Fairy Tales

THE HILL OF THE ELVES

SOME FIDGETY LIZARDS WERE running around in the cracks of an old tree. They could understand each other very well because they spoke lizard language.

“My, how it’s rumbling and humming in the old elf hill!” said one lizard. “I haven’t been able to close my eyes for two nights because of the noise. I could just as well be lying there with a toothache because then I don’t sleep either!”

“There’s something going on in there,” said the second lizard. “They had the hill standing on four red pillars up until cockcrow. They’re really airing it out, and the elf maidens have learned some new dances that have stamping in them. Something is going on.”

“I’ve talked to an earthworm of my acquaintance,” said the third lizard. “He was right up at the top of the hill, where he digs around night and day. He heard quite a bit. Of course he can’t see, the miserable creature, but he can feel around and understands how to listen. They are expecting guests in the elf hill, distinguished guests, but who they are he wouldn’t say, or he probably didn’t know. All the will-o’-the-wisps have been reserved to make a torchlight procession, as it’s called, and the silver and gold—and there’s enough of that in the hill—is being polished and set out in the moonlight.”

“But who in the world can the guests be?” all the lizards asked. “I wonder what is going on? Listen to how it’s humming! Listen to the rumbling!”

Just then the hill of the elves opened up, and an old elf lady came toddling out. She had a hollow back, but was otherwise very decently dressed. She was the old elf king’s housekeeper and a distant relative. She had an amber heart on her forehead. Her legs moved very quickly: trip, trip. Oh, how she could get around, and she went straight down in the bog to the nightjar!

“You’re invited to the elf hill tonight,” she said, “but first will you do us a tremendous favor and see to the invitations? You must make yourself useful since you don’t have a house yourself. We’re having some highly distinguished guests—very important trolls—and the old elf king himself will be there.”

“Who’s to be invited?” asked the nightjar.

“Well, everyone can come to the big ball, even people, so long as they can talk in their sleep or do one or another little bit in our line. But for the main banquet the guests are very select. We are only inviting the absolutely most distinguished. I have argued with the elf king about this because I’m of the opinion that we can’t even let ghosts attend. The merman and his daughters have to be invited first. They aren’t crazy about coming onto dry land, but each of them will have a wet rock or better to sit on, so I don’t think they’ll refuse this time. We must have all the old trolls of the highest rank with tails, the river sprite, and the pixies. And I don’t think we can exclude the grave-hog, the hell-horse, or the church-shadow. Strictly speaking they belong to the clergy, not our people, but it’s just their jobs after all, and they are close relatives and visit us often.”

“Suuuper!” croaked the nightjar and flew away to issue invitations.

The elf maidens were already dancing on the elf hill, and they danced in long shawls woven from mist and moonlight, which is lovely for those who enjoy this type of thing. Way inside the middle of the elf hill the big hall had been fixed up. The floor had been washed with moonlight, and the walls were polished with witches’ wax, so they shone like tulip petals in the light. The kitchen was full of frogs on the spit, little children’s fingers rolled in grass snake skins, and salads of mushroom seeds, wet snouts of mouse, and hemlock. There was beer from the bog woman’s brewery, and saltpeter wine from the tomb cellar. It was hearty fare. Desert was rusted-nail hard candy, and church window glass tidbits.

They danced in long shawls woven from mist and moonlight.

The old elf king had his golden crown polished in slate pencil powder. It was deluxe powder, from the smartest boy’s pencil, and it’s very hard for the elf king to get hold of that. They hung up curtains in the bedroom and fastened them up with snake spit. Yes, there was quite a hustle and bustle!

“Now we’ll fumigate with curled horsehair and pig bristles, and then I think my share of the work will be done,” said the old elf maid.

“Dear daddy,” said the smallest daughter, “Won’t you tell who the distinguished guests are?”

“Well,” he said, “I guess I must tell you. Two of you daughters must prepare to get married—because two of you are going to get married. The troll king from Norway—the one who lives in the Dovre mountain and has many granite mountain castles and a gold mine that’s worth more than people think¹—is coming with his two boys. Each of them is looking for a wife. The troll king is one of those down-to-earth, honest old Norwegian fellows, cheerful and straightforward. I know him from the old days when we were on familiar terms with each other. He had come down here for a wife. She is dead now. She was the daughter of the chalk cliff king from Moen.² You could say she was chalked up to be his wife. Oh, how I’m looking forward to seeing him! They say that his boys are a couple of bratty conceited fellows, but that may not be true, and the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. They’ll straighten out when they get older. You girls will whip them into shape!”

“When are they coming?” one daughter asked.

“It depends on the wind and weather,” the elf king said. “They are traveling by the cheapest method and will come when they can obtain passage on a ship. I wanted them to come by way of Sweden, but the old fellow wouldn’t think of it! He doesn’t keep up with the times, and I don’t like that!”³

Just then two will-o’-the-wisps came hopping, one faster than the other, and so one came first.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!” they shouted.

“Give me my crown, and I’ll go stand in the moonlight!” said the elf king.

His daughters lifted their long shawls and curtsied right down to the ground.

There was the troll king from Dovre with a crown of stiff icicles and polished pinecones. In addition he was wearing a bearskin coat and sleigh boots. In contrast his sons were bare-necked and weren’t wearing suspenders because they were strapping fellows.

“Is that a hill?” the smallest of the boys asked and pointed at the elf hill. “We’d call it a hole up in Norway.”

“Boys!” said their father. “Holes go inward, hills go upward. Don’t you have eyes in your heads?”

The only thing that surprised them here, they said, was that they could understand the language right away!

“Don’t carry on now!” said the old king, “one would think you’re still wet behind the ears.”

Then they went into the elf hill, where there really was a fine company assembled. They had been gathered in such haste that you would think they had been blown together. It was just lovely and neatly arranged for everyone. The sea folks sat at the table in big vats of water and said that they felt right at home. All of them had good table manners except the two young Norwegian trolls. They put their feet up on the table, but then they thought that everything they did was becoming.

“Feet out of the food!” said the old troll, and they obeyed him but not right away. They tickled the elf maidens next to them with pinecones that they had in their pockets, and then they took their boots off to be comfortable and gave them to the elf maidens to hold. But their father, the old Dovre troll, was completely different. He told lovely stories about the glorious Norwegian mountains, and about the waterfalls that rushed down in white foam with a roar like thunder and organ music. He told about the salmon that jumped up the rushing waters when the water sprite played its gold harp. He told about the glistening winter nights when the sleigh bells rang out, and the lads ran with burning torches over the shiny ice that was so transparent that they could see the fish swim away in fright underneath their feet. He could tell stories so that you could see and hear what he talked about: it was as if the sawmills were going, as if the boys and girls sang folksongs and danced the hailing. Suddenly the old troll gave the old elf maiden a hearty familial smack—it was a real kiss—and they weren’t even related!

“Don’t carry on now!” said the old king.

Then the elf maidens had to dance, and they danced both slowly and the tramping dance, and it suited them very well. Then they did the hardest dance, the one that’s called “stepping out of the dance.” Oh my! How they kicked up their legs. You couldn’t tell what was the beginning or what was the end. You couldn’t tell arms from legs. They swirled around each other like sawdust, and then they twirled around so that the hell-horse got sick and had to leave the table.

“Prrrr ... they can surely shake a leg,” said the troll king, “but what else can they do besides dance, do high kicks, and make whirlwinds?”

“You’ll see,” said the elf king, and he called his youngest daughter forward. She was very slender and as clear as moonlight. She was the most delicate of all the sisters. She put a white twig in her mouth, and then she disappeared. That was her skill.

But the old troll said that he wouldn’t tolerate such a skill in his wife, and he didn’t think his boys would like it either.

The second one could walk beside herself as if she had a shadow, and trolls don’t have those.

The third was quite different from the others. She had been in training at the bog woman’s brewery, and she knew how to garnish elder stumps with glowworms too.

“She’ll be a good housewife!” said the old troll, and he drank to her with his eyes because he didn’t want to drink too much.

Then the fourth elf maiden came to play a big golden harp. When she played the first string, they all lifted their left legs because trolls are left-legged, and when she played the second string, they all had to do what she wanted.

“That’s a dangerous woman,” said the old troll, but both of his sons left the hill because they were bored.

“What can the next daughter do?” asked the troll king.

“I have become so fond of Norwegians,” she said, “and I’ll never marry unless I can come to Norway.”

But the smallest daughter whispered to the old troll, “It’s just because in a Norwegian song she heard that when the world comes to an end, the Norwegian mountains will stand like a monument, and she wants to get up there because she’s afraid of dying.”⁴

“Ho, ho,” laughed the troll king. “So that’s the scoop. But what can the seventh and last daughter do?”

“The sixth comes before the seventh,” said the elf king because he could count, but the sixth didn’t want to come out.

“All I can do is tell people the truth,” she said. “Nobody cares about me, and I have enough to do sewing my burial shroud.”

Now came the seventh and last, and what could she do? Well, she could tell fairy tales, and as many as she wanted to.

“Here are my five fingers,” said the old troll. “Tell me one about each of them.”

And the elf maiden took him by the wrist, and he laughed so hard he gurgled, and when she came to the ring finger that had a golden ring around its middle as if it knew there was going to be an engagement, the troll king said, “Hold on to what you have! My hand is yours! I want to marry you myself.”

And the elf maiden said there were still stories to hear about the ring finger and a short one about little Per Pinkie.

“We’ll hear those in the winter,” said the old troll, “and we’ll hear about the spruce trees and the birch and about the gifts of the hulder people and the tinkling frost. You will be telling stories for sure because nobody up there can do that very well yet. And we’ll sit in the stone hall by the light of the blazing pine chips and drink mead from the golden horns of the old Norwegian kings. The water sprite has given me a couple of them. And as we’re sitting there, the farm pixie will come by for a visit. He’ll sing you all the songs of the mountain dairy girls. That’ll be fun. The salmon will leap in the waterfalls and hit the stone wall, but they won’t get in! Oh, you can be sure it’s wonderful in dear old Norway. But where are the boys?”

Well, where were the boys indeed? They were running around in the fields blowing out the will-o’-the-wisps, who had come so good-naturedly to make the torchlight parade.

“What’s all this gadding about?” said the troll king. “I’ve taken a mother for you, now you can take wives among your aunts.”

But the boys said that they would rather give a speech and drink toasts. They had no desire to get married. And then they gave speeches, drank toasts, and turned the glasses over to show that there wasn’t a drop left. Then they took off their coats and lay down on the table to sleep because they weren’t a bit self-conscious. But the troll king danced all around the hall with his young bride, and he exchanged boots with her because that’s more fashionable than exchanging rings.

“The rooster’s crowing!” said the old elf who was the housekeeper. “Now we have to shut the shutters so the sun doesn’t burn us to death.”

And the elf hill closed.

But outside the lizards ran up and down the cracked tree, and one said to the other:

“Oh, I really liked that old Norwegian troll king!”

“I liked the boys better,” said the earthworm, but of course he couldn’t see, the miserable creature.

NOTES

1 Andersen likely took this motif from Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe’s famous Norwegian folktale collection Norske folkeeventyr, the first volume of which appeared in 1841. Dovrefjell is a mountain range south of Trondheim.

2 According to folklore, a supernatural creature was thought to live inside the chalk cliffs on Moen, an island in the Baltic Sea off the Danish coast.

3 Reference to Norwegian opposition to the 1814 union with Sweden.

4 Reference to the first line of the poem “Til mit födeland” (“To My Native Land”), by S. O. Wolff (1796-1859), which appeared in Samlede poetiske forsög lst. volume, published in Christiania in 1833. The first line is “Hvor herligt er mit Fødeland” (“How splendid is my native land”).