Produced by Hunter Monroe, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
[Transcriber's note: obvious typographical errors have been corrected; hyphenation has been regularised. Close quotes have not been added at the end of paragraphs followed by more dialogue.]
TOP-OF-THE-WORLD STORIES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS TRANSLATED FROM THE SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES
Published, August, 1916 Copyright, 1916, BY LOTHROP, LEE & SHEPARD CO. _All Rights Reserved_
Norwood Press BERWICK & SMITH CO. NORWOOD, MASS. U. S. A.
_In memory of ten happy years, this little book is dedicated to the children of John, William, Anna, Martha, and George._
Not for my dear usual public of little children have I gathered these stories from Scandinavian authors, but for boys and girls who have reached a stage which warrants a rather free range in Story Land. For here are to be encountered creatures and events, deeds and ideas, unsuited to youngest readers, but which have legitimate attraction for boys and girls from nine to fourteen years old--the age varying according to the child's maturity and previous reading.
Five of these stories were written by the noted Finnish author, Zachris Topelius, who wrote them, and much else, for the children of Finland and Sweden more than fifty years ago. His loving sympathy for children, and his earnest desire to write only what was wholesome and good for them, shine through all his literary work for the young. His "Läsning för Barn" (Reading for Children) in several volumes, contains stories, true and imaginative, poems, songs, hymns, and many charming plays for children to act. Although a Finn, Topelius wrote in the Swedish language.
By the kind permission of Miss Margaret Böcher I have made use of her excellent rendering of _Sampo Lappelil_.
Of the other stories presented here, two (_The Forest Witch_ and _The Testing of the Two Knights_) were translated from the Danish, and one (_Anton's Errand, or The Boy Who Made Friends by the Way_) from the Norwegian.
The translations are not strictly literal, neither are they, I am sure, unjustifiably free. The liberty exercised consists chiefly of omission. For example, in Knut Spelevink, extra incidents were omitted which dragged the story to a tedious length or marred it by the inartistic, outworn device of explaining Knut's adventures as a dream; in _The Princess Lindagull_, some details of the wild-beast fight were left out; in _A Legend of Mercy_, a hampering husk was stripped off from the good seed of the quaint little story. Most of the minor changes were made for the sake of smoothness and clarity.