About Asbjørnsen and Moe
Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe were two Norwegian friends who collected stories in the nineteenth century. From the 1830s, they listened to narratives passed down by word of mouth in different parts of Norway and wrote them down.
The first instalments of their joint collection appeared in 1841. They paid attention to words, turns of phrase and the different versions they heard. Their work brought these spoken stories into books, followed by new editions and translations.
Their notebooks and manuscripts are now preserved in the University of Oslo’s folklore collections. These records retain traces of the collecting process and of the people who told the stories behind the well-known published texts.