National Network for Equitable Library Service

A primitive story of transgression and transformation weaves its way through the centuries and cultures into the lives and conflicts and personal dramas of our own time. Seán Virgo traces its journey and the guises it takes on, reinventing itself as fable, fairy tale, ghost story, and fantasy — spellbinding entertainments that engage all the same with conundrums of warfare, colonialism, religion, art, and human fidelity. The Dibidalen of the title story is a remote northern valley where, in ancestral times, a man took a wife who was less and more than human; where a boy was abducted and dragged down the shaman’s path; where a hunter was punished for a crime he could not understand.Centuries later, a young Nazi officer in the army of occupation collects a “quaint fairy tale” from two old peasant women, the last speakers of a forgotten language. It is a gift for his uncle back home, a Lutheran pastor with a taste for philology. Locked up for years in an Austrian archive, the story escapes and touches the lives of two young couples and a child, as it makes its way home to the warm, fragile heart of an ancient garden.