The D'Aulaires here retell twenty-one Norwegian folktales, with text adapted from the Dasent translation of the collection of Asbjernsen and Moe.
The deep forests, the blue mountains, and the quiet closed-in valleys of Norway are possessed of a magical quality. Here it is not difficult to imagine strange creatures in the shapes of the mist on a bog, in the weathered stones, the straggly arms of a tree against the sky. And here, a long time ago, the people told tales of these strange creatures—trolls and water sprites, princesses and cinderlads, giant horses, talking cats, mountains made of glass.
From generation to generation these stories were kept alive by storytellers. Finally, in the middle of the nineteenth century, they were written down by two Norwegian scholars. This reissue of a favorite volume contains twenty-one of these old and best-loved tales, selected, edited, and illustrated with magnificent pictures by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire.
—from the dust jacket
This book has been reprinted a couple of times, first in 1969 under the supervision of the D'Aulaires:
"For this new edition we and our publishers have tried to keep as close to the first edition as we could. However, two of the pictures could not be located, so we have redrawn them with minor changes. Besides, we have done some editing on our translation, since our English now, thirty years later, flows a bit easier. But we have tried to be very careful not to lose the quaint flavor of the Norwegian country language, which is such a great part of the charm of these tales."
Then, later, under the title D'Aulaires' Book of Norwegian Folktales. This version, published by The University of Minnesota in 2016, remains in print.
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