My paternal grandmother was born on February 13, 1879. I always remembered her birthday as the day between Lincoln’s birthday and Valentine’s Day. She shared many wonderful books with me as I was growing up. This song reflects some images from one of them.
Tag Archives: Norwegian folktales
The Righteous Penny
In that recent video with illustrations by Violet Moore Higgins and the song “Man of No Dreams,” I had one slide that included the title of a story from the folktale collection—“The Righteous Penny.” The story is one more often translated as “The Honest Penny,” and you may read one such translation here. The story includes the amusing motif of a cat that keeps reappearing aboard ship, but what I particularly like is the moral at the end: “He fetched his mother so that she could share in his happiness and did everything for her he could, because he did not believe in what she had always said: Everyone must look out for himself.” I like Inger Margrete Rasmussen’s translation of the tales, but the best one still in print is the Dover paperback, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, translated by George Webbe Dasent. The Dover edition includes many of the wonderful illustrations that were created by such well known Norwegian artists as Theodor Kittelsen, Otto Sinding, Per Krohg, Erik Werenskiold, and Dagfin Werenskiold.