D'aulaires' Book Of Trolls

Trolls of all kinds-mountain trolls, forest trolls, trolls who live underwater and trolls who live under bridges, uncouth, unkempt, unbearable, unforgettable, and invariably unbelievably ugly trolls-fill the pages of D’Aulaires’ Book of Trolls, the spectacularly illustrated and delightfully entertaining companion volume to the much-acclaimed D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths. Here the husband-and-wife team of Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire explore the shadow side of Norse mythology, the night world in which the trolls work their wiles and carry on in the most bizarre and entertaining fashions, hunting for babies to eat or squabbling with each other in the blueberry patch. Trolls with multiple heads, trolls with heads they carry under their arms, and trolls with only one eye to share around, along with troll wives, whose long red noses are just the thing for stirring soup, roam the mountains of the north by night and retreat by day to sleep in caves full of silver and gold. With their matchless talent as storytellers and illustrators, the d’Aulaires bring to life the weird and wonderful world of Norse mythology.

Author Biography

Ingri Mortenson and Edgar d’Aulaire met at art school in Munich in 1921. Edgar’s father was a noted Italian portrait painter, his mother a Parisian. Ingri, the youngest of five children, traced her lineage back to the Viking kings. The couple married in Norway, then moved to Paris. As Bohemian artists, they often talked about emigrating to America. “The enormous continent with all its possibilities and grandeur caught our imagination,” Edgar later recalled. A small payment from a bus accident provided the means. Edgar sailed alone to New York where he earned enough by illustrating books to buy passage for his wife. Once there, Ingri painted portraits and hosted modest dinner parties. The head librarian of the New York Public Library’s juvenile department attended one of those. Why, she asked, didn’t they create picture books for children? The d’Aulaires published their first children’s book in 1931. Next came three books steeped in the Scandinavian folklore of Ingri’s childhood. Then the couple turned their talents to the history of their new country. The result was a series of beautifully illustrated books about American heroes, one of which, Abraham Lincoln, won the d’Aulaires the American Library Association’s Caldecott Medal. Finally they turned to the realm of myths. The d’Aulaires worked as a team on both art and text throughout their joint career. Originally, they used stone lithography for their illustrations. A single four-color illustration required four slabs of Bavarian limestone that weighed up to two hundred pounds apiece. The technique gave their illustrations an uncanny hand-drawn vibrancy. When, in the early 1960s, this process became too expensive, the d’Aulaires switched to acetate sheets which closely approximated the texture of lithographic stone. In their nearly five-decade career, the d’Aulaires received high critical acclaim for their distinguished contributions to children’s literature. They were working on a new book when Ingri died in 1980 at the age of seventy-five. Edgar continued working until he died in 1985 at the age of eighty-six.