A Polysystemic Study of Folk Literature in Nineteenth-Century Norway

The Norwegian Folktales, collected, transcribed and re-written by Per Christian Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe from 1842, had a pivotal role in the shaping of a cultural and linguistic identity in the emerging nation-state. After four centuries of ‘union’ where Denmark and Sweden were the dominant partners, Norway was finally declared an independent nation state in 1914. The folktales, handed down orally through the generations across the country, embodied important symbolical, cultural and linguistic characteristics from the rural environment. The paper describes the context and process through which The Norwegian Folktales influenced both the emerging natonal identity and the emerging Norwegian language and how this can be interpreted through Gideon Toury’s notion of norms in Translation Theory.