This year’s Edinburgh International Storytelling Festival ‘Lights of the North’ focusses on story telling from Scotland, Norway, Germany, Sweden, and Iceland. There are still local events throughout Edinburgh and Scotland until the end of November, and an exhibition of illustrations by Hester Aspland at the Story Telling Centre until 5 November 2025. As it is the centenary year of the National Library of Scotland, some events have been organised with the National Library in Edinburgh.
Norwegian folk tales
I chose to sample the Norwegian stories. The first event ‘Norwegian Tales’ was narrated by two story tellers, Mimesis Heidi Dahlsveen and Georgiana Keable Jerstad, who are regulars at the festival.
Folk tales and fairy tales have recognisable tropes. They use rituals such as eating, drinking, and sleeping. Daughters and sons nearly always seem to come in threes. There are often farmers or wood cutters. In one of Heidi’s tales a wood cutter had three daughters who each married a goat, a bear, and a fox (because in the forest the alternative would be marrying a tree). In Norwegian tales there are cultural references such as ‘the blue hour’ or twilight, and the word ‘skol’ or cheers.
Folk lore is populated by lots of forms of life: kings and queens, and supernatural beings such as hag-trolls, animals who act like people, and things that come to life or transform into other things. In a story told by Georgiana about beer, the broom, the wheat, and the rake become animate and start talking.
Earthy stories
The stories were unexpectedly like listening to stand-up comedy, but about trolls, woodcutters, and kings and queens. One revolting but really funny story involved a man admiring a bear’s pot of stew which contained all the fruits of the forest. In attempting to learn to cook like the bear he goes to the toilet in that evening’s stew pot. The man later tries to copy a fox who goes fishing for fish and chips with his tail.
Like stand-up comedy, a story in the spoken tradition seems to be constructed to help the narrators remember the story. For example, the marriage of three daughters can lead to a narrative structure of three similar sequels. The comedy was boosted by the storytellers’ knack for imitating noises and actions, such as the bear trudging through the forest, or undertaking his natural daily processes.
Dirty stories
Mimesis Heidi Dahlsveen continued to entertain at the National Library of Scotland in another event, ‘Folk Tales in Focus: The Norwegian collectors and Scotland’. This was billed as an Adult Event. Heidi gave some background about the story collectors Asbjørnsen and Moe, but she mainly told stories peppered with contemporary references and sometimes subverted the stories. A troll went to a self-development workshop to learn how to get on with humans, and a king’s sexuality is ambiguous. These stories got progressively dirtier and funnier until the last story which involved sex, a four-leaf clover, a king, a queen, and a troll. However, I will not relate this here in case the reader ever wants to go and listen to Heidi for themselves.
Other stories
Besides the Norwegian Stories there were stories from other traditions. An event on the Irish/Scottish legends, ‘The Fianna in Focus: Scottish Lore and Collections’with Donald Smith and Ruairidh MacLeangave a taster into the Fenian cycle: the cycle of stories surrounding Finn MacCool. This highlighted how Scottish place names in the North are influenced by the Gaelic oral tradition. Such names are often related to dramatic events in an epic story, like the death of a hero, for example ‘Uaigh Dhiarmaid’, or Dhiarmaid’s grave.
All the events I attended, both funny and serious, showed that the oral story telling tradition is a rich mine of literary, historical, and social interest. But for those who just wanted an hour or so of escapist and funny entertainment those were on offer too, reviving, like a hot drink on a cold autumn evening.
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