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 Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe’s famous Norwegian folktale collection
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 fodeland” (“To My Native Land”), by S. O. Wolff (1796-1859), which appeared in
CLOD-HANS AN OLD STORY RETOLD
IN AN OLD MANOR house in the country, there lived an old squire who had two sons, who were too clever by half. They wanted to propose to the king’s daughter, and they dared to do so because she had announced that she would marry the man who could speak up the best for himself.
