East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon

Author: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen; Jørgen Moe

Time Period: 1701 CE–1850 CE

Country or Culture: Norway; Western Europe

Genre: Fairy Tale

Overview

Fans of Madame de Villeneuve’s fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast” will likely enjoy its earthy Norwegian cousin, “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon.” Like the more popular tale of the girl Beauty who accepts the love of a beast, thereby restoring his princely status, the Norwegian tale tells of a young girl given to a bear whose love she loses and regains. Before she recovers his love, however, this girl must undertake a long quest to restore the enchanted bear to human form. First published by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in 1845, “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon” was translated into English by George Webbe Dasent in 1859 and has since become one of the most popular Norse fairy tales. With its strong female heroine, down-to-earth tone, and humorous touches, the story continues to inspire new versions.

In this story, the girl, or “lassie” as she is called, is given to the White Bear for money, not because her father has wronged the animal as in “Beauty and the Beast.” In the White Bear’s opulent castle, the girl lives by herself during the day but is visited by a human man only at night. Complaining of loneliness, she visits her family, but the bear warns her not to speak alone with her mother. Naturally, the girl does precisely that and follows her mother’s advice to unveil her lover’s identity by lighting a candle. When she does so and discovers a lovely prince, she kisses him, dropping hot tallow on his shirt. Waking and denouncing her betrayal, he is forced to depart to an enchanted castle located east of the sun and west of the moon, where he must marry a long-nosed troll girl. Aided by three old women and the four winds, the girl undertakes a lengthy quest to find him. When she reaches the castle, she uses the women’s golden gifts to outwit Long-nose, and she finds the prince with the help of Christians imprisoned in the castle. In her final test, the girl rescues the prince when she alone is able to remove the drops of tallow from his shirt.

“My!” said her mother; “it may well be a Troll you slept with! But now I’ll teach you a lesson how to set eyes on him. I’ll give you a bit of candle, which you can carry home in your bosom; just light that while he is asleep, but take care not to drop the tallow on him.” Yes! she took the candle, and hid it in her bosom, and as night drew on, the White Bear came and fetched her away.

“East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon”

The tale shares with “Beauty and the Beast” the basic plot of a beautiful girl whose poor father gives her to a beast in exchange for something; through a test, the girl subsequently restores the beast to his human, royal form. Yet the story also includes many details from Lucius Apuleius’s tale “Cupid and Psyche,” particularly the lover’s night visits, the kiss and revelation, and the long quest in which the heroine ultimately reunites with her prince. All three tales dramatically showcase a girl who must somehow prove her worth as a mate. Scholars interpret the stories as dramatizing the perilous journey adolescent girls undertake to become women and wives. A gender analysis of both male and female characters reveals how this Norse version strikingly reverses traditional gender roles in this coming-of-age journey. Although such reversals occur to some degree in the story’s two main sources, close analysis shows how “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon” highlights female agency to a greater degree. As the tale progresses, the dominant male characters give way to the agency of female characters; by the end, the story restores a balance of power between men and women to suggest an especially compelling metaphor for a girl’s rite of passage into womanhood.

Summary

The story begins on a stormy autumn night in the house of a poor man who has more children than he can feed. Sitting by the fire, the family suddenly hears three taps on the window. The father opens the door and is greeted politely by the White Bear. The bear immediately asks for the man’s youngest daughter, the loveliest of his children, and promises to make the man rich in return. The daughter steadfastly refuses, but the man nonetheless invites the bear to return in a week’s time for a final answer. During that time, the man convinces the girl to accept the bear’s offer, so that upon the animal’s return, the girl departs with him, riding on his back. They arrive at a sumptuous castle, and the bear gives her a silver bell so that she may ask for whatever she desires. When she lies down in bed that night, a man comes and sleeps with her. He is in fact the White Bear, who transforms himself into a man—but only at night in the dark of their bedroom; he leaves in the morning before dawn. Spending her days alone like this, the girl eventually becomes distraught and asks the bear to allow her to visit her family. He grants her wish on one condition: She is not to speak alone with her mother. If she does, she will “bring bad luck on both of us” (Asbjørnsen and Moe 306).

The White Bear takes the girl to her family, now wealthy, and reminds her of his warning. Her family shows their gratitude for their newfound fortune, and the girl at first puts off her mother’s requests to talk. Eventually, however, she gives in and reveals her lonely days and the man’s mysterious visits to her at night. In response, her mother exclaims, “[I]t may well be a Troll you slept with!” (Asbjørnsen and Moe 307) and instructs the girl how to find out the truth. She gives her daughter a candle to light in the dark but urges her not to spill tallow on whomever she finds. When the bear returns to bring her back, he repeats his warning, but she denies that she has heeded her mother’s advice.

That night, the girl lights the candle to find a beautiful prince; she immediately falls in love and feels compelled to kiss him. As she does, she spills three drops of tallow on his shirt. He wakes and laments the girl’s foolish mistake: Had she just waited one year, he would have been freed from his stepmother’s spell, which makes him a bear by day and a man by night. “But now all ties are snapt between us; now I must set off from you to her,” he says (Asbjørnsen and Moe 309). The stepmother’s castle stands east of the sun and west of the moon; in it is a princess “with a nose three ells long,” who is now destined to be the prince’s wife. When the prince declares that the girl cannot accompany him, she asks to travel there alone to seek him out. He says she may do so, but “there was no way to that place. It lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, and thither she’d never find her way” (309). In the morning, she finds herself sitting on a patch of grass in the woods with the rags she had first brought from her home. The prince and the castle have vanished.

The girl weeps and then quickly embarks on a long journey to find the prince. In the first stage of her quest, she meets three successive “hags” who each lend her a horse and give her a golden object: an apple, a carding comb, and a spinning wheel. When she asks the first two hags if they know how to find the prince, they seem to know of the situation and mysteriously reply that he lives in the castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon, “and thither you’ll come, late or never” (Asbjørnsen and Moe 311). The old women each then offer their horses, bestow the golden objects, and send her along to the next woman. The third hag sends the girl to the East Wind with the idea that he might transport her to the distant castle. The East Wind says he cannot blow “so far” and carries her on his back to the West Wind, who responds in the same way and carries her to the South Wind. The South Wind likewise cannot carry out the deed and brings her to the powerful but cantankerous North Wind. The North Wind has taken what he complains is a difficult journey, but he nonetheless agrees to help. The following day, with great effort, he blows the girl to the castle where she lands beneath its windows.

There, the girl sits and plays with the golden apple. The prince’s false bride, Long-nose, spies her and asks to buy the apple. The girl says she will give it up if she can be with the prince that night. Long-nose agrees, but that night, the girl finds that she cannot wake the prince from his deep slumber. The false bride drives her out in the morning, so she bargains away the carding comb to try again a second night, with the same result. On the third morning, she gives the spinning wheel to Long-nose. In the meantime, however, the prince is informed by Christians imprisoned in the castle with him that they hear a woman weeping and praying in his room at night. That evening, the prince pretends to drink what he now realizes is a sleeping potion given to him by Long-nose. The girl finds him awake; he announces she has come just in time to rescue him from his wedding the following day to Long-nose. He says that before the wedding, he will demand a test of washing out the three drops of tallow from his shirt. Long-nose will fail the test because “that’s a work only for christian folk, and not for such a pack of Trolls” (Asbjørnsen and Moe 318). The prince will then challenge the girl to wash the shirt. The next day, all goes as planned; the more the trolls wash the shirt, the blacker it becomes. The prince brings in the girl, who washes the shirt clean. The trolls burst with rage and the prince and princess free the Christians and “[flit] away” (320) from the enchanted castle.

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