In the days of our forefathers, when there was nothing but wretched boats up in Nordland, and folks must needs buy fair winds by the sackful from the Gan-Finn, it was not safe to tack about in the open sea in wintry weather. In those days a fisherman never grew old. It was mostly womenfolk and children, and lame and halt, who were buried ashore.

I thought I was buying a collection of north Norwegian folk stories when I purchased (OK, it was free) Weird Tales of the Northern Seas, by Jonas Lie (considered one of the “four greats” of Norwegian literature in the National Romantic period, along with Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsson, and Alexander Kielland [whose writing retreat near Stavanger I visited this summer]). What I got was something somewhat different, and in some ways better. It certainly left its impression on this reader.

Jonas Lie wrote novels in the “realistic” style (I’ve never read any of them), but he didn’t mind incorporating a folk tale or two into them, as sort of psychological local color. He also assembled some collections of genuine folklore stories. It from both of these categories that the editor (and translator? I’m not sure) R. Nisbet Bain collected this volume in 1893.

These stories are grim. They mirror the attitudes of a culture that learned to eke a marginal existence from the cruel sea at the cost of perpetual danger and human tragedy. The monster that shows up most often here is the draug. The name refers to a kind of revenant in other parts of Norway, but in the north he was a sea-troll who had a head like a seal’s (or a lump of seaweed), who took ruthless, often long-delayed revenge on those who offended him. Most often the lesson of the story is that you will pay for your sins, and nothing can be done about it.

Probably the most famous of the stories is the first, “The Fisherman and the Draug,” which is exactly the sort of thing I just described. The one that impressed me most was the next, “Jack of Sjöholm and the Gan-Finn,” probably the weirdest of the collection. It shows the most obvious marks of literary craftsmanship, especially in its poetic, dream-like quality, and ends in an obscure manner that you never find in real folk tales.

But all in all, these stories are genuinely atmospheric and haunting. If you like this sort of thing, I recommend it. The translation isn’t bad – a little stilted, but that very likely echoes the original text. This was the 1890s, after all. The worst problem is that the footnotes at the end of each story aren’t linked, which creates a difficulty for non-Norwegian readers.