Bone and Sickle

Robert the Devil is a supernatural medieval legend that inspired a 19th-century French opera, which incorporates key elements from a seminal Gothic novel.  The opera and legend are substantially different but both interesting.

We begin with Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1831 opera, Robert le diable, which gained notoriety for a ballet sequence in Act III, which portrays an attempted seduction of the hero, Robert, Duke of Normandy, by the ghosts of corrupted nuns, freshly risen from their crypts. The scene is not found in the original legend, but as we learn, was borrowed from a particularly sensationalistic early Gothic novel,The Monk, written by Matthew Gregory Lewis in 1764.   We also learn that Meyerbeer’s chief librettist, Eugène Scribe later went on to crib another storyline from Lewis’ The Monk for the 1854 opera by composer Charles Gounod, La nonne sanglante (“the bloody nun”).

Rendering of cloister set for Paris Opera premiere.
Along the way, we learn how Robert le diable helped save the financially imperiled Paris Opera after its royal subsidy had been withdrawn following the July Revolution of 1830.  Along with public curiosity about the scandalous ballet, ticket sales owed much to the 19th-century equivalent of special effects — flashy and innovative stagecraft (new gaslight design, trapdoors, floating will-o-the-wisps, etc.) and a spectacular set replicating a ruined gothic monastery. Hans Christian Andersen, George Sand and Frédéric Chopin lavishly praised the production. Honoré de Balzac and Alexander Dumas worked mentions of the opera into their novels. Edgar Degas painted not one but two renderings of the Ballet of the Nuns.

Edgar Degas’ rendering of the “Ballet of the Nins”
The opera also gave birth to a new style of ballet, one linked to Romanticism’s interest in the supernatural: ballet blanc, “white ballet” named for the innovative long, flowing skirts that lent themselves to wafting movements suggestive of misty wisps moving in the darkness. The opera’s 1847  London premiere was attended by Queen Victoria and featured superstar soprano Jenny Lind as Robert’s sister.  Traffic came to a standstill as unruly spectators mobbed the streets hoping for  glimpse of either celebrity.

The second half of our episode tells the original story of Robert the Devil.  It first appeared around 1250, sketched out in short form by the Dominican monk, Étienne de Bourbon, in a collection of exempla, or moral tales intended to be used by priests in their homilies.  A couple decades later, details were filled out in a longer, anonymous  poem, preserved in France’s National Library. Then by the late 14th century, it was rendered as a miracle play in “Forty Miracles of Our Lady,” commissioned by a guild of Parisian goldsmiths. By 1500, the story had arrived in Britain. That year, Wynkyn de Worde, assistant to pioneering London printshop owner Thomas Caxton, issued a chapbook prose translation hewing close to the French 14th-century poem.

I found the Wynkyn de Worde text reproduced in a handsome 1904 volume complete with line illustrations, decorative initials, and borders reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts books of William Morris.  As promised in the episode, here is the link to that book: Robert_the_Deuyll.pdf.  (Visit the show notes on the Bone and Sickle website if you can’t click link).

As for the  story itself, it’s best you enjoy it without spoilers as told by Mrs. Karswell.  It’s full of demonic wrath, battles, court intrigue, miracles, pathos, and a very and prolonged peculiar penance.  All told in charming 16th-century language with all the little sound-design extras you’ve come to expect from Bone and Sickle.

Trolls, as presented in medieval literature, are vastly different from the creatures we encountered in our last episode’s collection of 19th-century Norwegian folktales. These Viking Age trolls are more vividly and gruesomely described, and the “troll-women,” who frequently appear, are akin to witches.

We begin the show with a traditional song from the Faroe Islands, “Trøllini í Hornalondum,” telling the story of St. Olaf battling trolls on the coast of Norway. While the ballad presumably originated in Norway, it was first recorded by the Danish priest and historian, Anders Sørensen Vedel, in his 1591 publication, Hundredvisebogen, (the Book of 100 Ballads.”)

While St. Olaf (King Olaf II) is regarded as the saint who drove paganism from Norway, but this struggle was ongoing with trolls continuing to embody the old pagan world as belied by various tropes — their dislike of church bells, and fear of crosses. We’ll next look at an interesting case from Iceland presenting a direct conflict between a church and troll.  It was collected by the “Grimm of Iceland, Jón Árnason, a librarian and museum curator who published several collections of folktales, beginning in 1852. This one’s from his second volume of Icelandic Folktales, published in 1864.

Encountering trolls — St. Olaf’s Journey, fresco by Albertus Pictor, ca 1470, Dingtuna Church, Västerås, Sweden
After this, we have some general comments on the historical relationship between trolls and giant (jötunn, Þurs and risi) as well as trolls and witches or sorcery (trollldom). Our remaining four stories (the medieval ones) present trolls of the Icelandic saga, epic stories written in Old Norse and relating the adventures of ancestral heroes or rulers, usually with some connection to history but with certain creative embellishments. A subset of the sagas, which take place in their own mythic timeline, the fornaldarsögur were simply written with entertainment in mind and more oriented toward magic and folklore – and trolls, so we’ll lok at a couple of those. And then there’s the þáttr, a sort of short story, sometimes folded into sagas, but often reproduced independently.

As this is a storytelling episode, we won’t spoil the tales with plot outlines, but the sources (in order) are:

The 14th-century þáttr of Thorstein Ox-leg as translated in William Craigie’s 1896 compilation called Scandinavian Folk-lore: “The Trolls in the HeidarWoods.”

A portion of the 16th-century Illuga Saga, translated by Philip Lavender of the Viking Society for Northern Research.

The 14th-century Saga of Grim Shaggy-Cheek as translated by Peter Tunstall.

The Saga of Orm Stórolfsson, as retold by William Craigie in Scandinavian Folk-lore – under the title: “The Giant on Sauðey” (Saudey).

We end with a song “Trøllini Trampa,” (“Trolls’ Tramp”) by the Faroese band, Spælimenninir

Trolls in Scandinavian folklore can be a little different from what’s imagined in the rest of the world.  We begin our show with a montage of clips from recent movies, Trollhunter (2010), Troll (2022), and Troll 2 (2025) — the latter two being Netflix productions that have rekindled interest in the subject while reimagining trollsin a way that does not always conform to the folklore. While all Scandinavian countries have their share of troll lore, this episode focuses specifically on Norway, the country with the most compelling collection of troll folklore.

The first portion of our show looks at the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen’s play along with  incidental music composed for the play by his associate Edvard Grieg. Introducing this topic is a clip from the 1970 musical Song of Norway, a fanciful Edvard Grieg biopic that garnered particularly bad reviews.  We learn a bit about why Grieg hated his well-known “Hall of the Mountain King,” a composition which accompanies Peer Gynt’s encounter with trolls inside a mountain in the Dovre mountain chain. We also learn what Ibsen hoped to achieve in telling the story of his antihero Peer Gynt, and how he wrestled with the movement known in Norway as Romantic Nationalism.

Next we look at two figures integral to this movement, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, a pair of folktale collectors often described as the “Brothers Grimm of Norway.”  Their 1841 publication, Norwegian Folk-Tales, along with updated volumes published in 1844, 1845, and  1871, provide most all the troll tales with examine in this episode. An exception to this is a book authored by Asbjørnsen alone, High Mountain Scenes, volume 2, Reindeer Hunt at Rondane. Published sometime before 1846, it’s the only volume referencing tales told about Peer Gynt, those being very loosely represented in Ibsen’s play.

Asbjørnsen & Moe’s “Norwegian Folk Tales”
The first of these we retell concerns a creature known as “the Bøyg,” something referred to as a type of troll in the story is described more  as a giant serpent of sorts. We follow this with more Peer Gynt episodes involving male trolls flirting with human females and a troll poking his enormous nose through a cabin window and suffering the consequences inflicted by Gynt.  The final story, “The Cat on the Dovre-Mountain,” takes place at Christmas, a time when troll encounters are particularly prevalent, and involves Gynt outsmarting a group of bothersome trolls via a peculiar stratagem.

Next, we run through some lesser-known details of the best-known troll tale “The Three Billygoats Gruff.”  We follow this with another well-known (in Norway) story, “The Boy Who Had an Eating Match with a Troll.” It involves a youth outwitting a troll with a particularly gruesome ruse It was familiar enough to Norwegian audiences to be referenced in Trollhunter.

Next we look at a character Askeladden, who is pitted against trolls in several of Asbjørnsen & Moe’s stories.  He’s usually describing the good-for-nothing youngest brother of a trio, an underdog who surprisingly achieves great things. His name (literally “ash lad”) referenes his stay-at home habits, in particular, sitting by the hearth playing in the ashes. We learn of several characters with related names and habits in Scandinavian literature and a more insultingly rude nickname for such characters, one which Asbjørnsen & Moe chose to censor from their stories.

Theodor Kittlesen, “Troll Pondering How Old iIt Is” (1911)
Our next troll tale, “The Lads who Met the Trolls in the Hedale Woods,” gives us particularly monstrous trio of trolls sharing a single eyeball.  While this is atypical, we also encounter here the common trope of trolls sniffing the air for “Christian blood,” a suggestion that their kind of an older pre-Christian order.  A reference to trolls using magic is also contained in this story, something we’ll run into in other tales.

We then hear some clips from a couple of Asbjørnsen & Moe-inspired films, the 2017 Norwegian film Ash Lad: In the Hall of the Mountain King and its 2019 follow-up, The Ash Lad: In Search of the Golden Castle.  The “Golden Castle” in Norwegian film title and  the title  of the relevant Asbjørnsen & Moe story is “Soria Moria Castle.” This one also features trolls, but in a peripheral role.  It’s a longer legend quest rather than a short folk tale in which we encounter three multi-headed trolls holding human women captive in three different castles.

Our last story, “The Hen is Trips in the Mountain,” takes its  weird title from a strange phrase uttered to open a door into a mountain, like “Open Sesame.” When a young woman enters theis particular mountain looking for a lost hen, she meets an unpleasant end, as does her younger sister, but when the youngest of the three enters, she manages not to repeat the mistakes of her two siblings and later discovers that trolls can explode when touched by the first rays of dawn (as well as turning to stone, another common folklore trope).

We wrap up the show with some interesting stats regarding the fascination trolls exert over the heavy metal subculture.

Theodor Kittlesen, “Mountain Troll” (1887)
 

 

Gammer Gurton’s Garland, published in 1784, is one of the earliest collections of English nursery rhymes, and contains verses both familiar and alarmingly unsettling.

Intended to be read to toddlers (i.e., “children who can neither read nor run,” according to its subtitle) and named after a fictitious Grandma (“Gammer”) Gurton, who’d be analogous to Mother Goose, the volume were assembled by the eccentric scholar Joseph Ritson, who was known for his collecting of Robin Hood ballads, vegetarianism and ultimate descent into madness.

Portrait of Joseph Ritson by James Sayers, early 1800s.
We begin our episode with a snippet of a 1940s’ rendition of “Froggy Went a-Courting” by cowboy singer Tex Ritter. It’s a relatively modern take on Ritson’s “The Frog and the Mouse.” But like quite a few rhymes in the collection, this one had appeared in print earlier. Already in 1611, British composer of rounds and collector of ballads, Thomas Ravenscroft, had written out both lyrics and musical notation for “The Marriage of the Frogge and the Mouse,” a song he described as a folk song or “country pastime.”

While a few other rhymes in Ritson’s collection were borrowed from one of two earlier editions of nursery verses (both published as Tommy Thumb’s Song Book 40 years earlier), most of what he collected appeared for tge first time in Gammer Gurton’s.

We hear a bit about some of the familiar rhymes that premiered in this collection, including Goosey, Goosey Gander, Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross (with the “rings on her fingers and bells on her toes” lady), Bye, Baby Bunting, and There Was an Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe.” Ritson’s version of the last, however, takes a rather rude and unexpected turn.

1865 edition of Gammer Gurton’s
Many, if not most, of Ritson’s rhymes seem to have been weeded out of the gentile or sentimental collections we know today. Naturally, we devote attention particularly to these objectionable verses. Included are a handful of aggressively nonsensical rhymes, which could pass for 18th-century Dada and verses notable for their cruelty. The most alarming contain brutal slurs, threats, and playful references to assault, adultery, matricide, suicide, and animals going to the gallows.

The last third of our episode is dedicated to poems noteworthy for their survival as musical ballads. The first discussed is the basis for song “Lady Alice,” which later appears in James Child’s 1860 collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Ritson’s version, “Giles Collins and Proud Lady Anna,” is a greatly simplified version of the ballad later cited by Child. While toddlers might appreciate the simpler storytelling, the subject matter — namely, doomed lovers — is not the normal stuff of healthy nursery rhymes. More surprising, is the fact that Ritson’s story begins with Giles Collins in the process of dying and Lady Anna dead (of heartbreak) within a few verses. After their deaths, a tentative suggestion of undying love, a lily reaching from Giles’ grave toward Anna’s, is destroyed – an unhappy turn on the not uncommon motif of a rose and briar entwining over lovers’ graves.

We close with a discussion of “The Gay Lady who Went to Church,” an innocuous-sounding rhyme, intertwined with the history of two rather gruesome folk songs popular around Halloween: “There Was an Old Lady All Skin and Bones” and “The Hearse Song” AKA “The Worms Crawl In.” Also discussed is a surprising link between Ritson’s nursery rhyme and a faux-historical ballad invented for the very first Gothic novel, Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk.

INFORMATION RE. THE FOLK-HORROR GIVEAWAY DISCUSSED IN THE SHOW OPEN CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://www.boneandsickle.com/giveaway/

The Christmas Eve ghost story is a fine old tradition associated with Victorian and Edwardian England, one that’s been making a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 2018, Bone and Sickle has enthusiastically embraced the custom.

Our offering for 2025, is “The Other Bed” written by E.F. Benson in  1912 and read for us by Mrs. Karswell.

Previous Christmas ghost stories are linked here in our website show notes  (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 , 2023, and 2024.)