Folk Tales of Sweden — Part 1 (Little Rosa and Long Leda · The Three Great-Aunts)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Part one — the premiere of a new shelf. Two Swedish folk tales collected from oral tradition by Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius and George Stephens and published in Svenska folk-sagor och äfventyr, Första delen (Stockholm, 1844–49); heard here in a fresh in-house English translation made from the Swedish. In Little Rosa and Long Leda, three white doves on an axe-handle reward the kind stepsister with beauty, golden hair and gold rings from her laughing mouth — and answer her stepsister's stones with doubled plainness, thorn-bush hair and a toad at every laugh. Cast away by a hired ship that the sea itself takes in a storm, Rosa keeps a green island with a singing linden and a nightingale, is changed by an enchanted shirt into a golden goose, and at the last pleads for the very stepmother who wronged her — the death sentence remitted, at Rosa's word, to lifelong imprisonment in the tower. In The Three Great-Aunts, Big-Foot Mother, Big-Seat Mother and Big-Thumb Mother spin, weave and sew the idle bride through her three trials for the price of a wedding invitation — and the king, hearing how their shapes came about, forbids his daughter-in-law ever to spin, weave or sew again. The episode opens and closes with its theme, Spotlight After Midnight — Slow Pulse, heard also briefly between the stories.
Chapters
0:38 Little Rosa and Long Leda
24:28 The Three Great-Aunts
One further tale of the book is not read on this shelf, excluded by name after a full reading: Ungdoms-Landet — The Land of Youth (No. 9). No claim of completeness for the book is made.
From Svenska folk-sagor och äfventyr, Första delen, by Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius & George Stephens (Stockholm, 1844–49), public domain — Project Gutenberg eBook #57357, tales 7B and 11, complete and in book order, in a fresh in-house English translation from the Swedish. Narrated by Silas. Theme: Spotlight After Midnight — Slow Pulse.
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