The Magic Book
Danish fairy tale
The Magic Book is a Danish fairy tale collected by Evald Tang Kristensen in Eventyr fra Jylland ("Adventures From Jutland.") Andrew Lang included it in The Orange Fairy Book, listing it as translated by Mrs. Skavgaard-Pedersen.
Synopsis
A boy called set out to seek service. He was rude to an old man, refusing to give up the way, but entered his service. The old man set him to keep some rooms clean and scatter sand on the floor, told him where to find food and let him wear clothing that was there, and forbade him to enter one room. The boy immediately cleaned nothing but his own room, and then, after some days, went into the room. He found a heap of bones and some books; he took one book, found it was magical, and learned shapeshifting from it. He ran away to home, but his father thought he had stolen the fine clothing and sent him off. The boy told him to sell the dog he would find by the door the next day, but be sure to take the strap back. The dog appeared, and at his wife's insistence, the father sold it and kept the strap.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17085675. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Magic Book” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.