East of the Sun and West of the Moon
Based on Wikipedia: East of the Sun and West of the Moon
A Place That Doesn't Exist
Where is east of the sun and west of the moon? Nowhere. That's the point. It's a place so impossibly far that you'd need the North Wind himself to carry you there, and even he might arrive exhausted. This impossible destination gives its name to one of the most beloved fairy tales to come out of Norway, a story that's been told and retold for centuries because it speaks to something deep in us: the fear of losing love through our own mistakes, and the hope that we might win it back through perseverance.
The tale belongs to a family of stories that scholars call "The Search for the Lost Husband," and it has relatives all over the world. You might recognize its bones in Beauty and the Beast. You'd certainly see its reflection in the ancient Roman tale of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably its great-great-grandmother. But the Norwegian version has its own particular magic, shaped by long winters and the kind of landscape where you can believe the winds might be brothers who talk to each other.
The Story Itself
It begins with poverty. A peasant has a daughter so beautiful that even a white bear takes notice. The bear arrives one day with a proposition: give me your youngest daughter, and I'll make you rich. The girl is understandably reluctant. But poverty has a way of making impossible bargains seem reasonable, and her father persuades her to accept.
The bear carries her away to a castle that seems to exist outside of ordinary space. It's magnificent, enchanted, filled with everything she could want. At night, something strange happens. The bear sheds his animal form and comes to her bed as a man. But she never sees him. He arrives only after she's extinguished the light and leaves before dawn breaks.
This goes on. She grows accustomed to her invisible husband, but she misses her family terribly. The bear agrees to let her visit home, with one condition: she must never speak to her mother alone. Only when others are present.
This is, of course, an impossible condition. Mothers are persistent. Her mother corners her, wheedles, and finally extracts the whole strange story. And then she does what mothers in fairy tales so often do: she gives advice that will ruin everything. She hands her daughter a candle and tells her to light it at night, to see who shares her bed. Just be careful, she warns, not to spill any tallow.
Three Drops of Wax
The girl returns to the castle and waits for night. When her mysterious husband falls asleep, she lights the candle.
He's beautiful. A prince, young and handsome, nothing like the monster she might have feared. Overwhelmed, she bends to kiss him.
Three drops of tallow fall onto his skin.
He wakes. And now she learns the truth: he was cursed by his wicked stepmother, a witch-queen, to wear a bear's form by day. If the girl had only waited one year without seeing him, the curse would have broken. But now he must return to his stepmother's castle, which lies east of the sun and west of the moon, and marry the witch-queen's daughter.
By morning, the castle has vanished. The girl stands alone in a forest, with nothing but her regret and her determination.
The Journey
What follows is one of the great quests in fairy tale literature. The girl sets out to find a place that exists beyond geography, and she does it through sheer stubborn will.
She meets three old women, each sitting outside a great mountain. The first plays with a golden apple. The second combs with a golden carding comb, a tool used to prepare wool for spinning. The third works a golden spinning wheel. None of them know the way to the castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon, but each lends the girl a horse to reach the next, and each gives her the golden object she holds.
The third old woman sends her to the East Wind. He's never blown that far, but he knows his brother, the West Wind, is stronger. The West Wind hasn't been there either, but the South Wind might have. The South Wind sends her to the North Wind, the mightiest of them all.
The North Wind admits he's been there exactly once. He blew an aspen leaf to that distant castle, and it exhausted him so completely he couldn't blow for days afterward. But if she's truly determined, he'll take her.
She is.
The Castle Beyond the World
The North Wind deposits her at the witch-queen's castle. Now the girl must use her wits. She takes out the golden apple and begins to play with it where the witch-princess, her rival, can see.
The princess wants it desperately. What will you take for it?
A night with the prince, the girl says.
The princess agrees, but she's cunning. She gives the prince a sleeping potion. That night, the girl sits beside him, weeping and calling to him, but he doesn't stir.
The next day, she offers the golden carding comb. Same bargain, same result. The prince sleeps through her pleading.
But the castle has other inhabitants. Prisoners, locked away by the witch-queen, overhear the girl's desperate words through the walls. They tell the prince what they've heard.
On the third day, the girl offers her last treasure: the golden spinning wheel. That night, when the princess brings the prince his drink, he only pretends to swallow. When the girl comes to him, he's awake.
The Washing of the Shirt
Now they plot together. The prince tells the girl his plan: he'll announce that he'll marry whoever can wash the three spots of tallow from his shirt. His stepmother and her daughter, being trolls rather than true humans, won't be able to do it. Their touch will only make the stains darker. Then he'll call for the strange girl to try.
It works perfectly. The witch-queen scrubs, and the spots spread. The witch-princess scrubs, and the shirt turns nearly black. The girl takes it in her hands, and the tallow lifts away like morning mist.
At the sight of their defeat, the two witches fly into such a rage that they explode. The curse shatters. The prince no longer needs to be a bear by day or live in an impossible castle. He and his bride free all the prisoners, gather up the gold and silver that filled the witch-queen's halls, and leave that place forever.
Why Bears?
Scholars who study folklore have catalogued thousands of variations of this story from around the world. They've given it a classification number: ATU 425A, "The Animal as Bridegroom." The animal changes depending on where the story is told. In some versions, he's a pig. In others, a snake. In Scottish stories, he's a black bull. The Greeks told of a serpent. But in the Germanic and Slavic regions, in the cold northern forests where bears were both terrifying and awe-inspiring, the bear predominates.
A Swedish scholar named Jan-Öjvind Swahn analyzed over eleven hundred versions of this story and its relatives. He found that the bear appears more often than any other animal in the tales from these northern regions. There's something about the bear that captures the imagination of people who live in places with long winters. Bears are powerful, dangerous, but also oddly human in the way they stand, the way they move. They hibernate through the dark months and emerge with the spring. They're creatures of transformation.
Cupid and Psyche
The grandmother of all these tales is probably "Cupid and Psyche," a story embedded in a Roman novel called The Golden Ass, written by Apuleius in the second century. In that version, a mortal woman named Psyche is so beautiful that Venus herself grows jealous. The goddess sends her son Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with something hideous, but Cupid sees her and falls in love himself.
He takes her to a magical palace where he visits her only in darkness, forbidding her to look upon him. Her jealous sisters convince her that her husband must be a monster. She lights a lamp and sees instead the god of love himself, so beautiful that she trembles. A drop of hot oil from her lamp falls on his shoulder. He wakes, feels betrayed, and flees.
Psyche wanders the world searching for him, performing impossible tasks set by the vengeful Venus, until finally the gods take pity and reunite her with Cupid.
The parallels are unmistakable: the invisible husband, the forbidden light, the drops that fall and wake him, the long search afterward. But the Norwegian version transforms the classical tale into something earthier, replacing gods with trolls and replacing the Mediterranean landscape with something darker and colder and somehow more human in its stakes.
Variations Across Cultures
A Finnish-Swedish version makes the curse's origin explicit. A large-nosed woman wants to marry a handsome man. When he rejects her, she curses him to become a bear. The rest follows a familiar pattern, but the witch's motivation is made clear: she's ugly, she was rejected, and she wants revenge. The bear isn't just cursed; he's cursed by wounded vanity.
In a Russian version from the Novgorod region, the impossible destination shifts slightly. Instead of "east of the sun and west of the moon," the prince says he must go "to the sun in the west, to the moon in the east." The contradiction remains: you cannot go both directions at once. The destination is defined by its impossibility.
The girl still follows. She still finds three huts with three old women. She still receives golden objects: an apple, an embroidery hoop, a spinning wheel. She still trades them for nights with her husband. She still fails twice because he's been drugged. She still succeeds on the third night because he's been warned.
The washing of the stained shirt appears in almost every version. The false bride's failure isn't just her inability to complete the task; it's that her very nature makes things worse. She isn't just inadequate; she's actively corrupting. The true bride's success demonstrates not just her worth but her fundamental compatibility with her husband. She can undo the damage because she's the one meant to be with him.
The Golden Objects
Those golden treasures the girl collects on her journey deserve attention. An apple, a carding comb, a spinning wheel. All three connect to women's traditional work and to femininity itself. The apple evokes both temptation and knowledge, from Eden to the golden apples of the Hesperides. The carding comb and spinning wheel are tools for transforming raw wool into thread, for creating something useful from chaos.
The girl doesn't use these objects as weapons. She uses them as bait. The witch-princess wants them because they're beautiful and because she senses their power, but she doesn't understand what they really are. They're the girl's journey made tangible, proof of how far she's traveled and what she's endured. When she trades them away, she's not giving up treasures; she's spending currency she earned through suffering.
The Winds as Characters
The four winds in this story behave like a family. The East Wind knows his limitations and defers to his stronger brother. The West Wind does the same. The South Wind passes the girl along to the North Wind, the most powerful of all. There's a hierarchy here, and everyone knows their place in it.
The North Wind's admission is particularly moving. He's been to the castle east of the sun and west of the moon exactly once, and it nearly destroyed him. He blew an aspen leaf there, the lightest possible cargo, and he was so exhausted afterward that he couldn't blow for days. But he'll take the girl anyway, if she's determined enough.
Her determination is the key to everything. She doesn't have magical powers. She isn't a princess or a witch. She's a poor peasant girl who made a mistake and refuses to let that mistake be the end of the story.
Why We Keep Telling It
East of the Sun and West of the Moon has been translated, adapted, and retold continuously since it was first collected by the Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in the nineteenth century. Andrew Lang included it in The Blue Fairy Book in 1889, introducing it to English-speaking children who would grow up to pass it on to their own children.
The Danish-American illustrator Kay Nielsen created a famous edition in 1914, his art nouveau images capturing the strange beauty of the story. In the 1980s, the animation studio Don Bluth Productions began developing an animated film based on the tale, though it was never completed. Novelists have expanded it into full-length books. Playwrights have staged it. Each retelling finds something new in the old bones.
The story endures because it gives us something we need. It tells us that mistakes can be forgiven, that what we break through foolishness we might mend through perseverance. It tells us that love is worth pursuing to impossible places. And it tells us that even the mightiest forces in the world, even the North Wind himself, will help us if our determination is genuine.
The castle east of the sun and west of the moon doesn't exist. It can't exist. That's what makes reaching it mean something.