the draug (here rendered as “the Water Sprite” but also misidentified as “Uldra”) in the fjord, a third is a superb description of an uncanny meeting on a lonely path with an old man who may or may not be “the Mountain Demon.” One supernatural being is named constantly, as a generic stand-in for the underjordiske: “Nipen.” Author beware the perils of third-hand research! Nipen is presumably “Nissen,” an error most likely arising from either Martineau or the English travelers she uses as her source misreading the long s (= ſ ) or the sharp s (= ß) in Germanic Fraktur orthography.

I catch glimpses of Scandinavian lore in some of the work by George MacDonald, one of the most important progenitors of modern fantasy. In Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), he narrates a near fatal encounter by a man wandering in Fairyland and the Alder-Maid:

“…it was a rough representation of the human frame, only hollow, as if made of decaying bark torn from a tree. […] It had arms, which were only slightly seamed, down from the shoulder-blade by the elbow, as if the bark had healed again from the cut of a knife. But the arms moved, and the hand and the fingers were tearing asunder a long silky tress of hair. The thing turned round—it had for a face and front those of my enchantress, but now of a pale greenish hue in the light of the morning, and with dead lustreless eyes.  […]  The … walking Death looked at me once, with a careless dislike on her beautifully moulded features; then, heedless any more to conceal her hollow deformity, turned her frightful back and likewise vanished amid the green obscurity without.”²⁴

Though MacDonald does not use the term huldra, he appears very familiar with the stories about her.

A.S. Byatt’s work is informed by her deep scholarly knowledge of Scandinavian lore and myth (a prime exhibit being her 2011 novel Ragnarok: The End of the Gods) and her abiding attachment to the North of England, where she grew up. Her 2003 short story in The New Yorker, “A Stone Woman” is an astute and evocative refashioning of what we might know about trolls. A grief-stricken widow in modern-day Yorkshire begins to turn piecemeal into stone, meets an Icelandic stone carver, and travels with him to Iceland.

“Trolls,” Thorsteinn said. “That’s a human word for them. We have a word, tryllast, which means to go mad, to go berserk. Like trolls. Always from a human perspective. Which is a bit of a precarious perspective here.”²⁵

In the end, the woman transforms completely, and joins her fellow trolls, singing into the gale on the mountain “Trunt, trunt, og tröllin i fjöllunum.” 

Equally intrigued by the overlap between English and Scandinavian lore is Susanna Clarke, whose 2004 novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is one of the most important fantasy texts of the new century. The novel contrasts an inherently more magical and wild North of England with rational civilization centered on London. The mightiest of all wizards is The King in the North, The Raven King (with its Odinic associations). Clarke even more subtly suggests the imbrication of cultures in the 2001 short story “Tom Brightwind or How the Fairy Bridge Was Built at Thoresby.” En route from London to Lincoln in 1780, the fairy-lord Tom Brightwind gets stranded near Nottingham for lack of a bridge. What ensues is a retelling of the “Devil Builds a Bridge” and “Master Builder” legends, with the fairy orchestrating the construction in one night. For my purposes here, Clarke’s specificity of locale matters most: Nottingham and Lincoln are in the heart of the old Danelaw; Thoresby and its referred-to neighbor Ossington are real places, the former reflecting its Viking settlement, the latter its Anglo-Saxon origins. And, to my eyes at least, the fairy’s surname looks less English and more like an entry (Vindálfr, Glói, Fáinn) in the Skáldskaparmál and Völuspá lists of dwarves.   

Especially noteworthy among more recent efforts is Victor LaValle’s World and British Fantasy Awards winner The Changeling (2017, now a streaming series as well), which combines the story of the first organized Norwegian emigration to America via the Restauration in 1825 with a child-stealing troll in a version of modern-day New York City’s “Little Norway.” Swedish-Canadian Maria Haskins, in “Hare’s Breath” (2017), tells a story set in 1940s Västerbotten of a nøkken‘s daughter, his fiddle, and Sweden’s eugenics laws.²⁶  Eleanor Arnason (American, with Icelandic heritage) details how Signy in today’s Iceland outwits an abusive troll and makes peace with the troll-wife in “My Husband Steinn,” and how an elf in puffin guise aids a modern fisherman in “The Puffin Hunter” (2014).²⁷ Swedish Karin Tidbeck evokes the mystery of the huldra in “Some Letters for Ove Lindström, and of meeting the hidden folk in Norway’s mountains in “Reindeer Mountain” (2012). Her “Brita’s Holiday Cottage” (2012) is both wistful and a tale of body horror, with a puzzled human narrator dancing and feasting at midsummer in Jämtland with elvish folk who may be her long-sundered relatives: “In true dream fashion, they all come from little villages with names that don’t exist like Höstvåla [“Autumn-Howl”], Bräggne, Ovart [“Unexpected”]; all located somewhere north of Åre, by the lakes that pool between the mountains.”²⁸  

Each of these authors excel at making the places within which their stories unfold come alive, laced with uncanny sensations of the liminal, the hallmark of both the underlying folklore and the best modern fantasy.²⁹ Åre is a leading alpine sports center – Tidbeck’s genius is to wonder what might happen there in the off-season, when some neighboring localities not on the maps stir from hibernation. Norwegian fantasy author Berit Ellingsen, speaking in English, makes this point explicit: 

“The landscapes and nature, wildlife and weather; but also the fairy tales and legends and myths of Scandinavia are a major influence of all my work. I like to call my fiction ‘landscape fiction’, and the natural world plays a big role in my novels as well as short works.”³⁰ 

Katherine Langrish makes similar observations:

“I’ve described the three Troll books [collectively entitled West of the Moon] as a Viking- Scandinavia-that-never-was … true as I could make it to the historical conditions, but including a menagerie of supernatural creatures that really were believed in by people of that time – trolls, elves, ghosts, water spirits. My books are not so much an alternative Britain and Scandinavia … as the real Britain and Scandinavia, plus. … Folk legends spring from particular places, particular landscapes, and there was little point in inventing an imaginary country to put them all in.”³¹ 

The place in question is a vast ill-defined space on the edge of the map, dubbed simply “The North.” The North for English-language authors has been a signifier of otherness, mystery, danger, barbarism, and the possibility of self-reclamation since the 1700s, entwined with the rise of Gothic literature and depictions of the uncanny, and the Romantic “discovery” of landscape.³² (Ancient concepts of Ultima Thule and Hyperborea had already primed the pump). These tropes manifest strongly in today’s fantasy fiction, with The North a screen upon which the author can project all sorts of adventures and ruminations, sometimes far removed from Scandinavian realities. Hence the many pseudo-Scandinavian place-names in fantasy literature, pastiches that alert the reader to specific conventions of the genre. For instance, in Leigh Bardugo’s best-selling Grishaverse books, the northernmost realm is Fjerda, with the towns of Djerholm, Elling, Felsted, Gjela, and Hjar, and regions named Avfalle (!) and Kjenst Hjerte. Samantha Shannon’s Roots of Chaos novels include a northernmost kingdom called Hróth, ruled by the Hraustr dynasty, with the cities of Eldyng and Vattengard (and, just across the straits, Brygstad on the River Rinna). Lisa Lueddecke’s A Shiver of Snow and Sky opens: “Skane was built on superstition.” Skane is an island off the coast of Löska, with place-names such as Hornstrask, Sjørskall, Isavik, and Bormur. Den Patrick’s Ashen Torment series features an empire called Solmindre and a continent called Vinterkveld. I could cite another few dozen examples and not exhaust my list.³³ One more deserves special mention as it subtly subverts the trope: in Ursula K. Le Guin’s widely acclaimed Earthsea books, the islands named with a Scandinavia feel (Roke, Havnor, Barnisk, Norst, Torkeven) are inhabited by dark-skinned peoples, while the pale-skinned sea raiders who worship strange gods come from islands with distinctly non-Scandinavia sounds: Atuan, Karego-At, Atnini.    

The North is practically a character in its own right in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (a.k.a. Game of Thrones), ruled by the Starks in Winterfell, with the tutelary Old Gods still speaking to them through the trees, while what the Wildlings call the “true North” lies in the ice-lands beyond The Wall, beset by White Walkers and enthralled wights. Imbuing the landscape with meaning and/or giving it eldritch forms of consciousness via genii locorum, are important tools in the modern fantasy writer’s kit. Deliberately or not, in so doing these authors echo the supernatural associations of specific places within folklore and the matter-of-fact presentation of the marvelous in fairy tales, as well as otherworldly visions epitomized by the Draumkvedet, exotic voyages such as those of Ohthere to Bjarmaland and the putative travels of St. Brendan, and the oddities found the further north you go on the map published by Olaus Magnus in 1539.

For instance, A.G. Slatter in All The Murmuring Bones traces the heroine’s long hazardous journey north to find her missing parents in a place on no standard maps (aided by supernatural helpers, and threatened by ghosts):

North of Bellsholm. But what if I make my way northwards, more or less, and find myself lost and none the wiser? […] North of Bellsholm, more or less. Perhaps it was all a lie. […]  So, northward I continue. For how many days?  Who knows, the map has no scale.  […] The forest gets thicker the higher we go … […] …the road [grows] narrower and less well-tended; the undergrowth twines and weaves together, fallen logs are covered in a green carpet of moss … [there’s] no sign of what lies on the far boundary of the estate, the northernmost.”³⁴

The heroine in Pullman’s The Golden Compass realizes she is far beyond the fields she knows when she finally reaches the north after a trip that begins in the Oxford of an alternative Earth:

“Directly ahead of the ship a mountain rose, green flanked and snow-capped, and a little town and harbor lay below it: wooden houses with steep roofs… […] The smell was of fish, but mixed with it came land smells too: pine resin and earth, and something animal and musky, and something else that was cold and blank and wild: it might have been snow. It was the smell of the North.”³⁵

It is therefore perfectly logical that she would in that town meet the imprisoned King of the Bears as well as the consul to the boreal witches.

The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw puts the reader from its first sentences into an arctic world not ours, one where “an iceberg the shape of a galleon [is] floating in creaking majesty past St. Hauda’s Land’s cliffs,” a hog rescues lost hikers in the hills, five albino crows are counted among a flock of 200. The hero chases indeterminate images one December day into the woods near Ettinsford:

“It was a darkening afternoon whose final shafts of light passed between trees, swung across the earth like searchlights. He left a path to follow such a beam. Twigs crunched beneath his shoes. A bleating bird skipped away over leaves. Branches swayed and clacked against each other overhead, snipping through the roving beam. He kept up his close pursuit, treading through its trail of shadows.”³⁶

Having already stepped off the path into Mirkwood, our hero quests deeper into the fairy-tale north of St. Hauda’s Land, where ice, snow, fog, and wind prevail, roads, forests, and other geographical features can change overnight, miniature winged cattle flit about, and various other strange sorceries occur.

I conclude this brief survey with Heather Fawcett’s 2023 novel Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, in which – like so many intrepid Victorian women before her –  Cambridge folklorist Emily Wilde voyages in 1909 to The North, in her case to study “the Hidden Folk” on Ljosland, an island Fawcett places somewhere off the coast of Møre og Romsdal, perhaps due north of the Shetlands. Based in the village of Hrafnsvik, plunging into the forest of Karrðarskogur and then onto the glacial fields, Wilde befriends, combats, and otherwise engages with all manner of tusser and underjordiske, in a meta-fictional tale that captures both the sense of the marvelous and the experience of gathering impressions of the same. It oscillates between “cottagecore,”³⁷ a coziness associated in part with hygge and fika, and “grimdark,”³⁸ which nods to saga bleakness and the flinty worldview lying at the heart of folklore.   

Bio: Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he / his) (www.danielarabuzzi.com) has been published in, among others, Crab Creek Review, Asimov’s, Abyss & Apex, Coffin Bell, Shimmer, Red Ogre Review, Goblin Fruit, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Pushcart nominee. He earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com).

Notes: