INTRODUCTION.
Three names in the living literature of Norway may be said to have escaped from the provinciality of a narrow home circle, and to have conquered a place for themselves in the general European concert. Two of these, — Ibsen and Björnson, — are borne by professional poets; the third is that of a man of science whose irresistible bias towards literary style may be said to have made a poet of him against his will. The novelettes of Björnson and the comedies of Ibsen belong to the tradition of imaginative art, but the stories of Asbjörnsen, a selection from which is here introduced to the English public, in some sense inaugurated a new order in literature. Here in England, where our poetical language has been repeatedly renewed at the fresh wells of the vernacular, where Chaucer and the Elizabethans, Butler, and Burns, and Dickens, each in his own way, have constantly enriched our classical speech with the bright idioms of the vulgar, we can scarcely realise how startling a thing it is when a great writer first dares, in a ripe literature, to write exactly as people commonly speak.
