Tag: first friday fairy tales

About East of the Sun and West of the Moon by Sarah Viehmann

Welcome back to First Friday Fairy Tales! I’ve been looking forward to this edition for a long time, as it’s absolutely my favorite fairy tale of all time. “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” combines the romance and mystery of “Beauty and the Beast” with the quest adventure of “The Snow Queen,” and I adore it every time I return to it. I can’t recall when I first encountered it, but it has stuck with me ever since. Today, I want to get into the history of the folklore of this particular story, though if you want to know more about the related tale, “Beauty and the Beast,” you can check out the essay on that here. Click below to continue!

Folklore

I teased about Apuleius’s The Golden Ass in the “Beauty and the Beast” edition a long time ago, so it’s about time to get into it! The reason The Golden Ass is so important is that it contains the story of “Cupid and Psyche,” which is thought to be the precursor to most tales of the ATU 425 Type (”Search for the Lost Husband”). It shares a remarkable number of similarities to “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” from the mysterious husband in darkness to travel on the back of the wind to a jealous mother figure assigning difficult tasks. The ending is slightly different, as are, of course, the specific motifs, but morphologically it has a nearly identical structure. “Cupid and Psyche” is a direct influence on “Beauty and the Beast,” even though it’s even more similar in structure to “Cupid and Psyche.” 

“East of the Sun and West of the Moon” was collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe in 1845 to be included in their collection Norske folkeventyr (just like Dappelgrim and The Gingerbread Man). Their collection efforts were built on a similar to impulse to those of the Grimm Brothers, though it’s evident that despite these collectors’ goals of creating thoroughly national collections of folktales, such an endeavor is thwarted by the nature of these stories. While “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” is very Nordic in its details, such as the white bear and the trolls, the framework of it, as we’ve seen, has made its way across Europe and the Mediterranean, perhaps farther, for millennia. That said, these details present in the story are part of what makes it unique and enchanting, so let’s take a look at how this variant of the 425A Type forms its own identity. 

Setting and Symbolism

One of the reasons this story is my favorite is that it captures both the repetitive quality of oral folk stories and the detail and beauty of a more literary effort. This is something that sets it apart from “Beauty and the Beast,” which lacks the repetition, magical natural elements, and quest narrative. What the stories share in common, however, include a frightening beast as a suitor and a realm of supernatural creatures that pose some sort of threat to the heroine’s happiness. In “Beauty and the Beast,” these are fairies, while in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” they are trolls. 

Trolls are present in Old Norse folklore as well as in later Scandinavian folklore. They share much in common with the fairies and witches of central Europe, possessing magical powers but remaining far from human civilization. They are frequently depicted as ugly creatures, rather than the ethereal beauties of the fairies, but they can be similarly possessive and covetous of human companions–they themselves are not Christian, and they are considered a threat to Christianfolk in later folk tales. One of their defining characteristics is in fact that they have a social organization and are not solitary, which is something their depiction in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone did not get right. Overall, though, the depiction was not too far off. 

There are some other figures in the story that are also significant, such as the old women the heroine encounters while searching for the white bear. I have a lot to say about old women and crones in fairy tales, but I’ll save that for another day. Finally, all four of the winds appear in the story to help the heroine. Part of this can be explained by the presence of Zephyrus, the West Wind, in “Cupid and Psyche.” However, it likely isn’t a stretch to say that the winds are especially meaningful to Scandinavian people, who depended on the winds in their fishing and sailing endeavors. 

The Rule of Three is also very prominent in the story, as the heroine visits three witches and meets three winds before receiving the help of the North Wind. She receives three items from the witches, each of which gives her three nights with the prince in the troll kingdom. Not only is the number three important on a morphological level according to Vladimir Propp, but it’s important on an oral narrative level. The amount of repetition and the Rule of Three would have been important for oral narrators to preserve the most important elements of the story across multiple tellings. 

Conclusion

“East of the Sun and West of the Moon” not only preserves an oral narrative quality, but it successfully weaves this together with an enchantingly vivid setting in Scandinavia (even the day on which the events begin, a Thursday, is significant because it was named for Thor, a major Norse deity). The heroine also has a wonderful amount of agency in this story, which deliberately gives her the option of saying no to the bear’s request in the beginning of the tale, and then making the decision to pursue him later out of her own free will. There’s much to be said about this agency, but that is yet another topic for another time. All in all, this fairy tale is an exquisite example of a folktale, and I expect it will remain my favorite for many years to come.