The tales of which this volume presents the first English translation—­though, as regards some of them, hardly the first English version—­appear to have been collected about twenty or twenty-five years ago.  Two gentlemen, Messrs. Asbjoernsen and Moe, (the name of the first of whom begets much confidence in his ability for the task,) went out among the most unlettered and rudest of the common folk of Norway and Sweden, and there, from the lips of old women and little children, gathered these stories of the antique time.  Of what age the stories are, nobody knows,—­those who listened to them in their childhood, to relate them in turn in their declining years, least perhaps of all.  For they are a part of the inheritance common to all the races that have sprung from the Asiatic ancestor, who, at periods the nearest of which is far beyond the ken of history, and at intervals of centuries, sent off descendants to find a resting-place in Europe; and it is one great object, if not the principal object, of the original collectors and the translator of these tales to exhibit in them a bond of union among all European peoples.

Indeed, the tales in their present form may be regarded as examples in point appended to the translator’s Essay which opens the volume.  For they will add little to our stock of available stories, for either youthful or adult reading.  The best of them already are a part of our nursery lore, and are known to the English race under forms better adapted to English taste and sympathies than those under which they are here presented; and nearly all of those that are exceptions to this remark are unfitted for “home consumption,” either by the objectionable nature of their subjects, by the still more objectionable tendency of their teaching, or by a yet more fatal demerit,—­their lack of interest.  They are in some respects notably tame and puerile,—­with a puerility which is not childish simplicity, but a lack of inventive fancy, and which exhibits itself in bald repetition.  The giant, for instance, always complains of a smell of Christian blood, and is always answered by the formula, that a crow flew over the chimney and must have dropped a bone down it; the hero almost always meets three old women, or three Trolls, or three enchanted beasts or birds, of whom he in that case always asks the same questions, receiving the same replies, verbatim.  There is a reason for this sameness, which is indicative of the rude condition of the people among whom the tales have been perpetuated; but the sameness palls none the less upon more cultivated minds.  Mr. Dasent characterizes these people as “an honest and manly race,—­not the race of the towns and cities, but of the dales and fells, free and unsubdued, holding its own in a country where there are neither lords nor ladies, but simple men and women.  Brave men and fair women,” etc. (p. lxviii.) And he says of the tales, that in no other collection is “the general tone so chaste, are the great