Fairy Tales

THE RAGS

OUTSIDE THE FACTORY THERE were bundles of rags piled up in big stacks, gathered up from far and wide. Each rag had its story—each had a tale to tell, but we can’t listen to all of them. Some of the rags were domestic, and others came from foreign countries. There was a Danish rag lying right beside a Norwegian rag. The one was Danish through and through, and the other was utterly Norwegian, and that was the entertaining thing about them, as every sensible Norwegian or Dane would agree.

They recognized each other by their speech, although the Norwegian said that their languages were as different from each other as French from Hebrew. “We go to the mountains to fetch our language raw and original, and the Dane makes his sugar-coated mushy gibberish.”¹

The rags continued to talk, and a rag is a rag in every country. They only count for something when they’re in a rag pile.

“I am Norwegian!” said the Norwegian rag. “And when I say that I’m Norwegian, that’s all I need to say! I’m as firm in my fibers as the primordial mountains of old Norway, a country that has a constitution just like free America! It tickles my threads to think of what I am and to let my thoughts clink like ore in words of granite!”

“But we have literature!” said the Danish rag. “Do you understand what that is?”

“Understand!” repeated the Norwegian. “You flat land liver!—I should lift you into the mountains and let the Northern lights enlighten you, rag that you are! When the ice thaws in the Norwegian sun, then old Danish tubs sail up to us with butter and cheese, actually edible wares, but Danish literature follows along as ballast! We don’t need it! Where fresh water bubbles, you can dispense with stale beer, and in Norway there is a well that hasn’t been drilled, that the newspapers haven’t spread around and made known all over Europe, and that hasn’t been disseminated through camaraderie and through author’s travelogues to foreign lands. I speak my mind freely, and you Danes must get used to these free sounds. You will do that because you have a Scandinavian attachment to our proud mountainous land, the world’s primeval mountains!”

“A Danish rag would never talk like that,” said the Danish rag. “It’s not our nature. I know myself, and I’m like all our rags. We are so good natured and modest. We think too little of ourselves, and that doesn’t gain you anything, it’s true. But I like it. I think it’s completely charming. But, by the way, I can assure you that I very well know my own true worth. I just don’t talk about it. No one can accuse me of that failing. I’m soft and flexible, tolerate everything. I don’t envy anyone, and speak well of everyone. Except that there isn’t much good to be said for most others, but let them worry about it. I just make fun of it all because I’m very gifted myself.”

“Don’t speak to me in that soft gooey language of your flat country—it makes me sick!” said the Norwegian rag, and was able to get free from his bundle with help of the wind and move to a different pile.

Both rags were made into paper, and as chance would have it, the Norwegian rag became stationery on which a Norwegian wrote a faithful love letter to a Danish girl, and the Danish rag became a manuscript for a Danish ode in praise of Norway’s vigor and splendor.

So something good can come from rags, when they get away from their rag pile and are changed to truth and beauty. Then they shine with mutual understanding, and there’s a blessing in that.

That’s the story. It’s quite amusing and won’t offend anyone at all, except—the rags.

NOTE

1 Possibly a wordplay in the original since the Danish aas (mountain ridge) is similar to the name of Ivar Aasen (1813-1896), the Norwegian who created nynorsk (New Norwegian), one of the two official languages of Norway. The other official language is bokmål (book language), which is derived from Dano-Norwegian, the written language of Denmark/Norway for hundreds of years.