Beschreibung:

BLIXEN, KAREN [OSCEOLA] Autograph manuscript for the early Blixen story Grjotgard Alveson og Aud . [Copenhagen: no date but likely circa 1905]. An approximately 50 pp. manuscript on recto and verso of a lined notebook paper, executed in a black/brown and purple inks, includes numerous cross-outs, edits, and few drawings at rear. Housed in a custom half morocco folding case. A few pages detached at rear, a few leaves excised and possibly lacking, lightly handled, a few small spots. A very early (and possibly first) draft of one of Karen Blixen's first serious writing efforts. While Blixen had written some plays for her family to perform, she turned more seriously to writing tales in 1904 and, at the urging of a friend, submitted several for publication. Most of these were flatly rejected, but a few were published under the pseudonym Osceola, a name chosen for the brave Seminole leader who launched an insurrection against American troops in the 1830s - and also for her father's dog who originally bore the name. (Blixen's father had lived among the Native Americans of Wisconsin who had furnished him with a similar pseudonym that he used before his 1895 suicide). Grjotgard Alveson og Aud is recorded as an unfinished story of a semimythic old Denmark at the time of transition between paganism and Christianity. The story finds its base in Viking saga, which Dinesen and her siblings were very well versed. In the story, Grjotard, the son of a liegemen to King Olav the Holy who is murdered for continuing pagan practices, falls in love with Aud, the wife of his brother, "whom he identifies with a female spirit of the woods" (Thurman). Troubled by this desire, he seeks the spiritual advice of his fallen father, who encourages him to honor his family, and, upon learning that his brother has been murdered, seeks revenge and is himself killed. The tale closes with Aud mourning the brothers, asking sadly "Shall we, who have seen them, forget them?" (Thurman). While written as a twenty year old in 1905, the work would not be published until after her death in 1962 when the Osceola stories were first collected in a volume under that title, and a copy of that book accompanies the lot. We find no example of a Dinesen manuscript at auction, let alone such an early and exploratory work. Published in Osceola, Gyldenal, 1962, p. 9; See also Judith Thurman. Isak Dinesen. The Life of a Storyteller. New York: St. Martins Press, 1982. p. 80. C