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He too saw the image in the water; but he looked up at once, and became aware of the lovely Lassie who sate there up in the tree. Page 70
EAST OF THE SUN AND
WEST OF THE MOON
OLD TALES FROM THE NORTH
ILLUSTRATED BYKAY NIELSEN
NEW YORK
GEORGE H DORAN COMPANY
A folk-tale, in its primitive plainness of wordand entire absence of complexity in thought,is peculiarly sensitive and susceptible to thetouch of stranger hands; and he who has been able toacquaint himself with the Norske Folkeeventyr of Asbjörnsenand Moe (from which these stories are selected),has an advantage over the reader of an English rendering.Of this advantage Mr. Kay Nielsen has fully availedhimself: and the exquisite bizarrerie of his drawingsaptly expresses the innermost significance of the old-world,old-wives’ fables. For to term these legends,Nursery Tales, would be to curtail them, by nine-tenths,of their interest. They are the romances of the childhoodof Nations: they are the never-failing springs of sentiment,of sensation, of heroic example, from which primevalpeoples drank their fill at will.
The quaintness, the tenderness, the grotesque yetrealistic intermingling of actuality with supernaturalism,3by which the original Norske Folkeeventyr are characterised,will make an appeal to all, as represented in the picturesof Kay Nielsen. And these imperishable traditions, whosebases are among the very roots of all antiquity, are herereincarnated in line and colour, to the delight of all whoever knew or now shall know them.
Permission to reprint the Stories in this book, whichoriginally appeared in Sir G. W. Dasent’s “Popular Talesfrom the Norse,” has been obtained from Messrs. GeorgeRoutledge & Sons, Ltd. The Three Princesses in theBlue Mountain is printed by arrangement with Messrs.David Nutt; and Prince Lindworm is newly translated forthis volume.