When I was little, May Day was the day I gathered various wild flowers or dandelions into a little basket and left them on my grandmother’s porch early in the morning. She always acted dutifully surprised and wondered who could possibly have left them. Much later I learned about Morris Dancers and maypoles and International Workers’ Day. But for me, May Day is still about flowers. So here, for your virtual enjoyment, are some flowers and a song I wrote some years ago about leaving (or not leaving) flowers on someone’s doorstep.
In that recent video with illustrations by Violet Moore Higgins and the song “Man of No Dreams,” I had one slide that included the title of a story from the folktale collection—“The Righteous Penny.” The story is one more often translated as “The Honest Penny,” and you may read one such translation here. The story includes the amusing motif of a cat that keeps reappearing aboard ship, but what I particularly like is the moral at the end: “He fetched his mother so that she could share in his happiness and did everything for her he could, because he did not believe in what she had always said: Everyone must look out for himself.” I like Inger Margrete Rasmussen’s translation of the tales, but the best one still in print is the Dover paperback, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, translated by George Webbe Dasent. The Dover edition includes many of the wonderful illustrations that were created by such well known Norwegian artists as Theodor Kittelsen, Otto Sinding, Per Krohg, Erik Werenskiold, and Dagfin Werenskiold.
This is a song I wrote back in the 1960s. It incorporates a lot of story motifs that I recalled from my favorite fairytale collection, East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon. George Webbe Dasent’s 1859 English translation of this Norwegian collection is most famous, but my childhood favorite was one my grandmother had on her bookshelf. The images here are from that book, accompanied by the song, “Man of No Dreams.”
