East Of The Sun and West Of The Moon: A Fairy Tale Sleep Story

Full transcript

A great white bear stands in the rain at the window of a peasants' cottage, one heavy paw lifted to tap the glass, and this is where the old Norwegian tale of east of the sun and west of the moon begins. It is a dark and rainy Thursday evening in autumn, and The poor family within has no notion that the creature outside can speak. Yet speak he does. And what he asks for is a daughter, the youngest and the fairest, in exchange for wealth enough to lift the household out of its long hunger.

Who is the man who comes only in the dark and is gone before the light? And if she once dares to look upon his face, how far must she travel to win him back? If these old tales help you rest, subscribe so the next story can find you beside the fire. The rain runs in threads, down the small dark panes, and inside the cottage no one stirs. For a beast that talks in the voice of a man has a way of stilling a whole household into silence. The fire ticks low in its bed of coals. The wet pour waits at the glass, patient as the night itself.

Let the rain settle now into a soft and steady sound against the shutters, and let the story take its own slow pace. The tapping came again, patient and even, as though the great poor had all the night in which to knock. Inside the low room, the fire had burned down to a red heart of coals, and the peasant lifted his head from his hands. He had been sitting there in the poverty that follows a family from season to season, counting nothing, because there was little enough to count. When he crossed the packed earth floor and opened the shutter a crack, the wet dark breathed in at him, and there in it stood the bear, white as new snow against the black trees.

Larger than any beast the man had ever seen come down out of the wood, the peasant did not cry out. in the creature's stillness held the fear in check, and he waited, and the bear began to speak in a low and courteous voice. The bear asked for the youngest daughter, the prettiest of them all, and he wasted no soft words in the asking. He said plainly what he would give in return. If the man would part with the girl, then the bear would make him as rich as he was now wretched, would fill the bare house with plenty, and would turn the family's long want into ease. The peasant stood at the open shutter with the rain on his face, and the promise turning over in his mind. And he thought of the winters behind him and the winter's yet to come, of thin bread and cold rooms and children who went to bed hungry.

Riches, said the voice out of the dark, riches enough to end all of that. And yet the thing he was asked to give was his own daughter carried off into the wood by a beast. And this he could not answer in a breath. So the peasant did the only wise thing left to a poor man caught between his love and his need. He told the bear that he could not say yes so quickly, that he must speak with the girl and win her willingness. And he asked the creature to come again in a week's time for his answer. The bear seemed content with this. He lowered his great head, turned upon the wet ground, and went back the way he had come, and the white of him faded among the wet trunks until the wood swallowed him entirely.

The peasant fastened the shutter and stood a long while with his back against the door, to his own heart, wondering whether he had spoken with a wonder or with a curse. When he told the family what had passed at the window, the youngest daughter would have nothing at all to do with it. She was the prettiest of his children, and she was also the one least willing to be traded away like a sack of grain. And who could fault her for that? A bear had asked for her, a bear that talked in the voice of a man, and she was to climb upon its back and be carried into the mountains, and no one could tell her where.

She said no, and she went on saying no, through the first of those seven days, tending the fire and the small work of the house, with her mouth set in a firm line. Her father did not force her, for that was not his way. But through the days between, he came to her again and again, and reasoned gently. He spoke of the poverty that pressed on them all, of the empty larder and the coming cold, of the brothers and sisters who might yet be fed and clothed and kept warm. He spoke of the bear's fine and gentle manner, which was not the manner of a wild thing, and of the promise it had made, which had been made in earnest.

He did not paint the parting as small, for it was not small. He only laid the truth of their hardship beside the truth of the offer, and let her look at both together, morning and evening, until the sharp edge of her refusal began to wear away. And at last, worn by love more than by argument, the girl gave her word. Perhaps she thought of her father's bent shoulders, or of the little ones, or perhaps some quiet curiosity of her own had begun to stir beneath the fear. She gathered what few things were hers, the poor rags she owned, and she sewed them into a small bundle with her own hands, folding her whole life into a parcel she could carry under one arm.

It did not take her long. There is not much to pack when one has never had much, and when When the last stitch was set, she sat with the bundle in her lap and waited for the week to close. On the seventh night, the white bear came again and stood beneath the same window, and this time, the girl was ready. She stepped out into the cold with her bundle held close, and she looked up at the huge, shape of him, and he knelt so that she might climb onto his back. She set herself upon the broad ridge of his shoulders and took a deep hold of his shaggy coat, her fingers buried in the thick white fur, and the bear rose beneath her and turned toward the trees.

Her father watched from the doorway with the firelight behind him. When the wood took them, the cottage fell away, and the girl held fast as the dark closed over the only home she had ever known. For to understand what she was leaving, one must picture the world this tale is made of, for it belongs to a particular corner of the earth and a particular kind of life. This is Norway before the Great Machines, a country of small farms scattered among steep valleys and long forests, where the winters come early and stay late, and where a household warms itself by a hearth and lights the dark with candles of tallow.

It is a place of spinning wheels turning in low rooms, of carding combs and wool, of bread carefully counted and firewood carefully stacked. In such a world, a family measures its wealth, not in coins, but in loaves and in logs, in whether there will be enough to last until spring. These were the very firesides where a tale like this one lived and traveled. In such a country, The long dark was the season of stories, and when the snow shut the doors and the work of the fields was done, the folk drew close to the coals and passed the old wonders from mouth to mouth, from the grandmother at her wheel to the child half asleep against her knee. A tale was not a thing kept in a book, but a thing carried in the memory, and given away again each winter, worn smooth by a hundred tellings, changing a little in every mouth, and yet keeping its bones.

The story of the white bear was one of these, spoken aloud in low rooms across the valleys, before anyone thought to set it down, a piece of the commonwealth of people who owned little else. It belonged to the hearth as surely as the fire and the spinning and the smell of tallow, and it asked nothing of its hearers but a quiet evening and a willingness to believe for an hour in a bear that could speak. that plain and honest hardship, the offer of a talking white bear glowed like something carried in from far outside the ordinary day. Yet the people of those valleys did not doubt such things could be. Theirs was a world still thick with the unseen, where the mountains were held to hide their own folk, where a troll might sit brooding under a bridge, and And a hidden people might pasture their cattle in the high summer fields, and where a beast come down out of the wood in the rain might well be more than a beast.

Enchantment was not a fancy to them, but a danger and a promise woven into the very land. And a husband bound into an animal's hide was an old and familiar shape of wonder, half believed and much feared. So a girl carried off upon a bear's broad back was not to those who told the tale so strange a thing to hear. And yet to the girl herself it was the strangest journey in the world, riding into the wood with no idea where the road would end. The bear carried her far, over long miles of dark country until at last they came to a great mountain that rose sheer and solid before them. There the beast stopped and the mountain opened. Where there had been only rock, a way now stood and beyond it lay a castle so grand and so bright that the girl could hardly take it in. Within the hollow of the hill was a hall of gold and silver, warm and shining, filled with every fine thing she had never in her life dared to want.

The bear brought her inside, and the door of the mountain closed behind them, and she found herself mistress of a splendor that only a week before would have seemed a dream too large to hold. She was given rooms of her own, hung and furnished in gold and silver, softer and richer than anything her father's cottage had ever known. She learned that beside her hand there hung a little bell, and that when she rang it, whatever she wished for would appear. If she was hungry, she had only to ring, and food was set before her, more and finer than she could eat. If she wished for anything at all, the bell brought it.

After a life of counting bread by the slice, she now had only to think of a thing and reach for the bell, and the thing was hers. It was comfort beyond measure, an ease that ought to have filled her heart to the brim. And yet, for all its brightness, the castle was strangely quiet. The girl walked its shining halls and found no one there, no servants moving through the rooms, no voices in the far chambers, no faces to meet her own. The gold gleamed and the silver shone and the bell answered her every wish. But the splendor had a silence at its center and she wandered through the wealth of it alone. She She had traded a crowded, hungry house for an empty, golden one, and in the long, bright hours, she began to feel the strangeness of a home where everything was given and no one could be seen.

Then night came to the castle, and with the night came the first hint of the mystery that would hold the whole tale in its hand. When the girl had gone to her bed and put out her light so that the great bedchamber lay in a darkness complete and unbroken, she heard someone come into the room. A man lay down beside her in the black dark, quietly, and she could not see so much as the outline of him. He never came until the light was out. And this was the way of the house, the one rule laid upon her.

She did not light a candle to look upon him, for she had been told she must not. And so she lay in the dark, beside a presence she could hear and feel but never see. He was gone again, before the first grey of daybreak touched the world, slipping away while she slept, so that when the morning came, the place beside her was empty, and the room was only her own. Night after night it was the same. The man came in the darkness and left before the dawn, and never once did she set eyes upon his face.

She came to know the sound of his voice, low and kind, and the gentleness of his manner, and she learned that there was nothing cruel in him. But she did not know whether he was young or old, whether he was fair to look upon, or fearful, whether the one who spoke so gently in the dark was a man at all. And in the quiet golden days between those nights, alone in her shining halls, the girl began to wonder about the stranger who shared her rest, and the wandering grew in her like a small and patient seed.

The change in her came slowly, the way a shadow lengthens across a floor when no one is watching it move. The golden days that had once seemed a marvel began to weigh on her, and the silence of the shining halls pressed closer than before. She thought of her mother at the hearth, and of her father coming in from the fields with the cold still on his coat, and of her brothers and sisters crowded round a single narrow table. She thought of the plain bread and the poor fire and the many voices, and she found that she would have given all the gold in the mountain to sit among them again for a single evening.

She grew quiet at her meals. She left the little bell unrung for hours at a time. She walked from room to room and touched the fine things without seeing them, and something within her turned again and again toward the low door of a house she had thought she was glad to leave. The man who came in the dark was gentle, and he was not slow to notice her sorrow. He asked her, one night, what it was that grieved her, for she had grown so still that he could feel the change in her even without a light to show her face.

She told him the truth, that she longed for her home, and that the longing had settled into her like a cold she could not shake. She missed her mother most of all, she said. She missed the sound of her and the nearness of her, and she did not think she could be wholly content until she had seen her people once more. The bear did not refuse her. He said that she might go home to visit and that he would carry her there himself, and the girl's heart lifted at the words, as it had not lifted in many weeks.

And he laid a careful thing upon her before he would agree. One condition, spoken low and grave in the darkness. She must promise, he said, that she would never talk with her mother alone. She might speak with her among the others, with the whole family about them. But she must never let herself be drawn aside into a room by herself with her mother, no No matter how her mother might wish it, for if she did that, he told her, she would bring bad luck down upon them both, and she would undo all the good that had been given.

She scarcely understood the warning, but she gave her word gladly. For the promise seemed a small thing set against the joy of going home. She would take care, she said. She would keep to the company of the others. Whatever her mother asked of her, she would not step apart into a quiet corner alone, and so it was settled between them in the dark. And in the morning, the great white bear was waiting for her, and she climbed upon his broad back and wound her hands into his thick fur, and the mountain opened, and they went out together into the light of the world she had missed. He carried her over the long miles once more, back across the dark country, until at last they came within sight of a fine, large house standing where her father's poor cottage had been. The bear set her down before it and reminded her gently of what she had promised. She was to remember his warning, he said, and to do as he had asked, for the sake of them both. Then he told her that he would come again for her when the visit was done, and he turned and went back the way he had come, and the girl stood alone before the doorway of her family's new house, with her heart pounding for gladness. For the poverty was gone, where the old cottage had leaned against the wind. There stood a house, handsome and well-built, with good rooms and good furnishings, and every sign that the family within wanted for nothing.

The bear had kept his bargain to the last. Her father was a man of means now, and the hungry years were behind them. When the door opened and her people saw who stood there, the whole house filled at once with joy. They took her in, and they could not make enough of her. There was no end, they said, to the thanks they owed her for the good fortune she had brought upon them all. And they wished her every happiness in the world. And they asked her a hundred times over how she fared and whether all was well with her.

She told them that all was well, and in the greater part it was true. She had everything she could think to wish for, she said, and she wanted for nothing. What more, she answered. The old telling does not fully say, for she was mindful of her promise, and she kept among the others and did not let herself be drawn aside. But her mother was not content with that. Her mother wished to speak with her alone. It began small, a touch on the sleeve, a word murmured under the noise of the others, a nod toward the further room. Her mother Mother wanted to hear it all, the whole of how her daughter lived, the truth of the strange house in the mountain, and the husband she had been given.

She tried once, and the girl slipped away from her toward the company. She tried again, and still the girl kept to the crowded room. But a mother's wanting is a patient thing, and it does not tire, and it does not forget. And through the hours of that visit, she came again and again, quietly, to draw her daughter apart. At last the girl forgot. Perhaps she was worn down, or perhaps the old ease of home undid her caution, or perhaps she too longed to unburden herself to the one person in the world she trusted most.

Whatever it came about, the warning went out of her mind, and when her mother led her by the hand into a quiet room and shut the door, she followed, and the two of them were alone. And there, alone with her mother, the girl told everything. She told how she lived in splendor through the golden days, mistress of a hall of gold and silver with a little bell that brought her whatever she desired. And she told two of the knights. She told how, when her light was out and the great bedchamber lay in a darkness without a seam, a man came and lay down beside her, and how he was gone again before the gray of dawn ever touched the sky.

She told how she had never once seen him. She did not know if he was young or old. She did not know if his face was fair or terrible. She heard his voice in the dark, low and kind, and she felt his nearness. But the whole long while she had lived as his wife, She had never set eyes upon the man who slept beside her. All day she walked alone through the empty gold, she said, and all night she lay beside a stranger she could not see, and she was lonely in a way she could not well explain.

The mother listened, and as she listened, the fear grew in her face. This was no honest way for a man to keep a wife, she said. A husband who would come only in the blackest dark and steal away before the light and never let his own face be looked upon, was no husband at all as she understood the word. She grew certain of the worst. It must be a troll, she declared. Some troll had taken her daughter for its own, and hid its ugliness in the darkness, and meant her no good. The thought of it turned the mother cold, and she would not rest until she had done something to guard her child. So she took a candle end, a little stub of tallow such as any house might keep, and she pressed it into her daughter's hand and folded the girl's fingers over it. The girl was to hide it, she said, against her breast, tucked away where no one would find it, and carry it home with her to the mountain. Then, in the night, when the man was fast asleep beside her, she was to take out the candle and light it quietly, and hold it up, and look at last upon the thing that shared her bed. That way she would know the truth, whether it was a troll or a man, and she could be delivered from her doubt.

Only, the mother warned her, and here she was very careful, she must take great heed not to let any tallow drip upon him while he slept. Not a drop must fall. If the girl was cautious, she would learn what she needed to know, and none would be the wiser. The girl took the candle. She did not feel easy about it. Somewhere under her fear ran the memory of the promise she had broken, and the warning she had let slip her mind, And a small, unquiet voice told her that no good came of prying into what she had been asked to leave alone. But her mother's fear had crept into her own heart, and the longing to see the face she had lived beside for so many nights was stronger now than her caution. She hid the candle end against her breast, as she had been told. And when the visit was done and the great white bear came for her as he had promised, she climbed upon his back and let him carry her home to the mountain, and all the long way she felt the little weight of the tallow warm against her, and she said nothing of it. That night she lay in her great bed as she had lain so many nights before and she put out her light and the bedchamber closed around her in its perfect dark. In time she heard him come, quiet as ever, and lie down beside her and she felt his breathing slow and and deepen as the sleep took him.

She waited, she waited until she was sure he was far under, until his breath came long and even and the whole castle lay in the deep middle of the night. Then with her heart going hard, she reached for the candle she had hidden and she struck a light, and she kindled the little flame, and she raised it up over the sleeping stranger to look upon him at last. He was no troll. By the small trembling light of the tallow candle, she saw a man, and such a man that the breath went out of her.

He was the handsomest prince that eyes had ever rested upon, young and fair, sleeping quietly, with his face turned toward her. And in the whole of her life, she had never beheld anything so lovely. All her fear fell away in an instant, and in its place a great tenderness rose up in her, sudden and complete. She loved him at once, wholly, the way one One loves a thing long sought and found without warning. She could not help herself. She bent down close over him, meaning only to kiss him, to touch her lips to the face she had waited so long to see.

And as she leaned, the candle tipped in her hand. Three drops of hot tallow fell from it, three small drops only, and dropped down upon his shirt where he slept and burned there. The prince woke. He woke and he saw the light, and he saw her leaning over him with the candle in her hand. And a great sorrow came into his face. Deeper than anger, the sorrow of a man who sees a door close that had almost stood open. What have you done? he said to her, low and grieving. And then he told her the whole of it, the truth she had never guessed. He was a prince, he said, and he was under an enchantment.

By day he was forced to go in the shape of a white bear, and only in the night, in the dark, luck. Might he be a man again? And this was why he had never let her see him. A witch had done it to him, his own stepmother, a wicked queen who had cursed him and bound him to the beast's form. And the spell had carried within it its own undoing, if only she could have borne it. Had she waited but a single year, he said, patient in the strangeness, and never once looking upon him by any light, the enchantment would have broken of itself, and he would have been freed, and they might have lived out their days together in gladness.

One year she had been so near to the end of it. But now it was undone. Now, because she had looked, he could not stay. He must leave her, he said, and go to the witch queen his stepmother. And there he must marry the bride she had chosen for him, her own daughter, a princess of that witch's blood. The girl clung to him and begged him to let her come, to tell her where he was going that she might follow. He told her the name of the place, and the name was a grief in itself, for it was no No place that any road could reach, his stepmother's castle lay east of the sun and west of the moon, he said.

And there he must go, and she could never find the way. She wept and she pleaded, and she asked him again and again if there was nothing she could do. No path, no hope, but the night was passing and the sorrow was on him and he had no comfort to give her. She held to him as long as she could hold and somewhere in the dark of that grief the weariness took her and her eyes closed against her will and she slept. When she woke it was morning and she was lying on the cold ground. The great bed was gone, the gold and silver halls were gone, the little bell, the shining rooms, the whole splendor of the mountain, all of it had vanished as though it had never been and the prince with it.

She lay in a small green clearing, hemmed about by dark and tangled forest on every side, with the trees crowding close, and no house and no living soul in sight. She was alone in the wild wood, with nothing left to her but the clothes she wore, and the memory of a face she had seen for the space of three drops of tallow, and the name of a place that lay beyond the reach of any road she knew. She did not lie there long. Grief has its own weight, and it pressed her down into the cold grass. But under the grief, there was something harder and steadier, and that thing lifted her up onto her feet. She had seen his face. She had heard the name of the place where he was going. It was a place beyond every road, a place no map could hold. And still she set her mind to it, the way a spinner sets her mind to a tangled skein, patiently without letting go of the thread.

She smoothed her skirts and she looked about her at the dark wall of the trees. And she She chose a direction, and she began to walk. She walked a long, long way. The days folded one into another, and the wood gave way to open country, and the country rose into hills. And still she went on. She wore her shoes thin against the stones. She drank from streams and slept beneath hedges, and ate what berries the branches gave her, and the thought of the sleeping prince and the three drops of tallow went before her like a small light carried in cupped hands.

She did not know where the castle lay. She knew only that it lay somewhere, and that somewhere was better than nowhere, and so So she kept her feet moving. After many days of this, she came to a high cliff, gray and sheer, that stood up out of the land like the wall of some far greater house. At the foot of it sat an old woman. The old woman was bent and wrinkled, with hands like knots of root, and she was playing to herself, turning a bright thing over and over in her fingers, tossing it a little way into the air and catching it again. It was a golden apple. It caught the light with every turn, round and heavy and perfect, and the shine of it fell on the old woman's face and on the grey stone behind her. The girl came near and greeted her gently as one greets the old, and then she asked the question she had come so far to ask. She asked whether the old woman could tell her the way to the castle that lay east of the sun and west of the moon, where a prince lived who was to marry a witch's daughter against his own heart.

The old woman stopped her play and looked at the girl a long while. She knew of the prince, she said. She knew that such a one was spoken of and that such a wedding was said to be coming. But the road to that castle she did not know. For she had never in all her long years traveled so far, and she doubted the way ran through any country she had walked. Yet she would not send the girl off empty. A little further on, she said, there dwelt a neighbor of hers, older than she, and wiser in the ways of far places.

And it might be that this neighbor could name the road. She would lend the girl her horse to carry her there, for the distance was great, and the girl's feet were worn. Then the old woman pressed the golden apple into the girl's hands. "'Take this along with you,' she said. It was a thing of value, and a long journey has need of things of value before it is done. And better it should go with one who was walking towards something than lie in an old woman's lap by a cliff. The girl thanked her with all her heart and put the apple safe in her bodice against her breast and climbed up onto the horse, and the horse carried her onward.

It bore her over hill and hollow, through country stranger and higher than any she had until it came to a second mountain, and beneath the mountain sat a second old woman. This one held in her hands a golden carding comb. The sort a woman draws through wool to loosen and straighten the fibers before the spinning. And every tooth of it was worked of gold. She drew it idly through the air as she sat, and it flashed as the apple had flashed. The girl climbed down and greeted her and asked her the same question, the way to the castle east of the sun and west of the moon.

And the second old woman answered much as the first had done. She had heard, in her long life, some rumor of the place. But she had never been there. No, not once. And she could not tell the girl a single mile of the road. But she, too, had a neighbor, older again, and further versed in distances. And it might be that this third woman would know. She would lend the girl a fresh horse to ride there, for the first was weary and the way went on. And as the girl made ready to go, the second old woman gave her the golden carding comb.

"'Carry it with you,' she said. There is no telling what may be of use before your journey is done, and a thing so fine has a way of opening doors that stand shut to a poor traveller. The girl took the comb and thanked her and set it safe beside the golden apple and climbed onto the second horse and rode away. Now she carried two treasures of the loom and the hearth against her breast, and the The weight of them was a small comfort, for they had been given in kindness, and kindness, given freely, is a lantern of its own in a hard country.

The second horse went on further than the first, up into high and lonely hills, where the wind was thin and cold, and the grass grew short between the stones, and at last It stopped outside a little hut, and there sat the third old woman at a golden spinning wheel. The wheel turned under her foot with a low and steady hum, and the thread ran out golden between her fingers, thin and bright and endless, winding onto the golden bobbin. She was the oldest of the three by far, so old her eyes had gone pale as milk, and she did not stop her spinning as the girl came up.

But she listened, and she nodded her head to the question. She could not name the road either. Like her neighbors, she had heard of the castle, east of the sun, and west of the moon. And like them, she had never gone there, and the way was hidden from her, as it was hidden from them. But she gave the girl a piece of counsel worth more than a mile of road. It was of no use, she said, to ask any more old women by any more mountains, for none of their kind had ever walked so far. There was one, though, who might know, one who went everywhere and touched every corner of the world.

That was the East Wind. The East Wind was abroad in all countries and blew through all doors, and perhaps in his wandering he had come near the place. She would lend the girl a horse to carry her to him. Then the old woman lifted the golden spinning wheel from before her, wheel and bobbin and golden thread and all, and gave it into the girl's arms. "'Take this as well,' she said. "'You may have need of it before the end. More need than you can guess. And I am old and have spun thread enough.' The girl held the wheel close, hardly knowing how to thank her, and set it with the apple and the comb.

And now she bore three treasures, apple and comb and wheel. All of gold, all of the quiet work of women's hands, and she climbed onto the last horse and rode away toward the house of the east wind. She found him at last in his own country, restless and light, and never wholly still, forever lifting the dust of the road and letting it fall. She told him her errand and asked whether he could carry her to the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. The east wind looked at her with something like pity.

He had heard of the castle often, he said, for the winds tell one another the names of far places when they meet. But he had never blown so far himself. The furthest reach of his breath had never touched that door, yet he would not turn her away. He had a brother, the West Wind, who was stronger than he and traveled further. And it might be that the west wind had been there, or could go. If the girl would climb upon his back, he would carry her to his brother's house. So she climbed upon the back of the east wind, and he rose up and bore her away.

It was a strange riding, light and swift and cold, the ground streaming far beneath and the clouds torn to rags on either side, and she held fast and shut her eyes against the rush of it, and thought of the prince's sorrowing face. And after a while the east wind set her down gently at the door of the west wind, and told his brother the whole of the girl's errand, and left her there. The west wind was a broader and a rougher fellow than his brother, and his voice was deeper, and he too knew the name of the castle, east of the sun and west of the moon.

But he had never been there. His breath had blown over wide seas and driven tall ships before it, and still it had never reached that door. he had a brother stronger than himself, the South Wind, who had wandered far and wide in his time, and it might be the South Wind knew the road. If the girl was set on going, he would carry her there, and she said she was set on it, and thanked him, and climbed upon his back. So the West Wind bore her onward, further and higher than the east wind had done, over grey and heaving waters and lands she had no name for, and she was passed along the sky like a small leaf carried from hand to hand, held up by strength after greater strength, and none of them yet able to reach the place she sought.

The West Wind set her down at the door of the South Wind and told him her story and went his way. The South Wind was warm and great and slow, and his breath was the breath that thaws the snow and softens the hard ground. He listened and he shook his head. He had blown through many countries in his long life, more than his brothers had, and yet even he had never come to the castle east of the sun and west of the moon. But there was one wind stronger than any of them, he said, the North Wind, the oldest and the fiercest of the four.

And if the North Wind had never been there, then the girl might give up all hope, for there was no other in the world who could carry her. He would take her to his brother's door, and so she climbed upon the South Wind's back, and he swept her away, over deserts and rivers, and the tops of white mountains, further than she had gone yet, and set her down at last at the house of the North Wind. The North Wind was old and blustering, and cold came off him even as he stood in his own doorway, so that the girl felt the chill of him before she had said a word. His voice, When he spoke was rough as breaking ice, and it seemed the very stones shivered to hear it.

What did she want, coming so near? he asked, for few dared come so near to him. And she told him, plainly and without fear, that she was seeking the castle east of the sun and west of the moon, and that she had come to him because none of his brothers could reach it. And he was her last hope in all the world. The north wind was silent a long moment, and then he said that yes, he knew the place. He knew it well. Once, long ago, he had blown a single aspen leaf all the way to that castle one small trembling leaf, and it had cost him so dearly that he had come home spent and broken, and for many days afterward he could not gather breath enough to stir so much as a blade of grass. It was the furthest he had ever gone, and the hardest thing he had ever done. But if she was truly set upon going, if her heart was fixed on it, past all turning, then he would take her there, and do it once more, though it emptied him.

She said that she must go. She said it quietly, and she said it certainly, for there was nothing left in her that wished to turn back. Then, rest well this night and eat, said the Northwind, for we must have the whole day before us, and it is a long, long way. In the gray of the next morning he woke her, and he began to make himself ready, and it was a fearful thing to watch. He swelled himself out, greater and greater, until he was huge and terrible and dark, blotting the light, and the air about him roared and streamed.

He took the girl up, and he rose, and he flung himself out across the world. She had thought the other wind strong, but this was another thing entirely. The north wind tore across sea and sky in a single vast breath, and beneath them the water was lashed white and heaped into great gray hills of waves, and the spray was flung so high it seemed the ocean itself reached up after them. far below, ran before the storm, with their masts bent, and the whole world roared. On and on he went, and further and further, and the girl clung to him and did not look down.

But as the long day wore toward its end, the north wind began to fail. His breath came He sank lower and lower toward the heaving sea. So slowly at first, she scarcely marked it, and then not slowly at all. Lower he dropped, and lower, until the tips of the great waves began to reach up and lick at her heels, where she clung to his back, and the cold water touched her, and still Still the far shore was not in sight. She said nothing and held on and let him spend the last of himself as he would.

And the north wind gathered what little breath remained to him, all that was left in his old and mighty body. And with it he lifted her the last small distance and cast her up onto the shore beneath the walls of a castle. And there he set her down. Then he lay a long while against the rocks, so weary he could not speak, gathering himself before the long and heavy road home. And the girl rose up and looked, and saw that she had come at last to the castle that lay east of the sun and west of the moon. She rested that first night on the rocks where the north wind had set her down, and when the pale morning came, she rose and went and sat beneath the high windows of the castle.

The walls of that place climbed gray and cold into the far northern light, and the girl was small beneath them, weary from the whole long road of the world. She had nothing left of the journey save the three golden things the old women by the mountains had given her. And so, to comfort herself, she drew out the first of them. It was the golden apple, round and heavy and warm as sunlight in her hand, and she began to toss it and turn it and roll it back and forth across her palm, watching the light run over it.

She had not been sitting there long when a shadow fell across the window above her. It was the witch princess, the daughter of the wicked stepmother, the one to whom the the prince had been promised against his will. She looked down and saw the golden apple flashing in the girl's hands. And at once, a hunger came into her face, for she had never in all her days seen a thing so fair. She leaned from the casement and asked what price the girl would set upon that apple, For she must have it, and she would give gold for it, whatever the girl named.

The girl looked up at her calmly. The apple was not for sale for gold, she said, not for all the gold and silver in the castle. But there was one thing she would take in exchange for it. If she might have leave to go up that night into the chamber where the prince slept, and And to sit beside him there until morning, then the apple would be the witch princess's own. The witch princess thought this a small and foolish price for so great a treasure, and she smiled to herself and said that so it should be.

She would have the apple, and the girl should have her night. But the witch princess was cunning, and she meant that the bargain should cost her nothing at all. When the evening drew on, before the girl was ever brought up the winding stairs, the witch princess went to the prince and gave him a cup to drink. And into the cup she had mixed a sleeping drink so strong that no calling and no shaking could break it. He drank, not knowing, and he lay down, and a heavy and dreamless sleep came over him like a stone rolled across the mouth of a cave.

And so, when the girl was led at last into the chamber and the door was shut behind her, she found him lying there, deep asleep, and could not rouse him by any means she knew. She went to him and spoke his name. She spoke of the white bear, and of the castle she had lost, and of the candle and the three drops of tallow, and of the winds that had carried her over the sea. She took his hand and pressed it, and laid her cheek against his, and told him of every mountain she had climbed, and every old woman who had lent her a horse.

he did not stir. He lay as though carved of cold marble, and his breathing did not so much as change, and though she wept and pleaded through all the dark hours, she could not wake him. When the gray light began to creep to the window, she was led away again, and the door closed, and her first night was spent for nothing. The next day she went back and sat beneath the windows as before, heavy of heart, and she took out the second of the golden things. This was the golden carding comb, worked all over in fine gold, the little teeth of it glinting, a thing such as no woman in any village had ever held.

She sat combing the empty air with it and turning it in the light, and again the witch princess looked down from the high window and saw it and could not bear to be without it. Again she asked the price, and again the girl gave the same answer. The comb was not to be had for money. But for one more night beside the sleeping prince, the witch princess might take it and keep it. And the witch princess, who thought herself very wise and the girl very simple, agreed a second time, for she had lost nothing by the first night and expected to lose nothing by this one.

She took the golden comb, and when the evening came she went again to the prince with a cup, and again she mixed the strong sleeping drink into it, and again he drank, and lay down, and sank into that same deep and stony sleep from which no voice could call him. So the girl was brought up the stair a second time, and a second time she found him lost to the world. She knelt beside him and did all that she had done before. She told him again of the long road and begged him to open his eyes if only for a moment and let a moment be enough.

She wept until she had no more words and then she wept without words, low and steady, through the whole of that long night. But this castle was not empty of ears. In the rooms that lay near to the prince's chamber, there were folk shut up as prisoners, men and women, whom the witch queen held captive within her walls, and they lay awake in the dark on the other side of the stone. All that At night they heard the sound of a woman weeping and pleading close by, hour upon hour, calling to the prince by name and grieving that he would not wake.

It was a strange and sorrowful sound to come drifting through a wall in the deep of the night, and they did not forget it. And when the day came, and they were let out to their labor, and they found themselves near the prince, they told him of it. There had been a woman, they said, in the chamber beside his own, two nights now, or one at least, that they had marked well, and she had wept, and called upon him without ceasing until the dawn, and it had near broken their hearts to hear her.

The prince listened, and a great stillness came over him, for he began to understand what had been done. He said nothing of it to the witch princess or to her mother. But that day, when the girl came again and sat beneath the window, he watched from within, scene. She had taken out the last of the three golden things. This was the golden spinning wheel, the finest of them all, its wheel and its treadle and its slender spindle, all of bright gold. And she sat, turning it, so that the little wheel spun and flashed. The Witch princess saw it, and her greed rose higher than ever. For of the three, this was the fairest, and she leaned from the casement and asked what it would cost. And the girl, as before, said that it was not for sale, but that for a third night beside the prince, The Witch Princess might have the golden wheel and welcome.

The bargain was struck a third time. But the Prince was ready now. When the Witch Princess brought him the cup that evening, he took it as a man takes a drink he means to swallow, yet he only touched it to his lips. And when she was not watching, he poured the sleeping drink quietly away, so that not a drop of it passed down his throat. Then he lay upon the bed as though it had overcome him and shut his eyes and waited in the dark, wide awake and listening, with his heart going hard within him. When the girl was brought in and the door was shut, she came to him as she had come the two nights before, sorrowing, hardly daring to hope, and she bent to him and began to speak.

And this time, at the first sound of her voice, he opened his eyes and turned to her and took her hands in his. There, in the dark chamber, at the far end of the world, The two of them wept together, though it was no longer only grief in it, and they held one another and could hardly believe it, that after so long a road they would come to the same room at last and both awake. There was little time and much to say, and so the prince told her quickly all that was in his mind. He had come to this place only because his stepmother had cursed him and bound him to it.

And the wedding was to be the very next day when he must be married to the witch princess against every wish of his heart. But there was one thread of hope and he had thought long upon it. On the morrow he would tell the witch queen that before he took any bride he wished to see what manner of wife she would be, and so he would make it a condition. He would say that he would marry no woman in all the world but the one who could wash the three drops of tallow clean from his shirt. It was a small thing to ask, he would say, and no more than a man might ask.

But it was a thing, he told the girl, that his stepmother and her daughter would never be able to do, for they were of the trolls, and the work of the troll-folk only fouls what honest hands make clean. The stain had come from her candle and her love, and he believed with all his heart that her hands, and no others, would lift it away. She had only to be near and to wait, and when the witches had failed, he would call for her. So they made their plan there in the darkness, quietly, the way people speak who have only a little while and mean to use it well.

And before the light came, she slipped away again, but not in despair this time. In the morning, the castle was made ready for a wedding, and the witch queen sat in her high seat, and the witch princess was beside her in her finery, and the prince stood before them all. Then he spoke, and he said that it was the custom in his country that a man should see his bride prove herself before he wed her, and that he would ask but one thing, and it it was an easy thing. He held up his shirt, and there upon it were the three drops of tallow gone hard and yellow into the cloth, three small marks that had followed him from the far side of the world. He would take for his bride, he said, only the woman who could wash those three stains away and make the shirt white again. And whoever could not do it was no fit wife for him. To this the Witch-Queen agreed readily enough, for she thought it the simplest matter in the world, and she bade her daughter set to it first.

The Witch-Princess took the shirt and carried it to the water and began to wash, and she scrubbed at the three drops of tallow with a will. But the harder she rubbed, the worse it grew. The stains did not lift, they spread. Where there had been three small marks, the cloth went gray, and where it had been gray, it went black. And the more water and the more scrubbing she gave it, the darker and fowler it became, until the whole shirt was as filthy as if it had been dragged up a chimney, black as soot, from collar to hem. She stood there staring at the ruin of it and could not understand. Then the Witch Queen herself snatched it from her daughter's hands, for she was angry now and would show them how the thing was done. But the shirt fared no better with her.

The moment her fingers touched the wet cloth, it grew blacker still, and the more furiously she labored, the more it seemed to drink the darkness in, until it was a thing no one would have picked up willingly, and all their washing and ringing only made it worse. And so the two of them stood baffled and raging over a shirt gone black as the inside of a cold hearth. Then the prince said, as though it were nothing much, that there was a beggar girl waiting outside the window, and that she might as well try her hand, for the witches had made no headway.

"'Let her come in,' he said, and see what she could do. And they called her in, the girl who had come the whole length of the world, and she took the black and sodden shirt in her two hands and dipped it into the water. And no sooner had her hands gone under than the shirt began to change. The soot and the grayness lifted away from it, like a shadow drawing off a field, and the three drops of tallow melted and were gone, and the cloth came up, out of the water as white as fresh fallen snow, white as the coat of the bear he had been, without a mark upon it anywhere. Then the prince turned to them all and said that here and here only was the woman he would wed, for she and no other had washed his shirt clean, and he would have no bride in the world but her. He took the girl by the hand before the whole company and named her openly as his own true bride, and there was nothing the witch queen or her daughter could say against it, for the thing had been done in the sight of everyone and by their own bargain.

At that the wicked stepmother and the witch princess were seized with such a fury as no words could hold, to have been beaten by a peasant girl and by the washing of a shirt, and before all the folk of the castle was more than the pride of the troll folk could bear. Their rage swelled up in them and swelled higher, past all reason, past all holding, until there was no room left in them for it. And in that very moment, the two of them burst apart where they stood and were gone, and that was the end of them both.

And with their ending, the whole weight of the enchantment lifted from the world at once, As a fog lifts from a valley when the wind turns, the curse that had bound the prince into the shape of the white bear was undone the instant the witches died, and never again would he have to shed his own form at nightfall and go about the earth in a beast's white hide. He stood there a man, freed, in the daylight, with his true bride beside him. The first thing the two of them did was to go through that castle and throw open every locked door in it and set free all the poor folk who had been held prisoner within its walls.

The men and women, whose weeping through the stone had been the very thing that saved him. They led them out into the light, every one, and no one was left behind in the dark. And then, having no wish ever to look upon that place again, the prince and his bride gathered up all the gold and all the silver the castle held, as much as they could carry away, and they turned their backs upon the walls that stood east of the sun and west of the moon, and they went from that place together and left it far behind them.

They were gone then, the two witches and their far castle, emptying of its captives. And the white bear was a bear no longer but a man, walking free in the morning light. That is where the tale sets down its burden and lets the travelers go on their way. Yet a story like this one does not end simply because the road has ended. It leaves a question resting quietly in the mind, the way a coal keeps its warmth long after the flame has gone. What was it, in truth, that the girl won back, and what did the long road ask of her before it would give him up? The answer is a plain one, though it took the whole length of the world to reach it. The man who came to her only in the dark, who lay beside her and slipped away before the first gray of morning, was no troll and no beast at heart. He was a prince held fast under a curse, wearing a bear's white hide by day and his own true shape only in the blindness of the night. The enchantment had a mercy hidden inside its cruelty, for it would have run its course on its own.

Had she only waited out the turning of a single year, had she let the darkness keep its secret a little longer, the spell would have loosened by itself, and he would have stood before her freed, with no road to walk and no witches to face. It was not wickedness that undid them. It was a candle, lit out of love and worry, and three small drops of tallow falling on a sleeping shoulder. So the harm was done by curiosity, and the mending of it was laid upon patience. That is the shape of the whole story. Once the wonders are set aside. The girl had to unmake with slow and stubborn love the thing that a moment of looking had broken. She had to walk past the houses of three old women, past the four winds themselves, out to a place that has no place on any map, and there by back with golden things and with weeping the The husband she had lost, by the light of one small flame, what was spilled in an instant, took a year of the world to gather up again.

And she gathered it. That is the quiet heart of it. The tale does not punish her for wanting to see. It only asks that she carry the cost of seeing all the way to its far and impossible end. And it lets her arrive. Those who study these old stories have followed this one back a very long way. They tell us it belongs to a great family of tales found across many lands. The ones in which a young woman weds a husband she may not look upon, loses him through her own longing to see, and must then journey to the ends of the earth to find him once more.

The scholars who catalog such things set it among the tales of the animal bridegroom and give the whole wide family the Norwegian name of this very story, so that a tale gathered in the cold valleys of the north now stands as a signpost for its kind. When they trace its bloodline back further still, some fifteen hundred years and more, to a story told in Latin by a writer named Apuleius in the second century after Christ, the tale of Cupid and Psyche, in which a girl lights a lamp to look upon the sleeping God who is her husband, and spills a drop of hot oil, and loses him, and must wander the world to win him back. It is only a likely kinship, mind, a thing the learned reckon probable rather than proven, for these tales pass mouth to mouth for centuries, and leave few certain tracks. But the drop of oil and the drop of tallow are cousins, and the lonely road that follows them is the same road.

One scholar, a Swede by the name of Jan Euwind Swann, once set himself to gather up as many of these tales as he could find, and he sifted through something near 1100 versions of the story of Cupid and Psyche and its Kindred. Out of all that reading, he drew a small and curious truth. Among the peoples of the north, in the Germanic and the Slavonic lands, the hidden husband takes many shapes—a serpent, a pig, a black bull, a bird upon the wing. But the shape he wears most often of all is the bear. The white bear of this Norwegian telling is no No stray fancy then. He is the most usual face the enchantment wears in the cold countries.

And the tellers of Ringerike and Telemark, when they gave the prince his bear's hide, were reaching for the oldest and the truest image their long winters knew. There were two men who caught this particular telling before it could slip away, and their Their names are worth the keeping. One was Peter Christian Asbyonsen, a teacher, and the other was Jürgen Moore, a minister, and together they went out through the Norwegian countryside in the years around the middle of the 19th century, listening at hearths and writing down the wonders that the common folk still carried in their memories.

They had been stirred by the work of the Brothers Grimm away in Germany, and they borrowed the Brothers' care and their method. Yet they did their own gathering in their own fields, walking to the tellers, rather than waiting for the tales to come to them. What they wrote was never a bare copy of the words they heard. They listened to many mouths tell the same story, and from all the versions they tried to shape the one true form beneath, the lost first shape of the thing, and so their tellings are retold as much as recorded.

This story of the White Bear first came into print in the year 1844, set down as one tale among many in the second part of their collection, and it was numbered again a few years later the book was gathered anew. And there is one more thing the two collectors did, almost without meaning to, that outlasted even their wonders. In the years when they worked, Norway was a country waking to itself, hungry to know what was its own, and not borrowed from From the Danish rule it had so long lived under, the plain speech of the peasants who told these tales, the homely words for hearth and horse and spinning wheel, went down onto the page in Asbjornson and Moe's books, and in the setting down it was lifted up.

The written language of Norway grew in part out of these fairy tales, so the historians of the tongue tell us. When a Norwegian child reads of the white bear and the far castle, the very words carry a share of the nation that shaped them. A story gathered to keep the folk from forgetting their wonders helped, in the end, to give the folk their voice. It is a strange and gentle afterlife, for a tale about a girl and a bear, and it is a true one. And now let the tale itself grow quiet, and let the people of it move off softly into the dark from which they came, the way figures fade at the edge of a fire when the flames burn low.

Let the poor father rest easy in his good new house, the hunger behind him for good, the white bear at his window, nothing now but a strange blessing he half believes he dreamed. Let the mother be forgiven her candle, for she meant only love, and let the fear go out of her at last. There is no need to hold any of them longer, no need to keep watch over the road, or to count the miles again. Let the golden things go too, the apple and the comb and the little wheel, back into whatever lap or cottage the old telling keeps them in.

Let the three old women nod by their mountains and grow still. Let the four winds lie down in their own far countries, the great north wind easing against his rocks with his work done and his breath his own again, the sea he crossed smoothing flat behind him, and let the white walls that stood at the end of the world stand empty and open to the weather, their doors swinging wide, their long sorrow spent, while the shirt washed clean as new snow hangs somewhere in the warm to dry, three drops of tallow gone as though they had never fallen.

The bear is only a man now, warm and freed and walking in the daylight, and the girl who walked to the world's far edge and home again, may set down her burden at last and go along beside him. They do not need us to follow them any further. Whatever country they are bound for, it is a gentler one than the road that brought them, and they will come to it in their own good time. Let them go. Only the sound of the rain is left now, The same soft and steady rain that stood at the window where it all began, tapping not to be let in, but only to keep you company while you rest.

There is nothing further to travel toward. The far castle is behind you, the cold is outside, and here where you lie, the dark is a kind one, holding no bargain and asking no promise of you. You need not watch for anything in it. You need only let it settle over you the way snow settles over a quiet field without hurry, covering everything soft and white and still. the castle east of the sun and west of the moon far behind you now. It's cold enchantment no longer pressing on your thoughts. In your mind, reach back and close an invisible door upon that far mountain, feeling it move on silent hinges, sealing the old curse away in calm and order. Then see a single candle, its flame steady in the darkness, and with a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Rest well, sleep deeply, and let the old tales carry you into the night.