Read Noorsche volksvertellingen in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Noorsche volksvertellingen by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen was first published in 1845. In Passage you read the full text in the Dutch translation by T. Terwey, marked beginner and filed under fantasy and horror. It runs to about 61,400 words.

Trolls in the mountains. Huldre-folk in the forest. Strange islands rising from the sea.

A wandering narrator — sometimes a fisherman, sometimes a young officer, sometimes a tutor out walking with his pupils — roams the Norwegian countryside and listens. In a riverside mill by the Akerselva, in a gravedigger's cottage, in a manor kitchen and on a summer mountain farm, ordinary people tell him what they have seen and heard.

Their stories are full of the huldre, beautiful forest women who lure young men away; of trolls, mountain kings and changeling children; of witches, ghosts and a Christmas Eve that turns eerie. Out at sea, fishermen of the far north speak of Udröst, an enchanted island that appears only to those in mortal danger.

Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, who with Jørgen Moe gave Norway its great folk-tale collections, wrote these atmospheric legends in the 1840s. This 1875 Dutch translation keeps their chilling, fireside charm in clear narrative prose.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Dutch and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.