“You have traveled far, but the hardest part of a journey is always the next step.”
― Jackie Morris

I grew up reading battered old copies of the fabulous early twentieth century collections of children’s stories, some of my flea market finds were even bound in gold-toothed vellum and had beautiful embossed covers. Many leading artists of the day including Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac were commissioned to illustrate them. One of the finest creations to emerge from this golden age of illustration was an edition of East of the Sun and West of the Moon which boasted twenty-five color plates and many more monochrome images by Kay Nielsen, a young Danish artist who had studied in Paris before moving to England in 1911. The volume consists of fifteen fairy tales gathered by the Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe on their journeys across mid nineteenth-century Norway. Translated into English by George Webbe Dasent (1817–1896), the stories — populated by witches, trolls, ogres, sly foxes, mysterious bears, beautiful princesses and shy country lads turned heroes — were praised by Jacob Grimm himself for having a freshness and a fullness that “surpasses nearly all others”.