Introduction
by Laura M. Slot
Draumkvaedet – the Dream Song – is an ancient Norwegian poem that describes the dream of a young man named Olaf Åsteson during the thirteen Holy Nights between December 24 and January 6. Remnants of the poem reappeared in southern Norway in the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, it has been a source of inspiration to many musicians and artists.
After the last Holy Night, on January 6, Olaf Åsteson awoke from his long sleep and rushed to church to tell people about his dream. Until the year 353 A.D., Epiphany on January 6 was the Christmas Day, a day of profound cosmic importance, and which, back then, was dedicated not only to the birth of Jesus, but also the baptism, the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha.
Almost immediately after the poem resurfaced in the Telemark region of southern Norway, the text was abused for personal gain: scholars, clergymen and book publishers competed with each other to be the first to edit and publish the text as they saw fit. Magnus Brostrup Landstad (1802-1880) was the only one who attempted to publish the poem in its most authentic form. He published it in the year 1853, along with many other folk songs and poems, in the book Norske folkeviser, a collection of almost 900 pages.
In the decades that followed Landstad’s work, there was relative silence regarding the Dream Song. Decades later, in 1901, the poem was published again in Norway, in a book called The Dream Song: Draumkvaedet, Norske Folkeviser, edited by composer Thorvald Lammers (1841-1922). In the introduction, Lammers wrote that the folklorist professor Moltke Moe (1859-1913) had helped him in creating the book, and that they had based their version of the text mostly on Landstad’s book. Fifty years earlier, Moltke Moe’s father Jørgen Moe (1813-1882) had tried to compete with Landstad, when he was preparing his book Norske folkeeventyr around the same time Landstad was preparing Norske folkeviser. Landstad and his colleagues, primarily the music teacher and folklorist Olea Crøger (1801-1855), had encountered much injustice and adversity before and after the publication of Norske folkeviser.
Then, in 1904, another edition of the poem appeared. The German painter and artist Gerhard Munthe (1849-1929) used the Dream Song to create a book for the Norwegian Book Art Society, on the occasion of Norway’s independence from Sweden. Munthe added his own artistic illustrations, lettertypes and exquisite book binding, he put his name on the cover and printed only a few hundred copies as a special limited edition. Moltke Moe had been asked to contribute to Munthe’s book by providing a commentary to the ancient poem, but this never happened.
A few years later, in 1910, the Norwegian writer Ingeborg Möller-Lindholm (1878-1964) brought the Dream Song to Rudolf Steiner’s attention. Steiner spoke in some of his lectures about the many layers of meaning hidden in the poem. Ingeborg’s son Dan Lindholm (1908-1998) first published a German translation in 1967 – Das Traumlied. It is still in print today, and the current main Dutch edition is based on this German version.
In 1943, poet and painter Eleanor C. Merry (1873-1956) first published her English translation of the Dream Song. In 1961 this text was republished. It was based on a German version made by Eric Trummler, which was based on Landstad’s publication. She illustrated the poem with thirteen paintings, one for each Holy Night. Merry had consulted Miss E.M. Smith-Dampier, a talented poet, author and translator of historic poetry from Norwegian/Danish into English, who provided a literal English version of Landstad’s text as a cross-reference. Finally, Merry added the work of two musicians, Stanley Drake and Benedict Wood, who knew the four melodies of the Dream Song. Their sheet music is printed in Merry’s book, and her translation skilfully follows the metre wherever this was possible.
Merry mentions Landstad as the one who first ‘discovered’ the poem in the Norwegian region of Telemark. It is true that Landstad had worked his way through much adversity in order to successfully publish an honest and rich folklore collection. He never witnessed the popularity the Dream Song acquired during the twentieth century. Most of all, however, we have Landstad’s humble colleague Olea Crøger to thank for the poem: the Dream Song may have remained in obscurity for many more centuries if not for her pure love of folklore: It was Crøger who, mostly during the 1830s and 1840s in Telemark, singlehandedly collected and faithfully preserved so many old folk songs, melodies, stories and poems. These treasures did not only appear in Landstad’s book, but also in the book of melodies edited by composer Ludvig Mathias Lindeman (1812-1887), as well as in an early 1840 collection by Jørgen Moe.
Composer Andreas Peter Berggreen (1801-1880) and musicologist Øystein Gaukstad (1912-1996) both emphasized that it had been Crøger who had found and collected many of the historic texts and melodies listed in these works, and that she was only publicly credited for a much smaller contribution. The modest financial compensation she had received from publishers, after her death went towards establishing a library in Telemark. Rediscovering and truthfully preserving the ancient poem of Olaf Åsteson was Olea Crøger’s gift to the world.
Laura M. Slot
Leerdam, 2026