White-Bear-King-Valemon

White-Bear-King-Valemon (Kvitebjørn kong Valemon) is a Norwegian fairy tale. The tale was published as No. 90 in Asbjørnsen and Moe's Norske Folke-Eventyr. Ny Samling (1871).George Webbe Dasent translated it for his Tales from the Fjeld.

The familiar version was collected by the artist August Schneider in 1870 from Setesdal. Jørgen Moe collected a variant of the tale Bygland, summarized in the 2nd edition of Norske Folke-Eventyr (1852).

It is Aarne-Thompson type 425A, the search for the lost husband. A similar Norwegian tale that exhibits this motif is East of the Sun and West of the Moon (Asbjørnsen & Moe, No. 41). Others of this type include: The King of Love, The Brown Bear of Norway, The Daughter of the Skies, The Enchanted Pig, The Tale of the Hoodie, Master Semolina, The Enchanted Snake, The Sprig of Rosemary, and The Black Bull of Norroway.

A king had two ugly and mean daughters and one, the youngest, who was beautiful and gentle. She dreamed of a golden wreath. Her father set goldsmiths to make it, but none of them matched her dream. Then she saw a white bear in the woods, and it had the wreath. The bear would not give it to her before she agreed to go away with him, and got three days to prepare for the trip. The daughter did not care for anything as long as she had the wreath, and her father was glad of her happiness and thought he could keep off the bear, but when it arrived, it attacked the king's army and defeated them, unscathed.

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