Soria Moria — The shining castle always out of reach

Soria Moria is not a creature. It is a place — or rather the idea of a place — and of all the figures in Norwegian folklore it may be the one that says the most about the country that dreamed it.

In the Norwegian folktales collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe Asbjørnsen and Moe × Hans Krum, portrait of Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (c. 1865–1875), Nasjonalbiblioteket About this image ▸ Olsen & Thomsen (Christiania), portrait of Jørgen Moe (c. 1865), Nasjonalbiblioteket About this image ▸ Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812–1885) and Jørgen Moe (1813–1882) — the collectors of the Norwegian folktales. Friends from their schooldays at the Norderhov rectory on Ringerike from around 1826, they spent the 1840s writing down oral tales in the eastern valleys. Their joint Norske Folkeeventyr began in December 1841 as an anonymous, unbound pamphlet from Johan Dahl's shop in Christiania, grew by further installments through 1844, and in its enlarged 1852 edition was dedicated to the brothers Grimm. Jacob Grimm wrote back that these were die besten Märchen, die es gibt — the best folktales there are. Asbjørnsen alone published the legend collections Norske Huldreeventyr og Folkesagn (1845, 1848). The first fully illustrated edition of the folktales followed in 1879. Also discussed in Norske eventyr — the folk tales almost lost foreverBytting — the changeling left in the cradleThe Hytte — a sacred pastime of modern Norway in the mid-nineteenth century, a particular kind of story recurs. A young man — often the youngest of three brothers, often the one written off as a fool, the Askeladden, the Ash-Lad — sets out from a poor farm with nothing, and in the most famous of these tales, somewhere in the distance, across mountains and through forests and past trolls Troll × Erik Werenskiold, Soria Moria — Halvor og Trollet (1884), Nasjonalmuseet NG.K&H.B.05123 About this image ▸ The supernatural mountain-dweller of Norwegian folketro — sometimes gigantic, like the valley-striding jutul, sometimes small — living inside mountains and deep forest. Legends set the troll against the church: it hurls boulders at church buildings and flees the sound of church bells. Sunlight turns a troll caught above ground to stone. Andreas Faye's Norske Sagn (1833, expanded as Norske Folke-Sagn in 1844), Norway's first legend collection, put the tradition on paper; Asbjørnsen and Moe's Norske Folkeeventyr (1841–44) fixed the man-eating troll of the tales in print — "De tre bukkene Bruse" was first printed in 1843. Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) gave the troll its modern visual form; his Skogtroll (1906) is in the Nasjonalmuseet. Also discussed in Troll — the monsters of the mountainsStedssagn — local legends, told as warningsNorske eventyr — the folk tales almost lost foreverHuldra — the girl in the forest with a secretBytting — the changeling left in the cradleVardøger — your double, arriving a few minutes before youTradisjoner — celebrations across the Norwegian year , there is Soria Moria: a castle, golden, shining, glimpsed far off on the horizon. Reaching it is the whole shape of the journey. The princess is there, and the kingdom, and the end of being poor and overlooked. The hero does not know the way. He goes anyway.

The name itself means nothing in particular: not a real place, and not quite ordinary Norwegian. That emptiness is part of its power. Soria Moria is wherever the good life is, seen from wherever you currently are. It is the horizon with a castle on it.

In 1900 Theodor Kittelsen Theodor Kittelsen × Theodor Kittelsen, Selvportrett (1891), Nasjonalmuseet About this image ▸ Norwegian painter and illustrator (1857–1914), born in Kragerø, who more than any other artist fixed the visual identity of the country's folklore beings. Erik Werenskiold brought him into the illustrated Asbjørnsen folktale editions in the early 1880s. A stay at the Skomvær lighthouse on outer Lofoten (1887–89), where his brother-in-law served as assistant keeper, fed Troldskab (1892). His plague-hag drawings, begun after an encounter with an old woman on the island of Skåtøy, were published as the book Svartedauen in 1900. The same year, at Lauvlia in Sigdal, he painted his Soria Moria pictures; the national collection bought them at once. Nøkken (1904) — two pale eyes in a black lily-pool — is held by the Nasjonalmuseet; Da Huldra forsvant (1908) paints her vanishing. Also discussed in Pesta — an old woman walking from farm to farmDraugen — the drowned man who never came homeHuldra — the girl in the forest with a secretNøkken — the water-spirit who pulls you underNorske eventyr — the folk tales almost lost forever painted it: a boy on a high bare rock in the foreground, small and dark, looking across a vast distance at a far-off castle catching the last gold light. The painting is known simply as Soria Moria slott, and it is one of the most reproduced images in all of Norwegian art. Kittelsen did what the best folklore illustration does — he did not draw the castle so much as draw the looking, the enormous distance, the smallness of the boy and the largeness of the wanting.

A country built along a thin, hard, mountainous coast — a country that, in a single century, sent something like a fifth of its own people across an ocean toward a better life they had only heard about — is a country that knows the feeling of Soria Moria in its bones. The shining place that is somewhere else. The journey toward it undertaken without a map. It is no accident that this particular folktale image, of all of them, became a national one.

The proof of how deep it runs is that modern Norway still reaches for the name. When a governing coalition gathered to write its joint political platform — twice, in 2005 and 2009 — it did it at a conference hotel called Soria Moria, and the resulting Soria Moria Declarations carried the name out of the folktale and into the actual running of the country. A nation does not name its government’s founding document after a children’s-story castle by accident. Soria Moria is the Norwegian word for the thing worth walking toward, and the walking is the point — the castle, in the painting as in the phrase, is always still in the distance.