The Dead Began to Speak: Past and Present Belief in Fairies

The Dead Began to Speak:
Past and Present Belief in Fairies, Ghosts, and the Supernatural
Adam Grydehøj
agrydehoj@islanddynamics.org
The Unquiet Grave
“The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.
“I’ll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave
For a twelvemonth and a day.”
The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?”
“‘T is I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.”
“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips;
But my breath is earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.
“‘T is down in yonder garden green,
Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that ere was seen
Is withered to a stalk.
“The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
Till God calls you away.”
- The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child, 78a
Chapter 1: The Unquiet Grave
This is the island of Ærø.
I am standing just outside the village of Lille Rise, at the spot where the road to Ærøskøbing, the
island’s second town, yields to topography and bends northward. Ærøskøbing sits sedately at the
bottom of a three kilometre-long declension, its white church tower rising above a patch of red
roofs. To the west, a row of low headlands creates bays within bays, and the eye is drawn to the
calm, old fishing village of Ommel.
It is early fall, and the fields, harvested a month ago, are just beginning to green. By the time the
frost arrives, they will have acquired a thin sprinkling of grass. And the winter snow will come to
cover them, and the spring thaw will see them wax verdurous again, and finally, they will be
conquered by the plough.
Before me, lies a hill. Or at least, lay a hill. Today, there is only farmland, sloping slowly down
to that serene Baltic subsidiary that the Danes call the Island Sea. For the Danish National
Museum’s archives, however, this is the site of a phantom hill, named Grydehøj. The museum
records identify it as a Bronze Age burial mound.
In 1834, J.R. Hübertz, a physician and amateur historian, listed Grydehøj among the best
preserved burial mounds on Ærø.1 Excavations in 1865 discovered that Grydehøj contained eight
complete skeletons, a number of urns filled with ashes, and some bone-strewn chambers in great
disarray, a sign that these archaeologists were not the first men to have entered the ancient tomb
since the Bronze Age. Over the following nineteen years, Grydehøj’s great stones quietly vanished,
finding new homes in the walls of local houses. By the time the archaeologists returned, only a
couple of rocks remained, and these had been shattered. Grydehøj’s ignominious next 52 years
witnessed the gradual encroachment of farmland and the hill’s conversion into a clay quarry. When
the National Museum studied the mound again in 1936, this quarry was two meters deep and 30
meters in diameter, its edge closing in on Grydehøj’s historical centre and apex. What was left of
the hill was buried under bits of gravel and flint.2 By 1943, the year that 28-year-old Hans Simon
Peter Hansen inherited Grydehøj Farm, the hill had already disappeared from sight. Nonetheless,
Grydehøj, the ghost-hill that had lent its name to a farm, came to lend its name to a family when
Hans became Hans Grydehøj by law.
The story of this hill is a history of modernity, of every age’s modernity, when the old ways
crumble and are ground into earth. Still, this is no history of blind progress. The hill was killed by
the chisel and plough, not the convenience store and computer. The megaliths, as megaliths the
world over are wont to do, fell furrow by furrow over the course of a century. Today, the Grydehøj
family name – my family name – is the hill’s only remaining reminder.
If, however, you trust the Ærøskøbing Tourist Bureau down the road, not all history is bound for
oblivion. Sightseeing pamphlets call Ærøskøbing “Denmark’s Fairy Tale Town.” The epithet gains
special significance when one considers that 2005, the year in which I began my research on Ærø,
marked the bi-centennial of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth and has become a kind of extended
cultural holiday nationwide. As a result of local impoverishment that, for centuries, prevented the
people of Ærøskøbing from demolishing their tiny, half-timbered houses and building nicer ones,
the village of about 1,000 inhabitants is now the best-preserved market town in the Denmark.
Considering its small size, Ærøskøbing is remarkably easy to get lost in. Its road system is still
that of a quaintly unreformed Medieval village that was founded before the age of city planners who
realized that the best streets were straight ones. This is a miniature world of cobblestones and
hollyhocks, of homes that slant and droop, that radiate antiquity and careful restoration. The result
is predictable: In the summer, German pleasure boats fill the harbour, and Danish cyclists book-up
the hotels.
Walk along the main street, Vestergade, from the harbour, and you will pass by what must be
one of the world’s tiniest ice cream parlours, a place so proud of its walnut-maple syrup cones that
its owners refuse to mix this house speciality with inferior varieties of scoops. A short amble up the
road brings you to Ærøhus – a three-story, half-timbered, brick-red hotel – in which you can order
an Ærø egg cake, which is a baked, cheeseless omelette topped with pork rinds and sharp mustard.
Turning left on Søndergade leads you to the town square, still equipped with working water pumps
that, as a sightseeing pamphlet proudly informs, “supplied the town with water right up till 1952.”
There, in front of the old court house, now converted to a library, you can join a tour led by Jan
Pedersen, a guide who, depending on the time of day, is dressed either as a drum-beating town crier
or a pike-bearing night watchman. Taking another left and proceeding back toward the sea brings
you to the southern end of Smedegade. Here, you find the vanishingly-small Doll House, a summer
home-cum-photo opportunity. Just up the street lies the island’s biggest attraction, the Bottled Ship
Museum, showcasing the life’s work of an old Ærøese salt, “Bottle” Peter. Besides being a tourist’s
paradise, Ærøskøbing is a snow globe-village. You feel that, even if you could pick it up and shake
it, nothing would ever change, not for all modernity.
Only thirty kilometres long and eight kilometres at its widest, Ærø is, by mainland standards, a
small place. Not so for the islanders. A quarter of an hour drive southeast separates tourism-driven
Ærøskøbing from Marstal, the island’s largest town with a population of 2,400. These twelve
kilometres span a cultural gulf. Whereas Marstal has long been a Baltic shipping centre, the people
to the West were, traditionally, farmers. Even in Ommel, the fiercely independent village two-anda-half kilometres to the northwest of Marstal, the historical tradition is one of smuggling and
sailing. Today, Marstal has supplemented its maritime industry with renewable energy and is a
world leader in the development of solar panels. Regardless, historically-rooted jealousies are kept
alive, long after they have become economically irrelevant: It is widely held that, in the past, the
people of Marstal envied Ærøskøbing’s ancient market town status while those from the
Ærøskøbing region coveted Marstal’s maritime clout.
The primary explanation for the cultural divergence between Marstal and Ærøskøbing is not
evident from looking at a modern map. Until a damming project was begun in1856, the island was
nearly split in two by a shallow bay named Gråsten Nor, and West Ærø and East Ærø were
connected only by a thin isthmus, Drejet, and a ferry that ran between the outposts at Kragnæs and
Grønnæs. The meadows – still called Gråsten Nor – that the bay once covered are today a nature
preserve and, by extension, a kind of cultural no-man’s land.
The Marstal/Ærøskøbing divide is not, however, Ærø’s only one. Near Ærø’s north-western tip
lies Søby, the island’s third town, home to 600 people and a ship-building wharf. The area between
Søby and Ærøskøbing is Ærø’s most sparsely populated besides Gråsten Nor, and despite holding
more to Ærøskøbing than Marstal, Søby and its outlying villages form a society in themselves. In
the centre of this cultural region is a manor house, Søbygård, built in 1580 during the island’s 500year long ducal period.
Though the island has a population just under 7,000, each of Ærø’s three regions holds a claim
to history. Ærøskøbing is a relic of quaintness past. Marstal is a great port that sent shipping fleets
across the globe. Søby is a place where “the old ways” can still be said to thrive. This is not mere
tourist bureau-speak either: Pride in local history is as Ærøese as lard-fried pancakes.
As 83-year-old Esther Clausen, who has lived in a village near Søby most of her life, says:
Esther Clausen: But you know what? It’s also been a fact in past, Ærøskøbing and Marstal
could never, really, unite.
Adam Grydehøj: But why is it?
EC: See, that there is a good question. I can’t even begin to answer it because they [The people
of Marstal and Ærøskøbing.] can’t begin to answer it. So, how could I do it then? No, it’s some
disagreement about how Ærøskøbing, it’s a market town, and Marstal isn’t. And Marstal feels,
really, that they’re larger than Ærøskøbing, but Ærøskøbing is the one that has market town
rights, am I right? And it’s probably done something, I think [...]. But it’s something that’s been
around for many, many, many years. Huh! I’ve never heard of anything else.
Speaking with people on Ærø, you soon realize that the only way to get unbiased opinions about
this age-old local conflict is to talk with people from the island’s far-west. The Søby area has never
been sufficiently populous to threaten the other two towns’ ambitions, so it has remained relatively
neutral. Ask someone in Ærøskøbing, however, whether or not Søby takes sides in the war, and you
will be told that, yes, Søby considers itself to be aligned with Ærøskøbing for geographical reasons.
Ask the same question to a Marstaller, and you will hear that Søby is in the Marstal camp, aligned
against the arrogant and selfish people of Ærøskøbing.
It is no coincidence, then, that it was a resident of the Søby region, Birthe Henriksen, who set up
one of the most prosaic of the island’s many low-key tourist attractions, the Peace Bench, near Olde
Mill. As a tourist brochure describes it, the Peace Bench, “sitting on Ærø’s highest point, is a
symbol of the hope for peace on earth. The bench has the form of a bridge, and here, you can sit and
nurture positive thoughts as you enjoy the wide view over island and sea.” Local opinion is rather
less lofty in this regard, and the Peace Bench is seen merely as a bridge between the island’s two
warring factions. This was, indeed, Birthe’s intention when she had the bench designed and built.
Birthe had been shocked by the events of 11 September 2001 and had realized how vain it was to
seek peace on Earth while peace on Ærø was still wanting. At the Peace Bench’s official opening, a
photograph was taken of the mayors of Marstal and Ærøskøbing shaking hands while sitting on
either side of the bench. Birthe’s well-meaning effort does not seem to have succeeded, and unity
on an island-wide scale seems no more imminent than on a world-wide one.
2005 marked something of a turning point for Ærø. As a part of a country-wide political
restructuring, the island – formerly divided into two municipalities, Marstal Kommune and
Ærøskøbing Kommune – was unified into Ærø Kommune. Among other things, this meant that the
then-mayors of the two kommunes ran against one another in the local election, and the results are
indicative of the island’s cultural divisions. Ten parties ran in all, and five of them received enough
votes to be represented on the municipal council, the body in which the majority coalition selects a
mayor. In Marstal and Ommel, the Conservative Peoples’ Party (the party of Karsten Landro,
mayor of Marstal Kommune) received over 50% of the vote while the nearest contender, the Social
Democrats, garnered just 30%. Meanwhile, about 43% of Ærøskøbing’s population voted for the
Social Democrats (the party of Jørgen Otto Jørgensen, Ærøskøbing Kommune’s mayor), and the
Conservatives took less than 6%. Here, those voters with right-leaning politics opted for Venstre –
the reigning party in Denmark but only a relatively minor local player – that was allied with the
left-leaning Social Democrats on account of ultra-local policy. In Søby, the three aforementioned
parties managed just 22% of the vote combined, and the new Ærø Residents’ List swept up 66%.
After prolonged coalition wrangling, the Social Democrat-led group took charge of the unified local
council in 2006. When three villages in such close proximity to one another have such resoundingly
divergent voting patterns, and when the right-wing Venstre enters a coalition that includes the
Socialist Peoples’ Party, it cannot simply be put down to ideological differences.
All of the parties placed preservation of ferry services at the top of their agendas. Currently,
Ærø – which is, as the tourist brochure prominently assures us, “a real island” and not linked by a
bridge – has four ferry routes: One in Marstal, one in Ærøskøbing, and two in Søby. Economic
concerns suggest that a ferry route in Marstal or Ærøskøbing might have to be discontinued. Since
the 2005 election was a contest between two presiding mayors representing separate, ultra-locallyentrenched parties, the Conservatives campaigned to guarantee that Marstal would retain its ferry
while the Social Democrats and its allies battled for Ærøskøbing’s ferry route. By mainland
standards, the situation seems absurd. After all, even if one of the towns loses its ferry, taking the
surviving ferry would still only mean an extra quarter of an hour’s drive. For the people of Marstal,
Ærøskøbing, and Søby, the entire precept of localness was – and is – at stake.
Nevertheless, when one looks beyond the posturing of local politics and civic pride catchphrases, neither Marstal, Ærøskøbing, nor Søby retains a firm connection with the past. The average
Ærø-dweller has a fair grasp of the physical realities of life on the island a century or two ago.
People know that their ancestors were farmers or sailors or what have you. People know that the
farmers rode horses and the sailors rode sailing ships, that farmhouses were built by hand and that
Gråsten Nor was drained.
Very few, however, know how or what these ancestors thought.
Consider, the titbit of family history told to me by 77-year-old Klaus Jørgen Petersen, who lives
not far from Grydehøj and still speaks in heavy Rise dialect. Klaus Jørgen describes why his
grandfather first moved to Lille Rise after returning from a sailing voyage to his home village of
Ommel:
We came here in a strange way. It was because my grandfather, he came home, and it turned out
that his wife was dead. So, he was a bachelor. Then, an old one, who’s named Rasmus Butcher,
out from Ommel – we were out there, right? – says, “It’s a real shame that you live here alone.
When you come home, then there’s no wife in the house.” “Yes, there’s nothing to be done
about it,” says my grandfather, “because it was the Lord’s will.” “Yes, there’s something to be
done:” he says, “There’s a girl who goes up kintra.” That means, in the countryside. That
means, then, here [in Lille Rise]. “So, you come with me tomorrow. I’m going over to look at a
house-lamb.” That means, a dog. My grandfather, he drives with him over here, and they climb
up here, and there’s the neighbour’s – the old father –, he was talking with grandmother. And
then, he says, “Well, that was quite a meal!” “Yes, there’s a bit we can arrange.” And so, they
went in and got it arranged. So, they damned well got engaged. They were married here – here
in the house – with a letter from the king.
When Klaus Jørgen tells this story, he is speaking of his grandfather’s and grandmother’s
lives. When we hear it, it seems to concern a different world than our own, one in which
husbands and wives mean something other than they do today. It takes place in a world in
which people take the horse to town, not the car, and courtships last one afternoon. And so,
we may say, lying to ourselves, “Well, that doesn’t surprise me one bit.” However, when
children today learn the same story from the same time period in school, except with the King
of England and a Spanish princess as the protagonists instead of a sailor and a farmer’s
daughter, they are taught to shake their heads and wonder at the way in which the royalty
once married for power and not for love. Our knowledge of social history is so weak as to
make the past hardly recognizable.
Often, as I have travelled Ærø, speaking with people about the past, I have heard men and
women, both young and old, bemoan the materialism of today’s world. Still, it is materialism on
which the best-recollected history is built. The manor houses, the boats, the half-timbering: All of
these are remembered as long as they last, until the final stone disappears from the burial mound.
But for people today, the non-material aspects of past life – that vast, intangible realm of cultural
history – might as well have never existed. One of the most salient examples of this is society’s lack
of knowledge of its ancestors’ beliefs concerning the supernatural.
Let us go back to Grydehøj, that poor, neglected ghost-hill. In 1834, the island’s biographer,
Hübertz, wrote:
In the hills near Ærøskøbing, there are many fairies that frequently pursue the milkmaids and
the children who go there to play. This explains why the latter do not visit there very often.
These fairies have only one leg.
When one comes up Lille Rise Hill, there are two old burial mounds, Grydehøj and
Brallestene, on the left-hand side. There is no doubt that they are home to the beings that, at
night, scare the horses and lead people astray off the nearby road.3
To the majority of people, both on Ærø and elsewhere, the preceding passage is of questionable
historical merit. After all, it is generally understood that fairies do not and never have existed, and
knowing that fairies were once the object of widespread belief does nothing to alter the fact of their
non-existence. Nonetheless, as Hübertz’s words make clear, prior belief in fairies can neither be
viewed as a historical fiction used to scare children nor as a slightly embarrassing quirk of our
ancestors’ logic. I say our ancestors because both past belief in fairies and current ignorance of past
belief are the common birthright of nearly all European peoples and their descendants.
From Hübertz, we can see that, at least 170 years ago, some of the Ærøese believed in fairies,
and not story-book fairies either. They believed in fairies who had a direct influence on the human
community. This belief, furthermore, affected the way in which people went about their lives. For
example, milkmaids were cautious on the hills, children only rarely went to play in the vicinity of
Grydehøj, and night-time travellers took care when passing through the area.
It may well be asked whether it is not possible to overstate the significance that belief in the
supernatural had for the daily lives of past peoples in Scandinavia and the British Isles. There is so
much history in the world to learn that even the most interested individuals – even professional
historians – are forced to pick and choose from among millennia of accumulated historical subjects.
Is knowledge of supernatural folklore really as important as, say, knowledge of Europe’s royal
houses? Of World War I? Of the Battle of Hastings? Of the Reformation? Of imperialism and
colonization? After all, every one of us can agree that these great events actually happened, and we
can follow their impacts through time until the present day. On the other hand, in order to
understand great events, need we not first understand the world in which they took place and the
thoughts of their actors? To deny this is to deny the importance of learning any history whatsoever.
It is generally known that the common folk of Scandinavia and the British Isles believed in
fairies at some time or other, even if present-day popular opinion is divided as to when this was.
How many people though can say what, precisely, the word fairy meant in the age of widespread
fairy belief? If today, the word has a different meaning entirely, what does it tell us about our
assumptions concerning the past? If our ancestors believed in fairies, did they then believe in ittybitty maidens with butterfly wings and magic wands? If they believed in elves, did they believe in
jolly fellows who dwelt up north with Santa Claus and made toys for good little boys and girls? If
they believed in giants, did they believe in lumbering creatures that built their houses at the top of
beanstalks? And to put it bluntly, if they believed in these things, what kind of idiots were they? It
should be clear that, at least to some degree, current conceptions of some supernatural beings differ
from past ones.
So, what were the fairies who haunted the hill from which my own name arose?
I aim to prove with this book that belief in the supernatural had broad implications for past
residents of Northern Europe. In the process, we will look at what, exactly, people once believed in;
current society’s level of knowledge of past supernatural folklore; the extent of present-day belief in
the supernatural; and how present-day belief compares with past belief. There will be no attempt to
either prove or denigrate belief since the relative validity of these beliefs has no influence on the
extent to which they affect the way people live. Belief in itself is sufficient. To this end, and
because it would be awkward to place alleged before every statement (for example, “Jens Jensen
allegedly sighted fairies at Grydehøj”), supernatural beings will generally be spoken of as if they
definitely exist, as they do exist in the minds of those who believe in them.
Although this book is not split into two, distinct sections, it is based on a pair of methodologies.
As there are only very few true experts in the history of Northern European belief in the nonreligious supernatural, and the vast majority of readers will have little accurate prior knowledge of
the subject, a large part of this book will be devoted to analysis of past belief as it is portrayed in a
variety of historical sources, sources that will be briefly outlined in the next chapter. Of perhaps
greater importance to the scholar and equal interest to the casual reader will be the portions of this
book based on my 16-month period of fieldwork on Ærø. The precise methodology behind this
fieldwork will be discussed later, but suffice it to say that it consisted of recorded, personal
interviews with 61 of the island’s residents. Statistically speaking, this is not a huge number, but
from the point of view of a fieldworker, it is significant, representing as it does about 200 hours of
interviews. My fieldwork may have been limited to Ærø, but this study’s implications extend well
beyond the island. As we shall see, prior folklore is remarkably consistent across Europe, and
current conceptions of past belief are largely informed by factors at work throughout the Western
world.
For many people, it will be a surprise to see the subject of fairies approached with such
earnestness, and it might still be argued that folklore of the supernatural is a matter of mere history,
of a vanished past. It might be argued that discussion of the supernatural is irrelevant in today’s
world. But on what evidence is this assertion based? On anecdotal knowledge? On surveys? On indepth research? We know that the people of Hübertz’s era believed in the supernatural, but what
about the people of today?
Chapter 2: Evidence of Past Belief
It has been two years since I have last been in Skovby. Possibly the most charming of Ærø’s
villages, Skovby is located about five kilometres southeast of Søby, far outside the radius of my
Marstal-based life. This is Ærø’s land of hills and dales. The village itself sits prettily in a valley,
and by Ærøese standards, its little gardens and orchards are uniquely lush. Like Ærøskøbing,
Skovby has been the beneficiary of historical poverty: The concentration of antique half-timbered
and thatch-roofed houses here is stunning. If these buildings were anywhere near a major town, they
would be the exclusive residences of the wealthy, but as it is, they have stayed in the possession of
the commoners’ descendants. A golf course has recently opened north of Søby, but for now,
Skovby is unvisited by tourists. It is tempting to view the village as a relic of rural Denmark’s past.
I am here to speak with the 63-year-old former sailor, Palle Abramsson, one of the island’s most
knowledgeable historians. Recently, Palle transcribed Hübertz’s Description of Ærø from its old
Gothic lettering into perfectly-readable, modern Danish, instantaneously multiplying the ease with
which locals can learn about their island’s history. Like a surprisingly-large number of Ærø’s
residents, Palle is not strictly local. He was born in Copenhagen and visited Skovby as a child,
between 1950 and 1954, before his family relocated to Australia. Palle did not actually move to
Ærø until 1967.
Even in idyllic Skovby, Palle’s house stands out as being exceptionally picturesque, like a cutout cottage from a Thomas Kincaid painting. Whatever expectations of rusticity the house’s exterior
may engender, it is immediately evident upon entering Palle’s sitting room that one is not visiting
the home of a stereotypically-naïve crofter. The small room is crammed with notepads, binders, and
books on a range of historical subjects. Volumes on genetic evidence of human migratory patterns
vie for space with ashtrays and nautical trinkets beside the whirring desktop computer. Palle is not
an ethnologist’s dream catch. He did not learn local legends from his father’s father, is not the latest
link in an ancient chain of unbroken tradition. He first came to Ærø because – in accordance with
the urban fashion of the time – his school headmaster had sent young Copenhageners out into the
country in order to “fatten us up.” Gruff and confident, rough and ever-so-slightly condescending,
Palle still possesses a former sailor’s stocky frame and taste in furniture. But he also has deep
insight into humanity, a meticulous eye, and the oral skills to entrancingly describe what he has
spent a lifetime observing. There are not many people like Palle Abramsson on Ærø, and his type is
rare everywhere in the world. Whereas others let the past slip away into history, Palle holds it close
to heart with neither romance nor disdain.
As Palle speaks about old belief, it becomes clear that, in Skovby at least, the past is not all that
distant:
It’s logical that we can’t understand why people believed what they did, now that we’re sitting
here today with lights everywhere, but if you think about the old days, because poverty was so
common, not everyone could even afford tallow candles. From my childhood, back in the early
1950s, I remember that there were a lot poor, elderly people here in town. We had a tradition
from the old days that each farm felt itself responsible for particular places, so that when you
slaughtered the livestock, you’d go over and give them some meat. Or if you made soup, well
then, they got soup. I remember that I’ve been down with meat to an old lady. Where the bus
stop is, there was a little, yellow house. Her name was Maren Albertsen, and she had such thick
legs. Her hands were thick and blue. It was the same with a lot of people here: Thick and blue
fingers because they didn’t have any heat, couldn’t afford heat. And then, they walked on these
cold, brick floors. The houses were very low and damp. A woman named Anne Byks lived right
near here on Parsley Street, and she was a weaver, and her floors were like that. The house was
built in such a low and damp place that, during the winter, there was ice on the floor. Where I
lived, we always had to deliver something to her. The farm owner, Albert Jensen, he had some
particular houses here. It was like that up until… Well, for example, the last big farm – it was
named Skovtofte Gård – was owned by Karen, who’s now in the nursing home. Just across the
street from there lived an old lady, and Karen – this must be back in 1980 – would go over to
her with soup and the like when she made soup, right? But eventually, that tradition disappeared
as well.
These conditions, Palle feels, helped to incubate folklore. Like most historians I have spoken with,
Palle has never given much thought to belief in the supernatural. The historians’ professional
mantra seems to be, “I’m interested in facts.” If not for Palle’s having worked so much on
Hübertz’s text, he would probably know little more about past belief than the average local
historian. As he sees it:
When we talk about folk belief, then it’s a relative concept, right? Because those stories that
Hübertz has, and those stories that people tell over here, well, people told them in Jutland and
Zealand [Other parts of Denmark.] too. But we can say that they’re synonymous with Hans
Christian Andersen and, especially, Grimms’ folktales. They’re the past’s goodnight stories for
children and so on. I don’t think that you can label all of these stories “folk belief”. They aren’t
that. They’re good stories that someone’s made up and that are repeated all over the place, you
know?
While there is some truth in this, the opinion as a whole is not borne out by the facts, facts that go
unanalysed because they regard presumably non-factual events. The quality of being widespread is
hardly evidence of a story’s having been viewed as fiction.
In order to comprehend the nature of folk belief, it is first necessary to differentiate between the
varying categories of stories told about supernatural beings. On a basic level, these can be broken
up into five broad categories: Myths, legends, folktales, fairy tales, and fantasy. Folklorists will find
neither these categories nor their definitions unassailable, yet with non-folklorist readers in mind, a
simplified system is preferable.
When we use the word myth today, we usually mean an old story from a dead, or at least exotic,
religion. There is general agreement that the religions of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Norsemen,
and Irish can be called mythologies, but this system of labelling is dubious. A mere mythology to
one culture may be a living religion to the next. Is Greek mythology still mythology now that there
is resurgent belief in it? To many in the West, the stories of Hindu holy texts appear more akin to
mythology than religion. In Denmark, where the state Lutheranism is only weakly doctrinal and
holds little direct sway over the populace, the stories of the Old Testament are called myths far
more frequently than they are in the United States, a country stronger both in Christian
conservatism and Jewish influence. Similarly, most Protestants have no qualms about calling the
miraculous lives of the Catholic saints mythological even though some modern day Catholics are
prone to disagree. The age of a story and the vitality of the religion of which it forms a part are
inconsequential: A myth is simply a story that forms a part of a religious system. Without making
judgements as to factual accuracy, we can state that there is no real genre difference between, say, a
story concerning the miraculous birth of Zeus and one concerning the miraculous birth of Jesus.
A legend, meanwhile, is a story that, like a myth, is presumed to be historically accurate yet,
unlike a myth, is not cosmological but merely of local significance. When fairies scare milkmaids
on Grydehøj, there is no need for people in Copenhagen to take notice. When a mermaid foretells
the future of the Danish royal line, even the most interested of parties will agree the event’s
importance declines the farther one moves away from Denmark in both space and time. On the
other hand, when God creates the universe, it is a matter of far wider concern. There is no
implication of falsehood attached to a legend;4 a legend is just a story of an event deemed
noteworthy by its narrator. When someone tells you a perfectly true story about the awful storm that
blew the roof off of the barn this past winter, she is relaying a legend.
This definition is extremely simplified, and since legendary material forms the basis of much of
the present work, it should be mentioned in which major ways the definition is problematic. For one
thing, some of the stories that we are here labelling as legends – for example, Medieval ballads and
Hübertz’s account of milkmaids – fail to meet strict genre criteria. The important point, however, is
that when we call something a legend here, we do so to identify it as a carrier of legendary material.
This also ties into a second criticism that can, with good reason, be advanced against so simplified a
definition: Individual legends are not always believed to be true by either the teller or the audience. 5
Nevertheless, if we accept, for our purposes, that a legend is merely a story that relates presumablyhistorical subject matter of non-universal interest, then a particular individual’s belief or disbelief in
a particular legend is largely irrelevant. It is also worth pointing out that many legends deal with
events of regional, national, or even international significance, yet since, on a universal scale, all of
these are still but varying degrees of locality, we have little difficulty distinguishing such a legend
from a myth. Legends are encountered in a variety of sources prior to the 1800s, but the Romantic
period brought with it the golden age of folk belief research, and an untold number of more or less
scholarly collections of legends were printed in the period from the mid-19th Century until the
1930s. From here on, the words folklore and folk belief will generally be used to refer to legendary
as opposed to mythological or fictional material.
Nearly all supernatural beings that occur in myths also occur in legends although the opposite is
not always true. In the 1800s, many folklorists and comparative religionists saw legends as
remnants of dead religions, as decayed myths. Thus, if information was lacking about the dwarves
of ancient German mythology, the dwarves of contemporary German folk belief would be studied
to fill in the gaps. There are a number of problems with this viewpoint. For one thing, if we accept
this theory, we are at a loss to explain the legendary material that has survived from the days when
the mythology in question was still alive. It is true that giants are elements of both Norse mythology
and later Nordic folk belief, but there is an abundance of non-mythological texts referring to the
time during which the mythology was prevalent that also concern giants. Furthermore, not only are
the giants of Old Norse legend not quite like the giants of later legend, they also differ radically
from contemporary mythological giants. Only rarely do the Old Norse legendary giants resemble
the wise, almost godly beings that appear in Old Norse myth.
It is probably safe to assume that mythological beings do not differ essentially from those of
contemporary legend but are, rather, exceptional cases of their kind. Prodigious humans like the
Biblical Moses and Abraham abound in mythology, and we scarcely if ever question their
humanity. Nonetheless, humans who play major mythological roles are rarely anything less than
super-human. Why, then, should we hold elves and giants to a higher standard of classification?
The very fact of a character – human or otherwise – being present in a myth shows that she is an
abnormal specimen of her kind. Myths tell much about the way people think or thought but can
only act as supplementary material in explaining people’s daily lives.
Whereas legends are localized stories assumed by their narrators and audiences to be true on at
least some level, folktales are a form of orally-transmitted fiction. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White,
Jack the Giant-Slayer, and Tom Thumb are all famous folktales (though it must be noted that they
are famous today as fairy tales, in the form of particular, highly-literary texts such as those written
by Charles Perrault) that include supernatural beings. The fairies, dwarves, and giants in these
stories all differ considerably from those of legend, but as in myths, the humans of folktales are
hardly the humans of legends or every-day life either. Because folktales are works of fancy, it
should not surprise us if their characters are equally fantastic. We can be sure that many of the
people who, hundreds of years ago, told the story of Snow White believed in supernatural dwarves
and that the dwarves they believed in resemble the dwarves in the folktales just about as much as
the typical servant girl resembles Snow White herself. It is important to note here that ballads, from
which we shall learn much later, are not confined to any one genre and can carry legendary
material, universal truths, or take the form of folktales, all depending on their various contents.
Fairy tales are translations of the folktale tradition into written form. Unlike oral literature,
published texts are not easily altered over time, and writers like Hans Christian Andersen were
conscious that they were creating new stories in tradition’s narrative vein. Although most of
Andersen’s plots were truly of his own invention unlike, say, those polished by Perrault, they
nevertheless build on the tradition of the oral folktale. The witches, ghost dogs, and mermaids in
Andersen’s fairy tales have about the same relation to objects of actual belief as do beings in
folktales.
Few people would take Beatrix Potter’s fairy tales as proof that people in the early 1900s
believed that rabbits talked and hedgehogs did the laundry, but this is precisely what we do when
we accept fairy tales’ descriptions of supernatural beings at face value. The reason why we do not
think that real hedgehogs ever ironed stockings is that we all have prior knowledge of hedgehogs.
We have seen them in our gardens, at the zoo, or on television, and from experience, we know that
if they do drink tea and chat by the fireside, they hide the fact remarkably well. Fairies, on the other
hand, are things that most people only know about from fictional sources. In today’s world, it takes
special research – such as reading a book like this one – to learn about actual belief in fairies.
In 1836, Hans Christian Andersen would have expected his readership to be familiar with the
traditional concept of a mermaid prior to reading The Little Mermaid. Some readers would have
believed in mermaids and some would have thought the whole thing a load of nonsense, but at the
very least, mermaids were a component of living Danish culture. What about the child who reads a
redaction of The Little Mermaid today? It is quite likely that the child has some prior impression of
what a mermaid is, but this concept will usually be based on Disney’s adaptation of The Little
Mermaid or other progeny of Andersen’s original story. It is impossible to understand The Little
Mermaid as Andersen intended without first understanding the folkloric mermaid. Attempting to do
so is the equivalent of reading Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit without ever having heard of any rabbit
besides Bugs Bunny. To a lesser degree, this same decontextualization occurs in the realm of
nature; both roadrunners and Tasmanian devils exist in the real world, but since these creatures are
so little known outside of their natural habitats, it is difficult for many people to think of either of
them without first thinking of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters, which are, clearly, but
imperfect tools for understanding the animals found in nature.
The Icelandic Romances of the 13th century are, essentially, early fantasy novels. Although
written long after Iceland’s Christianisation, they depict giants – then objects of living folk belief –
in both legendary and mythological form. When it is necessary for a hero to fight a monster, the
antagonist is usually a savage giant from legend, but when the time comes for a hero to visit a
foreign kingdom, this land may well be ruled by the civilized, regal giants we find in myth. All is
dependent on the demands of the plot. Thorstein Mansion-Might, for example, is full of such
contrasts. In this saga, Thorstein 1) in a way familiar to legends from the 1800s, accompanies an
unwitting fairy to a feast, 2) kills a mythologically-sized eagle that has stolen the son of a legendary
dwarf, and 3) interferes in a war between two royal families of mythological giants.6
The situation gets less complex when we consider modern fantasy literature, film, and art.
While there are exceptions, many creators of modern fantasy have received their concepts of
folkloric beings solely from fairy tales and other fantasy writers. The prior knowledge they expect
of their audiences is fictional from the start, and they themselves may not understand supernatural
beings as objects of genuine belief. This does not mean that such fiction is of poor literary value,
just that it does not help people understand history. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,
Disney’s Peter Pan, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Terry Pratchet’s Disc World books all
belong to this genre. Key to the development of today’s fantasy is a long tradition of fantastic
literature and art from the Early Modern period (for our purposes, the Early Modern period is
approximately 1450-1700 in Great Britain and approximately 1500-1700 in Scandinavia) onwards,
the best-known example of which is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
By means of comparison between historical and present-day sources of information about folk
belief, we can learn what people thought and think about supernatural beings. It is more difficult to
explain how belief in fairies arose. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, an early 20th century folklorist, argues that
the problem with most theories of fairy origin is that they only explain part of the story, and the
least interesting part at that. For example, despite being the most popular conception among
academics and amateurs alike, there are serious flaws to the naturalistic theory of origin, a theory
that holds that supernatural beliefs – from fairy legends to entire mythologies – are attempts on the
part of believers to explain natural phenomena.
For the sake of analysis, we can look at the will-o’-the-wisp, a functionally-simple type of fairy
that was also the object of widespread belief. This being’s only characteristic is that, by appearing
as a light in the distance, it leads astray people who walk in the bogs at night. The person tricked by
the will-o’-the-wisp either becomes lost or finds himself waist-deep in bog water. In interpreting
this belief, modern science comes to our assistance, and it is now widely held that will-o’-the-wisp
experiences are, in fact, sightings of self-igniting marsh gas. Now, even if the universal application
of this explanation did not seem suspect, the question would remain: Why, when seeing selfigniting marsh gas, did people across Northern Europe once believe that they were seeing a type of
fairy? Why not a giant, bioluminescent insect instead? Why not a lantern-carrying prankster? The
naturalistic theory of fairy origin can help us understand why people experienced strange things but
not why these experiences were almost uniformly attributed to fairies. As Evans-Wentz says:
The fundamental fact seems clearly to be that there must have been in the minds of prehistoric
men, as there is now in the minds of modern men, a germ idea of a fairy for environment to act
upon and shape. Without an object to act upon, environment can accomplish nothing. This is
evident. The Naturalistic Theory examines only the environment and its effects, and forgets
altogether the germ idea of a fairy to be acted upon.7
Although, as we shall see, many theories of fairy origin are naturalistic at heart, Evans-Wentz’s
criticism also applies to the various other theories, including the psychoanalytic one. Perhaps,
fairies are merely results of repressed sexuality, but if so, why are they essentially the same
wherever you go? This question is usually answered with some variation of the so-called migratory
theory, which holds that a belief originates in a single place and spreads out from there by word of
mouth or in writing. Unfortunately, the migratory theory entered into legend scholarship by way of
folktale scholarship. Indeed, the theory is on considerably firmer ground when it concerns folk
literature than when it concerns folk belief. Whereas a folktale produced for entertainment may be
brought from place to place simply on account of its being a good story, a believed-in supernatural
legend has a number of further prerequisites to being culturally transmitted to new communities: It
must be relocated to a place where there is 1) a similar, pre-existing folk belief and 2) a population
sufficiently gullible to accept the story’s local historical reality. The migratory theory, when applied
to supernatural legends, goes something like this: Someone, somewhere gets it into his head that
fairies are to blame for, say, dead cattle, and then this explanation spreads, carried from place to
place and accepted by far-flung, credulous populaces.
If this sounds glib, it is only a reflection of the glibness of some of the migratory theory’s basic
assumptions when it comes to legends. The rationale of the migratory theory is to use textual
analysis to locate the origins of legendary material. Ideally, the theory can accomplish this up to a
point, stating that a particular legend’s collection of motifs can be traced back to such and such a
place at no later than such and such a date. Often, however, this analysis of text origins is confused
with an analysis of belief origins. We shall have more to say concerning naturalistic,
psychoanalytic, and migratory theories later, but let it suffice at the moment to note that they all
have limitations.
Part of what makes historical supernatural folklore appear so ripe for wide-ranging theorization
is that, within Europe in general and Northern Europe in particular, it proved resilient to localization
and, thus, would seem to tell us something universal about the human condition. The pagan
religions of Scandinavia and the British Isles were by no means identical, and Britain was
substantially Christianized at the very least 600 years before the first of the Scandinavian nations
converted. Notwithstanding this, already in the earliest ages from which we have documentary
evidence of folk belief, the Nordic, English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish folklores are astonishingly
similar.8 Wherever geographical conditions made it possible for people to believe in the same
supernatural beings, people did so. The relatively-early conversion of the British Isles to
Christianity brought with it literacy, and whereas we have no lengthy texts from Scandinavia
written prior to the year 1000 CE, there exist a wide range of British works, both in Latin and Old
English, from this period. For example, the Venerable Bede’s 731 Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum; Historia Britonum, from circa 820; and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, from circa 8901154 include scattered references to supernatural folklore. It is not, however, until the early
centuries of the second millennium that we see a number of texts from the British Isles that devote a
great deal of space to folk belief.
The descriptive/historical writings of William of Newburgh, Walter Map, Gerald of Wales,
Gervase of Tilbury, and others record contemporary legends as entertaining curiosities and marvels,
and it is noteworthy that these authors are believers themselves. Although the coming centuries
would, in both Britain and Scandinavia, produce an outpouring of fiction dealing with folk belief
either directly (for example, the Arthurian and Icelandic Romances) or allusively (for example,
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Icelandic family sagas), the question of determining folkloric
authenticity in books that make no claim to factual accuracy is a vexing one. For this reason, the
descriptive works of the writers mentioned above are indispensable to understanding popular folk
belief in the Middle Ages. This fact makes it all the more unfortunate that – besides the mid-13th
Century Norwegian The King’s Mirror – we have no comparable Nordic works before Olaus
Magnus (a Catholic archbishop-in-exile after the Swedish Reformation) wrote his Description of
the Northern Peoples in 1555.
Folk belief is not static throughout the period for which we possess written evidence, but neither
does it change as much as one might expect, especially considering the switches in popular religion
that occurred at the time. The British Medieval descriptive works recount many types of legends
that remain substantially unchanged over the following 700 or so years, effectively disproving the
popular idea that belief in supernatural beings is a steadily-decreasing throwback to heathendom.
Also, as we have seen, supernatural legendary beings are concurrent with mythology and, thus, not
a product of it. It seems, rather, as if mythology was built with elements of pre-existing folk belief.
This is interesting because it is commonly thought that even if folklore cannot simply be viewed as
decayed myth, folkloric beings are still vestiges of pre-Christian religion.9
This argument is, however, an uninformed one and seems created, perhaps unconsciously, in
defence of Christianity. Although fairies play a role in Nordic mythology but do not do so in the
Bible, the Bible says nothing in particular against belief in fairies. This is hardly surprising since the
folklore of the Middle East in Biblical times is not synonymous with that in England a thousand
years later. The Bible makes as little mention of glaciers and moose as it does of fairies. What the
Bible does offer are mentions of other supernatural beings from regional folklore, and Medieval and
Early Modern Christian scholars cite these references by rote in their discussions of contemporary
folklore. Although we do not know when the Northern European folklore system first arose, the
time span for which we have evidence is almost entirely Christian. Nor was this belief confined to
the common folk. The most doctrinaire of clergymen saw supernatural beings as devils, and devils
were, until recently, as essential to Christian theology as God.
Throughout Northern Europe, supernatural beings were frequently connected with – some might
say confused with – the dead.10 Both ghosts and fairies sometimes do the same things and live in the
same places, so much so, in fact, that many accounts of fairy and ghost activity would be
thoroughly ambiguous if the narrator did not specify the type of being involved. Today, as we shall
see, belief in ghosts is considerably more widespread than belief in any other of our ancestors’
supernatural beings, but from a Protestant point of view, the case ought to be the reverse. The
Reformation brought Christianity not just a new accessibility but also a new theology, and the early
Protestants were eager to differentiate their own churches from that in Rome. One of
Protestantism’s major theological revolutions was the abolishment of Purgatory. For the Puritans
and other doctrinal Protestants, ghosts were a religious impossibility because “there was no middle
place between heaven and hell, and the wicked were confined to hell, while the blessed had no
desire to leave heaven.”11 If fairies could not be ghosts and certainly were not angels of light, the
only religiously-compatible explanation for their existence was that they were devils.
Naturally, disbelief in ghosts does not prove belief in fairies. Still, beginning in the late 1600s,
when atheism made its first major appearance in England, many prominent churchmen were
adamant about the existence of supernatural beings because their non-existence would question the
very status of God. One of the great tasks for scientists of the age was the proving of natural laws in
order to show that experiences with fairies, witches, telepathy, and so on were, indeed, unnatural
and miraculous, were proof of the Lord. That these supernatural experiences were often the result of
an evil agent could only strengthen Christian faith.
Up until just a few centuries ago, many Christian scholars viewed even competing religious
beliefs as basically factual, and the heathen gods were merely disguised devils sent by Satan to lead
men into sin. Thus, we have Old Norse stories of Christ fighting and defeating Thor and of
countless tests of God’s might relative to that of the old deities. Missionaries in the Middle Ages
spent so much energy destroying sacred groves and temples holy to heathen gods not because these
sites encouraged false worship but because they empowered the gods themselves. In John Milton’s
1667 Paradise Lost, the devils who fall from heaven with Satan take their names from ancient
Middle Eastern gods, and many writers of the period list Classical gods, Biblical devils, and English
folkloric beings alongside one another. If anything, Early Modern Protestants had more concrete
views on supernatural beings than Catholics: Whereas these creatures were always bound to be
something of a mystery to Catholics, firm Protestants knew exactly what they were.
Present-day Danes tend to view belief in the supernatural as a thing of the past, as having died
out just after the Reformation. The idea that belief in the supernatural belonged to the previous
religious culture is not new. Within folklore itself, the vanishing of the fairies finds form in a
widespread legend of entire fairy communities packing up and leaving a region, either because they
cannot abide the ringing of church bells or because their human neighbours have offended them.
Writers on fairy belief have also tended to see it as deceased: Near the end of the 14th Century,
Geoffrey Chaucer appears to tell us that fairies are no longer seen and attributes this disappearance
to the coming of Catholicism.12 In the mid-16th Century, the Englishman, Reginald Scot, places
belief in a certain type of fairy in the recent past.13 In 1774, Finnus Joannæus of Iceland concludes a
description of local fairy tradition with, “As this superstitious belief is extremely ancient, so it long
continued in full vigour, and was held by some even within the memory of our fathers.”14 Little
would Finnus have suspected that many Icelanders would believe in traditional fairies even today.
Finally, the eminent folklorist, Katherine Briggs, commenting on the premature announcement of
belief’s demise, expresses doubt over the survival of belief so sublimely as to demand quotation:
In the same way our country habits have changed into urban ones; and the fairies, who
descended perhaps from gods older than those the Druids worshipped, who were so long
lamented as lost and so slow to go, have gone, now and for ever. They may not have cared for
church bells, but they liked factory horns and street lights even less; so that now the most
curious of studies is that of our own native tales.15
Briggs may be correct, but we would do well to make note of the words of that great fairyenthusiast, W.B. Yeats, who said of a pronouncement that resembled the above, “I know that this is
the common belief of folklorists, but I do not feel certain that it is altogether true. Much, no doubt,
will perish— perhaps the whole tribe of folk-tales proper; but the faery and ghost kingdom is more
stubborn than men dream of. It will perhaps be always going and never gone.”16
Still, those who would go out in Denmark today searching for scraps of old fairy belief would
expend much effort to little result. In this country, the line of fairy faith that stretched across
perhaps a millennia and a half has, apparently, been snapped. Over the last century, urbanization
and industrialization have wrought upon Europe a degree of social change for which the Black
Death is our closest historical parallel. The Skovby of Palle Abramsson’s childhood was not all that
different from a Danish village a thousand years ago. Within the course of half a century, that way
of life – squalid and close to nature, harsh and romantic – has probably left Northern Europe for
good. In 1950, Palle was in Skovby as a visitor from Copenhagen, from another world. Now, that
new world has erased the old world’s essence. For better or worse, the age of widespread fairy faith
is over.
Faith, however, is eternal.
Chapter 3: The First Fairies
When the physician, J.R. Hübertz, wrote his Description of Ærø in 1834, he had no idea how much
trouble he would be causing me 170 years down the line. From a folkloric viewpoint, Hübertz’s
book is the ultimate mixed blessing. On the one hand, within the scanty eight pages that the work
devotes to folklore of the supernatural, one finds a wealth of local tradition recorded by a
sympathetic nonbeliever. On the other hand, it is sometimes preferable to have no historical primary
sources than to have only one.
Just as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid has forever changed the face of
mermaiddom, Hübertz has posthumously achieved a monopoly on local folklore. There cannot be
many people alive today who have read the doctor’s book from end to end, but in the 1970s and
1980s, Hübertz acquired an ally in the form of the industrious local historian, Tove Kjærboe. In
scores of popularly-written books and articles, Kjærboe spread knowledge of Ærø’s history, and
because she was, like most local historians, a sort of jack-of-all-trades, this history ranged from
descriptions of local woodwork to biographies of famous residents – and, sometimes, these
residents’ horses – to the role of women on sailing vessels. Folklore of the supernatural is
represented as well. Hübertz was even less of a specialized folklorist than Kjærboe, but he, at least,
had the benefit of living in a time when belief in fairies still existed on something approaching a
broad scale. It seems that, for all her ambition, Kjærboe rarely, if ever, undertook folkloric
fieldwork herself, and even though Hübertz is only occasionally mentioned in her retellings of
Ærø’s legends, it is clear that the physician is usually her sole source.
As informative as Kjærboe’s work in other fields may be, her folklore is little more than a
modernized, somewhat chatty revision of Hübertz. Where Kjærboe does present new information,
its value is compromised by a lack of citations. For example, when Kjærboe tells an otherwiseundocumented story of a giant serpent that torments the people of Rise, we are left to guess as to
where she received her information.17 The difference between evidence obtained from a 100-yearold letter and that from present-day oral testimony is significant because the latter almost certainly
discounts the possibility of belief on the part of the storyteller. Furthermore, even when Kjærboe
appears to be merely channelling Hübertz, her amateurism is often tangible, and her interpretations
of the old tales show no more expertise than could be garnered from reading a couple of popular
collections of British fairy folklore. Whatever their faults, Kjærboe’s books were widely read
locally when they were published, and it is from these sources that most modern-day knowledge of
Ærøese folklore stems. The dominance of Hübertz/Kjærboe is such that interviews with the today’s
Ærøese very rarely yield historical legends not contained in Description of Ærø, a fact that is
particularly glaring in conversations with residents of East Ærø, a region from which Hübertz, who
lived in Ærøskøbing, offers no legends.
Hübertz himself was hardly satisfied with his folkloric work. He begins his chapter on legends
with the following:
Although the Ærøese are as little given to poetic sentiments as they are to a flair for music,
every once in a while, someone dares to reluctantly speak about those products of the soul that,
so far as I am aware, do not lend themselves to frequent expression. However, one can find a
number of old, very pretty legends, but it is difficult to bring anything of that sort out of the
reserved Ærøese. Whether in this case this reluctance lies in suspicion of the questioner or
contempt for these old stories, I cannot say for certain. I am convinced that the majority of the
Ærøese possess too healthy an intelligence and have too much peace of mind – even too little
fantasy – to set the smallest amount of faith in stories about fairies and the like. What, therefore,
I am able to deliver, I have had to laboriously collect from around the island.18
What is most remarkable here is that, already by the 1830s, Hübertz judges actual belief in the
supernatural to be decidedly uncommon on Ærø. This is a surprisingly-early date for disappearance
of belief in Denmark. During this same time, J.M. Thiele found fertile belief across the country, and
it was not until 50 years later that the greatest of the Danish legend-collectors, Evald Tang
Kristensen, began his monumental collecting of traditions. It may be that although belief was still
prevalent, people were unwilling to reveal it to an outsider, a possibility Hübertz acknowledges.
This reserve is particularly likely in the case of supernatural folklore since speaking about fairies
might not only leave one open to mockery but also, traditionally, could put one at risk of angering
the fairies themselves.
When Kjærboe takes up the same question as to why one finds so few legends on Ærø, she
paraphrases Hübertz (again, without referencing him) but makes a telling omission:
Ærø is very poor in legends and visions, and this might be connected with the Ærøese’s nature.
He is reserved about everything, possesses a calmness approaching stoicism, is not encumbered
by all that much fantasy, can maybe alter a good story, but he does not fabulate.19
When Hübertz mentions the Ærøese’s lack of fantasy, he does so in order to say that the people are
not generally prone to superstition. When Kjærboe repeats the statement, she implies that those who
tell legends do not believe in them. She thus shifts the legends completely into the artistic realm
even though Hübertz’s point is simply that lack of artistry and a sense of sound reason are somehow
related to one another. Unfortunately, the anachronistic idea that legends about fairies are nothing
more than fabulous “goodnight stories”20 of the past is all too common among historians who treat
folklore as a peripheral subject.
If it is our intention to discover the nature of the beings who were said to live around the
Grydehøj burial mound, we will be hard-pressed to draw any definite conclusions about it from
Hübertz, which is understandable since Hübertz would have expected his own audience to be
familiar with such beliefs beforehand. It would, for example, never have occurred to him that, one
day, his passages about fairies would be interpreted with an image of Tinkerbell in mind. For this
reason, our examination of Ærøese fairy belief will take us farther afield.
Discussion of legendary supernatural beings presents certain difficulties when it is done on a
multi-national and multi-lingual scale. It is not simply that different languages have different names
for the same concepts; the folkloric vocabularies of English and Danish are deficient in exactly
opposite ends of the terminological spectrum. If one ignores the flower-fairy-type imagery to which
most Westerners today have become accustomed and thinks only of traditional belief, talk of fairies
is not as clear-cut as one might expect. Without getting into fairy’s complex and somewhat opaque
etymological history, the term can, today, stand for two different, traditional concepts. It can either
be 1) a general word for a supernatural being that is neither a ghost, a witless monster, nor an angel
or devil; or it can 2) refer to a specific type of supernatural being, namely the social, humanoid
beings said by Hübertz to inhabit Grydehøj. Unfortunately, English provides no good synonym for
this latter meaning that might differentiate it from the former, and the various local names – like the
Irish Túatha Dé Danann, the Welsh Tylwyth Têg, and the Northern Isles trows – are too
geographically and thematically limited for our purposes. Danish, on the other hand, provides a
wealth of appropriate names for groups of these social beings (for example, elvere, elverfolk,
ellefolk, bjergfolk, højfolk, and højsknegte, none of which are exclusively regional) but possesses no
word that covers the entirety of the first definition of fairy. Since this book is written in English, it
would be more than a bit strange to call the beings that fall under the second definition by a Danish
name, especially as we will often be dealing with folklore from the British Isles. For this reason, the
various Danish names will generally be translated as fairy without comment. For the sake of
simplicity, whenever it is necessary to establish which definition of fairy is being used, we will
refer to a specific being as either a social fairy (that is, a fairy of the second definition) or a solitary
fairy (that is, an asocial fairy; any fairy that is not a social fairy).
The beings contained within the first, general definition of fairy can be split into four groups,
listed here in no particular order.21 Although not all of the beings mentioned will be familiar to the
casual reader, they will all be examined in turn later in this book:
1) Land-based social fairies and aquatic fairies, such as the seal-folk, that live the lifestyle of
land-based social fairies.
2) Solitary water spirits such as most mermaids and some of the more nuanced kelpies.
3) Brownies, boggarts, and all other goblins, whatever their personalities.
4) Self-aware monsters or non-humanoid beings such as black dogs, church grims, some giants
and kelpies, and various singular, local fairies.
The fourth category is less difficult than it at first appears. Although many of the monsters that we
call fairies are quite stupid or, at least, incapable of holding an intelligent conversation, they are
conscious of their actions and not driven by mere animal urges. This is in contrast to monsters like
sea serpents or worms (the Northern European legendary dragon) that just stake claim to a territory
like any wild beast or simply roam about, eating things.
Social fairies are the beings upon which much of European folklore is based and, as a result,
they serve as a useful point of comparison when looking at other varieties of supernatural beings.
Difficult though it may be, a true understanding of historical belief in fairies cannot be achieved
unless Tinkerbell is wholly overcome. Forget the tininess, the wings, the beauty, the sense of
humour, the magic dust: None of these are necessarily attributes of the fairies in which our
ancestors believed. To the fairies of tradition, a delicate flower is usually of less worth than an
elderberry bush. If a traditional fairy finds a small boy who has become lost in the woods, the fairy
is as likely to kidnap or kill him as to bring him home to his parents.
Across Northern Europe, social fairies take on a wide variety of physical forms. Some are as
large as or larger than humans, some slightly smaller than humans, some about a meter tall, and
some are quite tiny. Furthermore, they range from sublimely beautiful to exceedingly ugly, and
their level of intelligence can be placed either below or above that of humans. It would, however, be
a mistake to assume that each region is home to its own kind of fairy although some scholars22
argue this even today. Most localities possess legends representing a number of different social
fairy societies, and even as small a place as Ærø hosts at least three variants23. Today, now that
fairies have become the stuff of films and illustrated children’s literature, this physicallyheterogeneous group is often broken up into concrete races so that, for example, the Danish trolde
(small and ugly) and ellefolk (frequently human-sized and beautiful) have come to be seen as
completely separate types of beings. In the 19th Century, many folklorists seem to have been
confused by the variety of Nordic words for fairy, and even more recently, scholars who lack a firm
grasp on the subject sometimes follow their predecessors, even when their own evidence points to
the contrary. Regardless of their varying appearances, Northern European social fairies all act more
or less the same and play the same roles. Because of this, the division of social fairies on a
physiological basis seems unwise.
Social fairies were typically believed to live communally below the earth, often in caves, burial
mounds, or ancient fortifications (hence, for example, the Danish hill-folk [højfolk] and the
subterraneans [de underjordiske]). Legends do not usually tell of familial relationships between the
male and female fairies, partly, we might guess, because such relationships were not the primary
concern of humans who chanced to witness fairies. This is also, perhaps, influenced by the fact that,
for each legend that treats fairies as a class of beings living lives roughly parallel to those of men,
there is a legend that views them as quite outside human existence, as something ghostly or nearly
immortal. Although the number of distinct, local stories told about social fairies closes in on
innumerability, tradition provides a strong set of internationally-represented legends that hold the
great appeal of being nearly identical throughout Europe. We will explore the nature of these beings
of folk belief by drawing parallels between the fairies who appear in Medieval texts and those
written about by Hübertz. At a later stage, we will consider the evolution of post-Medieval fairy
belief.
Among the earliest undeniable, non-fiction documentation we have of Northern European belief
in fairies comes from Lacnunga and Bald’s Leechbook, a pair of Anglo-Saxon medical texts
designed for practical use. These books were compiled in the 10th and 11th Centuries respectively
and are collections of remedies for a variety of physical and spiritual ailments, including attacks by
elves. The majority of these cures combine the mixing of herbs with Christian prayer, and we will
be well-served by looking at a few examples of the so-called elf charms.24 The best-known of these
is For a Sudden Stitch [With færstice], a primarily performative ritual that is protective against,
among other things, elf-shot [ylfa gescot]. From later texts and from oral testimony being collected
even today, we learn that elf-shot is a form of crippling caused by fairies.25 Another word for this
phenomenon is elf-stroke, and although the condition is now attributed to natural agents, stroke has
been retained within the medical vocabulary to describe the results of a lack of oxygen to the brain.
Elf later took on a more limited meaning, but its Old English equivalents are derived from the
same source as the Old Norse alf, and for lack of much evidence in either direction, we should
probably assume the various related words to be roughly-equivalent concepts. Due to Scandinavia’s
late Christianisation and, consequently, late development of a written culture, these Old Norse
fairies are, despite their potentially equal or greater age, not documented by native sources until
centuries after their etymological descendants first made their way onto English parchment.
Throughout our study of the history of fairy folklore, we will find Scandinavia following hundreds
of years behind the British Isles, not necessarily because the Nordic peoples were folklorically
backwards but because a paucity of written material from Scandinavia makes it impossible to prove
otherwise.
To what extent the supernatural beings of the Anglo-Saxons – who came to present-day
England from northern Germany and southern Denmark in the 400s CE – were the same as those
believed in by Scandinavians four centuries later is absolutely beyond our knowledge. It is, at the
very least, noteworthy that the Germanic deities described by the 1st Century CE Roman writer,
Tacitus, are quite similar to those described in Icelandic mythological texts a millennium further
down the line. In any case, the dealings between the Norsemen and the Anglo-Saxons prior to the
latter’s settlement in Britain as well as the pre-Christian legends recorded in Iceland’s postConversion sagas make it likely that the Old English fairies took more from the Germanic peoples
than merely a name. It has been convincingly argued that the Old Norse mythological alfs are at
least partly synonymous with the Vanir, a race of Norse gods.26 The context in which elves appear
in the For a Sudden Stitch charm certainly suggests such a conception: Elf-shot is named alongside
Æsir-shot (the Æsir being the other race of Old Norse gods) and a description of warrior women
who resemble valkyries. Partially identifying Anglo-Saxon elves with Nordic gods is not meant to
underplay the significance of the probable existence of fairy-like deities represented in Britain’s
“native” Celtic mythology, and once the Anglo-Saxons had become integrated into British life, it is
implausible that no intermingling of folklores occurred. Most historians debating this point also fail
to take into account that the British and Nordic fairies resemble not only one another but Southern
European, Asian, African, and American supernatural beings as well, and it is far from certain that
all of these shared characteristics came about merely as a result of cultural exchange. Furthermore,
as stated above, it is problematic to draw folkloric conclusions from mythological texts.
Whether or not fairies can be said to be of Continental origin is, ultimately, irrelevant. The
scarcity of very early documentation for belief in either Britain or Scandinavia means that we are
often working with concepts of which we have been primarily informed by books written five or six
centuries later. By this point, distinctions between native Britons and descendants of the AngloSaxons would have been largely erased even assuming that the Norman Conquest had never taken
place. Even memory of the Vikings, who provided a second infusion of Germanic folklore into the
British Isles, would have been on the wane, particularly in England and Wales, by the time our most
important Medieval folkloric documents were written. Because so much folklore concerning fairies
is explicitly Christian, the migratory theory of international legend similarity cannot hold that a
complete, timeless concept of fairies entered into partially-Christian England with the pagan AngloSaxons. It would certainly be rash to assume that the first documented social fairies are identical to
those we find more fully described later.
There is also a further complication: With its references to Germanic deities, For a Sudden
Stitch may appear to be thoroughly pagan in nature, yet it is included in a book of Christian
medicine and concludes with an appeal to the Christian god. Other Anglo-Saxon elf charms help
account for this by showing how elves are interpreted as demons, as servants of Satan, with one
advising that the practitioner should “Work a salve against elfkind [ælfcynne] and nightgoers
[nihtgengan], and the people with whom the Devil has intercourse.” The text continues by listing
fourteen herbs that must be:
Set under the altar, sing over them nine masses; boil in butter and in sheep’s grease, add much
holy salt, strain through a cloth; throw the herbs in running water. If any evil temptation, or an
elf or nightgoers, happen to a man, smear his forehead with this salve, and put on his eyes, and
where his body is sore, and cense him [with incense], and sign [the cross] often. His condition
will soon be better.27
Whatever the religious origins of elves, it is clear that, by the time the above charm was recorded,
they had been thoroughly integrated into English Christian theology. Church ritual empowers the
mixed herbs’ healing properties, and the charm works medicinally against both spiritual and
physical ailments, the latter being represented by sore places on the victim’s body, presumably the
places where elf-stroke – typically believed to be caused by tiny projectiles – struck. Although the
extant Anglo-Saxon elf charms all place elves solidly in the Devil’s camp, few of the texts tell us
how the elves got into this unenviable position. For a Sudden Stitch leads us to see elves as
demonised gods, yet this was not the only explanation. Beowulf, which might have been composed
in the 8th century, is a work of poetic fiction that provides another Anglo-Saxon theory as to the
identity of fairies. Grendel, called “a fiend out of hell,” is said to have had lived “in misery among
the banished monsters, Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned [...] and out of
the curse of his exile there sprang ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove
with God time and again until He gave them their reward.”28 In Beowulf, elves are evidently
folkloric beings and not in the direct service of the Devil. Even though Christian thought of all ages
has allowed for different interpretations of where fairies came from, heathen gods were consistently
considered either to be euhemerised heroes or outright minions of Satan, and the latter possibility is
denied by the contrast between Grendel’s hellish origin and that of the elves.
There would come to be six major, popular theories of fairy origin. When we speak of popular
theories, we mean theories that were not exclusively learned or clerical; there were, certainly, many
churchmen who accepted popular belief. In simplified form and no particular order, these popular
theories go as follows:
1) One day, Eve is at home in Eden with her many, many children. Eve hears God walking up to
the house and is embarrassed about the size of her brood, so she hides half of them just before
God comes in the door. God, being omniscient, asks Eve if these are really all of her children.
Eve answers, “Yes.” God is offended and says, “The other children no longer belong to you and
will live as fairies on the earth and merfolk in the water.”
2) Satan’s revolt against God has been crushed, and the fallen angels are pouring out of Heaven
and into Hell. After a while, Jesus begins to get worried. So many angels were in league with
Satan that Heaven is starting to empty. So, Jesus calls out, “Father! Unless you do something
now, you won’t have any angels left!” God takes action and orders the closing of the gates of
Heaven and Hell, adding that “Whoever’s in is in, and whoever’s out is out.” This leaves a
whole host of angels stuck in the middle between Heaven and Hell. Those who fall to earth
become fairies, and those who fall in the water become merfolk.
3) Satan’s revolt against God has been crushed, and those angels who were in league with him
have been banished to Hell. There are, however, a great many angels who had refused to take
sides by supporting either Satan or God. Since these are neither good enough to remain in
Heaven nor evil enough to go to Hell, they are cast down to the world of man. Those who fall to
earth become fairies, and those who fall in the water become merfolk.
4) Fairies are minions of Satan.
5) Fairies are the descendants of Cain, as in Beowulf.
6) Fairies are the pre-Christian dead who were too good to go to Hell but cannot enter Heaven
on account of being pagans. This is also sometimes the fate of children who die unbaptised.
It is not possible to date all of these theories though, as For a Sudden Stitch and Beowulf show,
some of them must have existed quite early indeed. In popular belief, fairies could be purely evil,
somewhat evil, neutral but unchristian, good but unchristian, or, every so often, good and Christian.
Clearly, there was no consensus as to the fairies’ morality. It is, nevertheless, possible to say that
most people thought that fairies hovered somewhere between good and evil, not on the extremes.
Presumably, even those angels who fell with Satan but did not find their way into Hell have long
been outside the Devil’s control.
Besides these popular ideas, there are a number of theories that, founded as they are on
knowledge of the holy scriptures, would have been beyond the comprehension of the common
folk and the exclusive domain of learned men. Although it seems that many theologians – as
opposed to relatively-uneducated, local priests and pastors – saw fairies as devils, there were
more sympathetic interpretations. One of these theories springs from Jesus himself, who the
Bible quotes as saying, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must
bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.”29 That
this “other fold” should be the fairies would have seemed as likely as any other interpretation
in the days of widespread fairy belief. Competing with the “other fold” theory, in the minds of
sympathetic intellectuals was a theory of which one hears next to nothing today. This
identifies the fairies as the offspring of the Watchers, a group of fallen angels that appear
briefly in the Old Testament:
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were
born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they
took them wives of all which they chose. And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive
with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There
were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the
daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of
old, men of renown.30
Here, the Bible can be interpreted as accounting for fairies as the offspring of a union between
angels and humans. Although these angels were fallen due to their lust, they did not fall as did
severely as did Satan’s proud comrades. Still, the passage from Genesis is terribly vague, and
theologians from the early days of the organized church onwards turned to what would become the
Apocrypha (the non-canonical biblical texts) for an explanation. The apocryphal Old Testament
Book of Enoch provides a more complete description of the same events:
And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto
them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted
after them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of
men and beget us children.” And Semjaza, who was their leader, said unto them: “I fear ye will
not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.” And
they all answered him and said: “Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual
imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.” Then sware they all together and
bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And they were in all two hundred; who
descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount
Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. [...]
[They] took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in
unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments,
and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and
they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions
of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and
devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to
devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the
lawless ones.31
The end result of all this havoc created by the Watchers is God’s cleansing of the Earth via the
Flood. It is worth noting that the Beowulf passage we considered above implicitly contrasts elves
with these giants as it is only the giants who are said to have striven against and been punished by
God. We should, however, be wary of carrying such an analysis too far: After all, the giants in
Beowulf are also said to be descended from Cain, no mention being made of the Watchers.
After the Anglo-Saxon period in England, it is first in the writings of the Icelanders that
Northern European fairies attain more than just allusive mention. It is tempting to see this as proof
that the Icelanders had more belief in and experience with fairies than their contemporaries.
Iceland’s late Christianisation, taking place around year 1000, is remarkable and even more so is the
fact that this conversion was achieved somewhat democratically, yet the entire corpus of Icelandic
writing nevertheless lies well within the island’s Christian period even if many of these works deal
with events in the pre-Christian era. For our purposes, Iceland’s literary age begins with two local
historical chronicles written in the first half of the 12th Century, Landnámabók and Ari
Thorgilsson’s Íslendingabók. It was not until the latter half of the 1100s that what is generally
consider to be “saga-writing” started. The sagas are not a homogeneous group and can, for our
limited purposes, be broken down into four categories: Family sagas (novels or stories about
Icelanders), historical sagas (purportedly-factual historical writings), legendary sagas (either
mythological or based on historical legend), and Romances (fantastic tales). Although all of these
genres can contain supernatural elements, the family sagas are the most interesting for us here
because they contain authors’ representations of daily life in Iceland.
People today frequently have trouble wrestling with the idea that what we now term the
supernatural was, once, quite ordinary. The reason we read so little about fairies in most Medieval
historical writing is that this writing tends to – like historical writing today – focus on great deeds
done by great personages, the kinds of topics in which fairies rarely play a part. It is not that kings
and envoys and explorers lacked belief in the supernatural; at the time, doubting well-attested
accounts of saintly miracles and experiences with fairies placed one among the company of fools,
not the wise. Indeed, naturalistic theories could even be seen as heretical because they contradicted
the statements of the Church fathers.32 The scarcity of medieval documentation is probably a matter
of fairies being something of a domestic concern. Fairies influence fishing, life on the farm, and
night-time travel, all of which are activities in which they hold a personal stake. Fairies are quite
mundane. By contrast, saintly miracles are common enough in the old chronicles precisely because
they are miraculous and are as likely to benefit regents seeking victory in battle as they are to heal
sick children.
With the Icelandic family sagas, we have the first significant body of European prose literature
and the first literature centring on everyday life since the time of the Ancient Romans. The
supernatural events that take place in the sagas are sometimes assumed to be the authors’ conscious
attempts at depicting pre-Christian belief, yet it seems likely that while Icelanders in the 13th
Century may have worshipped a different god than did their forefathers, they held substantially the
same beliefs about fairies. Fairies appear in the sagas much as they do in the folklore collected in
the Britain and Scandinavia in the 1800s. Landnámabók, for example, gives the following
purportedly-true story:
One night Bjorn dreamed that a cliff-giant came and offered him partnership, and that he
accepted the offer. Afterwards a strange billy-goat came to join his herd of goats, and his live-
stock began to multiply so fast that soon he was a wealthy man. After that he was called HafurBjorn [Billy-Goat Bjorn]. People with second sight could see that all the guardian spirits of the
land accompanied Hafur-Bjorn when he attended the Althing [The Icelandic legal assembly.],
and [his brothers] Thorstein and Thord when they went out fishing.33
It is noteworthy here that although Bjorn only has contact with an individual fairy, this individual is
acting as a representative of a fairy community. We furthermore find instances of fairies accepting
sacrifices, giving advice on animal husbandry, and being exorcized from their home by a holy
water-wielding bishop.34 These are simply stories of fairies and men going about their business, the
kinds of stories that would have had little place in courtly historical texts.
As fascinating as the Icelandic and occasional early Danish and Norwegian references to
supernatural beings may be, they are nowhere near as useful to understanding the nature of fairies
as are the contemporary writings originating from England. During the 12th Century, literary
collections of marvels and miracles exploded in popularity as writing for the sake of entertainment
became an acceptable companion to writing for the sake of moral instruction. In 1215, Gervase of
Tilbury states:
To be sure, it is not proper that an emperor’s leisure should be contaminated with the prating
babbling of players; on the contrary, the crude falsehoods of idle tales should be spurned, and
only those which are sanctioned by the authority of age, or confirmed by the authority of
scripture, or attested by daily eye-witness accounts, should be brought to his venerable hearing
in his leisure hours. [...] Now we generally call those things miracles which, being preternatural,
we ascribe to divine power, as when a virgin gives birth, when Lazarus is raised from the dead,
or when diseased limbs are made whole again; while we call those things marvels which are
beyond our comprehension, even though they are natural; in fact the inability to explain why a
thing is so constitutes a marvel.35
The distinction here between miracles and marvels is significant even if Gervase is uncertain in
which category fairies belong. On the one hand, if fairies, in keeping with the tenets of the Church
fathers, were some kind of angelic or demonic phenomenon, their appearance would be miraculous.
If, on the other hand, fairies were just a mysterious race of beings, their actions would be
marvellous. Gervase makes clear his uncertainty on this point, and many of his supernatural stories
are either preceded or followed by a lively and usually inconclusive debate on how they could be
interpreted.
In 1188, Gerald of Wales [Giraldus Cambrensis] accompanied Archbishop Baldwin on a trip
through Wales intended to drum-up support for the Third Crusade, and the writings that resulted
from this journey have proven invaluable to historians in several fields. Most significantly for us,
Gerald’s account includes the earliest extant, detailed description of social fairies, a description that
encompasses their physiology, morals, and way of life. Despite this story’s length, its historic status
makes it worth quoting:
Somewhat before our own time an odd thing happened in these parts. The priest Elidyr always
maintained that it was he who was the person concerned. When he was a young innocent only
twelve years old and busy learning to read, he ran away one day and hid under the hollow bank
of some river or other, for he had had more than enough of the harsh discipline and frequent
blows meted out by his teacher. […] Two days passed and there he still lay hidden, with nothing
at all to eat. Then two tiny men appeared, no bigger than pigmies. “If you will come away with
us,” they said, “we will take you to a land where all is playtime and pleasure.” The boy agreed
to go. He rose to his feet and followed them. They led him first through a dark underground
tunnel and then into a most attractive country, where there were lovely rivers and meadows, and
delightful woodlands and plains. It was rather dark, because the sun did not shine there. The
days were all overcast, as if by clouds, and the nights were pitch-black, for there was no moon
nor stars. The boy was taken to see their king and presented to him, with his court standing
round. They were amazed to see him, and the king stared at him for a long time. Then he
handed him over to his own son, who was still a child. All these men were very tiny, but
beautifully made and well-proportioned. In complexion they were fair, and they wore their hair
long and flowing down over their shoulders like women. They had horses of a size which suited
them, about as big as greyhounds. They never ate meat or fish. They lived on various milk
dishes, made up into junkets flavoured with saffron. They never gave their word, for they hated
lies more than anything they could think of. Whenever they came back from the upper world,
they would speak contemptuously of our own ambitions, infidelities and inconstancies. They
had no wish for public worship, and what they revered and admired, or so it seemed, was the
plain unvarnished truth. The boy used frequently to return to our upper world. Sometimes he
came by the tunnel through which he had gone down, sometimes by another route. At first he
was accompanied, but later on he came by himself. He made himself known only to his mother.
He told her all about the country, the sort of people who lived there and his own relationship
with them. His mother asked him to bring her back a present of gold, a substance which was
extremely common in that country. He stole a golden ball, which he used when he was playing
with the king’s son. He hurried away from the game and carried the ball as fast as he could to
his mother, using the customary route. He reached the door of his father’s house, rushed in and
tripped over the threshold. The little folk were in hot pursuit. As he fell over in the very room
where his mother was sitting, the ball slipped from his hand. Two little men who were at his
heels snatched the ball and ran off with it, showing him every mark of scorn, contempt and
derision. The boy got to his feet, very red in the face with shame at what he had done. As he
recovered his wits he realized that what his mother had asked him to do was very foolish. He set
out back along the road which he usually followed, down the path to the river, but when he
came to where the underground passage had been there was no entry to be found. For nearly a
year he searched the overhanging banks of the river, but he could never find the tunnel again.
The passing of time helps us to forget our problems more surely than arguing rationally
about them can ever hope to do, and our day-to-day preoccupations blunt the edge of our
worries. As the months pass by we think less and less of our troubles. Once the boy had settled
down among his friends and learned to find solace in his mother’s company, he became himself
once more and took up his studies again. In the process of time he became a priest. The years
passed and he became an old man; but whenever David II, Bishop of Saint David’s questioned
him about what had happened, he would burst into tears as he told the story. He still
remembered the language of the little folk and he could repeat quite a number of words which,
as young people do, he had learnt very quickly.
The Bishop told me that these words were very like Greek.36
Gerald concludes his re-telling with a statement to the point that although he cannot credit such a
fantastic tale with belief, he is equally unable to “place a limit on God’s power” by denying that it
could be true. Concerning less elaborate tales, however, his belief is less hesitant, and in this case,
his doubt is based on the particulars, not on the fact of the general occurrence of supernatural
events. There are many places in which the account of Elidyr the priest diverges from the most
common strands of later folk belief, yet nothing in it is absolutely unique. The small size of these
social fairies, their non-Christian but high-minded morality, the rich kingdom beneath the earth: All
of these features are common enough but nevertheless unusual motifs in Northern European fairy
belief. It is curious that the story Elidyr the priest is both the earliest detailed fairy story and the
Medieval fairy story that best matches today’s Disneyfied, popular culture conception of the beings.
Twenty-seven years after Gerald travelled through Wales, Gervase of Tilbury presents what
seems to be another fairy story, which was told to him by Robert, prior of Kenilworth [Prior circa
1160-86.]. In this legend, a swineherd employed by William Peveril [Active in the mid-1100s.],
owner of Peak Castle, loses a pregnant sow. The swineherd searches for it in a cave and comes
upon:
wide open fields; advancing into the countryside, which was cultivated all round, he found
harvesters gathering in ripe crops, and in the midst of the hanging ears of corn he recognized
the sow, which had dropped its litter of several piglets. Then the swineherd, full of
amazement, and delighted at the recovery of his loss, described the events just as they had
occurred to the overseer of the land; he was given back the sow and, after a joyful leavetaking, led away his herd of pigs. The remarkable thing is that, on his return from the
subterranean harvest, he saw the winter cold uninterrupted in our hemisphere. I have
justifiably come to the conclusion that this is undoubtedly to be ascribed to the sun’s absence,
and its presence elsewhere.37
Unlike its predecessor, this legend tells us little about the subterranean race, which is only natural
since the swineherd does not seem to have spent much time in its presence. Like the previous story,
it presents the social fairies as living subterranean lives that parallel our own.
Even in the Medieval sources, descriptions of the fairies’ private lives are relatively rare.
Gervase seems to use the legend of the subterranean kingdom to shed light on three supernatural
manifestations of a more humdrum quality that almost directly precede it in his book: The
appearance on inaccessible mountaintops in Italy and France of fluttering banners, freshly-washed
linen, and laughing women must, to him, have seemed much less mysterious after consideration of
the farmland beneath the Peak.38 The swineherd’s rustic narrative is necessary to understand the
appearances of fairies who everyone – monks, knights, and swineherds alike – come to experience.
Like the commoners themselves, the essentially domestic and agrarian social fairies only
exceptionally have significant relationships with the human nobility but are, nonetheless, sometimes
exposed to the nobility’s view.
In their own ways, the legends of Elidyr and the swineherd are straight-forward enough, yet it is
only somewhat anachronistically that we can label the beings they describe as fairies. Gerald, after
all, calls the beings tiny men and little folk whereas Gervase simply identifies them as harvesters
and the overseer. Still, Gervase, writing in Latin, like all of the other English Medieval chroniclers,
elsewhere mentions fada, the word from which English received both fay (a supernaturally-gifted
but ultimately human sorceress) and fairy. In the 12th and 13th Centuries, fada was still primarily
used in the Romances to mean fay, and only context makes it clear that Gervase is referring to
social fairies:
But here is something we do know, confirmed daily as it is by men who are above all reproach:
we have heard that some men have become the lovers of larvas [Classical spirits.] of this kind,
which they call fays [fadas], and when they have transferred their affections with a view to
marrying other women, they have died before they could enjoy carnal union with their new
partners. And we have seen many men who had renounced the embraces of fays [fadarum] of
this kind, or spoke about them in public, they lost not only their worldly prosperity, but even the
solace of a wretched life.39
Passages like this represent the intersection between the fays of Romance and the fairies of folklore.
Just as Romance’s Sir Launfal must keep his fay’s love a secret,40 the folkloric Herr Oluf is slain by
his former fairy lover for planning to marry a mortal.41 The problem in all this is that the fays of
Romance reveal euhemerisation – the transformation from supernatural to human status – over
time,42 and the question is whether they have been degraded from fairies to mortals or from pagan
gods to mortals. We know from context that Gervase’s fada are fairies and not the fays of Romance,
but when the writer – possibly unwilling to state what he does not know for certain – fails to call
beings like those the swineherd found anything at all, we are forced to guess at his beliefs.
In all of the English descriptive and historical texts of the 12th and 13th Centuries, the experience
of Elidyr as reported by Gerald of Wales stands as the firmest proof for contemporary belief in
subterranean social fairies. Were we not in possession of this story and the masses of later recorded
folklore, we would be unlikely to associate the swineherd’s tale with supernatural beings as
opposed to very odd humans. This is even more relevant when we consider what is now the most
famous of all Medieval fairy legends, that of the Green Children. In a sense, this legend is the
opposite of those of Gerald and Gervase inasmuch as it involves fairies entering the human world
instead of the other way around. Although this legend is first and most lengthily recorded by
William of Newburgh, it is best known from a passage in Ralph of Coggeshall’s 1200 Chronicon
Anglicanum. This is something of a historical accident. The mid-19th Century folklorist, Thomas
Keightley, included in his Fairy Mythology a translation of Ralph’s account. Subsequent reprintings
of Keightley’s work and use of his translation by other authors – especially by the immenselyinfluential Katherine Briggs – have made his the standard version. Much can be blamed on a dearth
of translations in general. Ralph of Coggeshall’s chronicles have never been published in translation
in their entirety, and until 1988, the most recent translation of any sizable portion of William of
Newburgh dated from 1861. William of Newburgh’s account of the legend is preserved in his late
1190s historical chronicle, History of English Affairs [Historia rerum Anglicarum]:
I think that I should not omit mention of a prodigy unprecedented since the world began which
is known to have occurred in England during Stephen’s reign [1135-1154]. I myself had
protracted doubts over this, though it was reported by many, and it seemed to me absurd to
accept as genuine an event whose rational basis was non-existent or mostly obscure. But finally
I was so overwhelmed by the weighty testimony of so many reliable people that I was
compelled to believe and marvel at what I cannot grasp or investigate by any powers of the
mind.
In East Anglia there is a village which is said to lie four or five miles from the famous
monastery of the blessed king and martyr Edmund. Close to the village some very ancient
ditches are visible. In English they are called Wlfpittes or wolf-ditches, and they lend their name
to the village close by. At harvest-time, when the harvesters were busy in the fields gathering
the crops, two children, a boy and a girl, emerged from these ditches. Their entire bodies were
green, and they were wearing clothes of unusual colour and unknown material. As they
wandered bemused over the countryside, they were seized by the reapers and led to the village.
Many people flocked to observe this most unusual sight, and for several days they were kept
without food. So they were now almost fainting with hunger, yet they paid no heed to any food
offered to them. It then chanced that beans were brought in from the fields; they at once grabbed
these, and looked for the beans in the stalks, but when they found nothing in the hollow of the
stalks they wept bitterly. Then one of the bystanders pulled the beans from the pods and offered
them to the children, who at once gleefully took and ate them.
For several months they were nourished by this food until they learned to eat bread. In the
end they gradually lost their own colour when the qualities of our foodstuffs had their effect.
They became like us, and also learned the use of our speech. Persons of prudence decided that
they should receive the sacrament of holy baptism, and this was also administered. But the boy,
who seemed to be younger, lived only a short time after baptism and then died prematurely,
whereas the girl continued unaffected, differing not even in the slightest way from the women
of our own kind. She certainly took a husband later at Lynn, according to the story, and was said
to be still living a few years ago.
Once they had the use of our language, they were asked who they were and where they
came from. They are said to have replied: “We are people from St Martin’s land; he is accorded
special reverence in the country of our birth.” When they were next asked where that land was,
and how they had come from there to Woolpit, they said: “We do not know either of these
things. All we remember is that one day we were pasturing our father’s flocks in the fields,
when we heard a mighty din such as we often hear at St Edmund’s when they say the bells are
ringing out. When we turned our attention to the sound which caused us surprise, it was as
though we were out of our minds, for we suddenly found ourselves among you in the fields
where you were harvesting.” When they were asked whether people believed in Christ there, or
whether the sun rose, they said that it was a Christian country and had churches. “But the sun
does not rise among the natives of our land,” they say, “and it obtains very little light from the
sun’s rays, but is satisfied with that measure of its brightness which in your country precedes its
rising or follows its setting. Moreover a shining land is visible not far from our own, but a very
broad river divides the two.”43
This story is widely touted as an early description of social fairies, and while this is probably
correct, the text itself gives us no reason to believe that the Green Children are anything more or
less than human, and the fact that their home country is Christian is unusual in fairy tradition. In
common with Gervase and Gerald, however, the subterranean land parallels our own. These
folkloric otherworlds are not timeless paradises like Ireland’s mythological Irish Tir na nÓg, the
Romancers’ Avalon, or Tolkien’s Rivendell, yet they are countries on a fairly large scale and must
be imagined to house hundreds – if not thousands – of inhabitants.
As time goes on, however, accounts of expansive underground realms become less common,
and when the fairies practice agriculture or raise livestock, they tend to do so above the earth. By
1800, most fairies who live underground just keep house there, subterranean palatial and pastoral
traditions having been relegated to fairytales. This shrinking of the fairies’ territory presupposes a
shrinking of their communities, and indeed, the later folkloric fairies are far less likely to have kings
and overseers than their ancestors although there are regional exceptions, particular in Ireland and
Denmark. This decline in fairy high society makes a good deal of sense: After all, when the
population of any given fairy community is limited by the amount of housing space available within
a single burial mound and its immediate environs, internal hierarchy is unlikely to be terribly
complex.
The three legends concerning subterranean lands that we have looked at so far contain many
motifs found in later folk belief, but none of them represent, in their entireties, any of the most
common legends told about social fairies. In fact, going by the basis of these most impressive, most
fantastic legends alone, we might believe that the Medieval fairy world was a fairytale world. These
beings live in enchanted lands, very much apart from people. We know from later sources like
Hübertz, who writes of the danger of walking near Grydehøj, that fairies are not always so distant.
Did fairies enter into the human world only as their own worlds shrank, or do we have evidence
from the Medieval descriptive books to suggest that there were at last two different views of social
fairies?
Hübertz’s Description of Ærø affects me in a different way than other folklore collections do.
When reading about folklore close at hand, about folklore that shares my name, my heart is moved.
I cannot intellectualize the fairies of Grydehøj as I can the Green Children of the Wolf-Pits. Such is
the nature of Hübertz’s gift to Ærø’s posterity that I find it hard not to fall into the trap of thinking
that something unique happened on my island, on my ghost-hill. Still, as the always-forthright Palle
Abramsson asserts, “People like the Ærøese, they have a kind of feeling that they’re a bit special
and a little different from everyone else. But they aren’t at all. People are the same wherever you
go.” Maybe, even if the fairies on Grydehøj are not special in a wider, scholarly sense, they can be
special for the Ærøese as individuals. They were certainly special for our ancestors who feared and,
sometimes, loved them. The farmers living in Lille Rise in 1834 had never heard of Gervase of
Tilbury, and I daresay that even Shakespeare was unknown to most of them. They knew that other
people in other places had fairies as well, but the only fairies they cared about were their own. If
their fairies not only did the same things as all other fairies but also found themselves in remarkably
similar interactions with humans, the people of Lille Rise either did not know or did not care.
So it was in medieval Britain. Over the 619 years between Gervase’s Otia Imperialia and
Hübertz’s Description of Ærø, some peripheral aspects of fairy belief changed, but most strands of
fairy folklore raced unbroken through the ages. And why not? Even the Skovby of 1950 that Palle
describes is not so unlike the Wales that Gerald visited. Just imagine what the Skovby of 1834 was
like. Central heating and “civilization” came later to some places than others.
In 1215, Gervase of Tilbury provides a French story that would appear largely unchanged on
Hübertz’s Ærø. It is one of Europe’s most widespread fairy legends, that of a human woman who
becomes either a midwife or a nurse to the fairies, and Gervase’s account only diverges from the
most common strand of Northern European tradition in that the social fairies in question, dracs, live
in a river, not in a hill:
We ourselves have seen a woman of this kind who was carried off while she was washing
clothes on the bank of the river Rhône. A wooden goblet was floating on the water, and she
went after it, hoping to lay hold of it; but when she waded out into deeper water, she was pulled
down by a drac. She became his son’s nurse under the water, but returned unharmed, though
scarcely recognized by her husband and friends, after seven years. She likewise reported
remarkable things, claiming that the dracs used to feed on human beings whom they had seized,
and turn themselves into human shape. One day, when a drac had given the nurse an eel pasty as
her portion, she chanced to put her fingers smeared with fat up to one eye and one side of her
face, and as a result came to have very clear and keen underwater vision. Then, when her term
of duty was completed and she had gone back to her own life, very early one morning she met
this drac in the market-place of Beaucaire; recognizing him, she greeted him, and inquired after
the well-being of her mistress and her young charge. At this the drac said: “Hey! With which
eye were you able to recognize me?” She indicated the eye with which she saw him, the one
which she had once smeared with the fat of the pasty. Having established which it was, the drac
thrust his finger into the woman’s eye, and so from then on he went about without being seen or
recognized.44
Because these social fairies live underwater, they possess some of the attributes of aquatic solitary
fairies, including their predilection for eating humans, a habit hardly ever possessed by land-based
social fairies. Compare Gervase’s French legend with Hübertz’s tale from Dunkær, a village lying
between Lille Rise and Marstal:
Another time, it happened that a fairy-wife was in labour and called for the midwife in Dunkær.
When she had delivered the child, she was given an ointment with which she was to anoint the
child’s eyes. Out of carelessness, she came to touch her own eyes with the same ointment.
When she came out of the hill and took to the road home, she noticed that her vision was utterly
transformed, and she could now see many things that she had never seen before. Thus, as she
passed a field of rye, she saw that small fairies teemed among the grain, clipping off the stems.
“What are you doing here? What’s your business?” “Oh, oh! If you can see us, then you’ll really
get it!” and one, two, three, they had all set upon her and poked her eyes out. “Now, you can’t
see us! Now you can’t see us!” they sang as they hopped about her.45
The midwife to the fairies stories has a more or less set plot that goes as follows: 1) A male fairy,
who is not always recognized as such, fetches the midwife and takes her into a hill or wherever the
fairy habitation lies; 2) the midwife delivers a baby; 3) the midwife is given ointment to spread over
the baby’s eyes and accidentally gets some of it in one or both of her own eyes; 4) the midwife is
paid and returned home; 5) some time later, the midwife encounters and speaks to the male fairy in
the market, occasionally when he is in the process of stealing goods; 6) the fairy asks with which
eye or eyes the midwife can see him and blinds the offending eye/s in response. The cruelty of the
fairies Hübertz describes in this legend is shocking since, as occurs in Gervase’s tale, the fairies
usually blind the midwife only with some sense of regret; the blinding is merely out of necessity
and rarely contains an element of malice. Amazingly, Thomas Keightley is even able to present a
parallel Jewish legend concerning a mohel (a man who circumcises children) who is taken inside a
mountain by Mazikeen, a race of fairy-like beings, and is asked to perform a circumcision on the
child of a Mazikeen’s kidnapped human wife. The mohel only escapes the Mazikeen by refusing
their gifts and food,46 a pair of motifs that we will revisit later.
Although Mazikeen and similar beings appear in various parts of the Old Testament,47 we cannot
know how close Medieval Jewish folklore was to folklore in Biblical times. We can point to all the
tiny differences between these stories, talk about the folkloric significance of these differences until
the cows come home, yet those whose prior knowledge of fairy lore is limited to Peter Pan will be
most struck by just how similar these legends are to one another. By some process, people in France
and Denmark – and England and Norway and so on – separated by hundreds of years came to
believe in the same things, things that the majority of us can confidently say were never true, had
never occurred.
Chapter 4: The Mundane Lives of Fairies
The legend of the midwife to the fairies shows the danger of interacting with fairies, yet while it is
true that meetings with fairies often end badly, it would be wrong to assume that social fairies are
merely forces of evil. Not even Puritan writers, who do their best to paint the supernatural black and
white, ever deny that fairies’ actions often appear beneficial. In general, the fairies are ambivalent
figures, and though their code of morality is different than that of men, it is highly developed
nonetheless. Folkloric social fairies often overreact to perceived slights, steal, damage property,
cause illness, kill, and kidnap, yet they rarely display unmotivated malice.
An example of helpful fairies is given by Hübertz, concerning the inhabitants of Elverhøj [Fairy
Hill] of Dunkær:
Once, a little fairy-girl came with a ped [A peel; a kind of shovel used for baking.] that had
broken at the shaft and asked a farmhand in Dunkær to fix it; but he refused. The boy who was
standing with him was more accommodating, and as a reward, he found by his seat at dinner a
piece of liberally-buttered white bread that he consumed with good appetite even though the
farmhand was of the opinion that to do so could be deadly. The next morning, the boy woke up
cheerfully, but the farmhand lay stone dead in bed.48
This simple legend of a cake or slice of bread given in payment for a minor piece of repair work –
often the fixing of a broken ped – done for the fairies is common in tradition and usually results in
the man who accepts the gift growing exceptionally strong and man who rejects the gift becoming
weak or dying. Interestingly, as the above version of the legend involves only a single slice of bread
that can be accepted or rejected by just one person, it emphasizes not the accepting of the gift but,
rather, the willingness to do the repair work, an emphasis that rather alters the story’s typical moral.
The social fairies of Europe are neither demons nor Tinkerbells. Even in Scotland, where fairies
are often dark and, indeed, in liege to the Devil, they are not altogether evil. Mostly, they are just
mysterious. Not mysterious in a wispy, fog-on-the-marshes sense, but mysterious in the way that
any non-human intelligence would be mysterious. As we shall see, much fairylore concerns the
kidnapping of humans of either sex.49 Why would the fairies want to do this? Believers came up
with any number of theories: For example, fairies desire human mates, want humans for slaves,
cannot reproduce and so need humans to increase their numbers. To be a captive of the fairies is
seldom seen as a good thing, but then again, most people who have been captured by the fairies and
are later rescued or released never regain their happiness and/or sanity.50
The earliest, incontestable account of fairy kidnapping comes from the early 1180s, when
Walter Map writes about a Breton knight who regains his presumed-dead wife from a troop of
fairies [fatis]. The reunited, happy couple proceed to produce children together. As Walter
notes, “This would be an incredible and portentous breach of nature’s laws, did not
trustworthy evidence of its truth exist.”51 A much more detailed story of fairy kidnapping is
provided by Gervase. Because this legend’s historical significance and the fact that it is rarely
cited in texts on fairies, I have reproduced it here, slightly condensed, in spite of its length:
There is in Catalonia, in the diocese of Gerona, a very high mountain, to which people who live nearby
give have given the name Canigou. This mountain is steep-sided all the way round, and its ascent is from
most angles impossible. On its summit there is a lake containing blackish water, in which it is impossible
to see the bottom. There is said to be an abode of demons there, a vast palatial establishment behind a
closed door; however, the appearance even of the building, just like that of the demons themselves,
cannot be seen or recognized by ordinary people. If anyone throws a block of stone or some other solid
object into the lake, a storm immediately erupts, as if the demons were offended. […]
Now let the reader pay heed to what happened recently in these parts. In the village called La Junquera
next to the mountain, there was a farmer whose name was Peter de Cabinam. One day when this man was
attending to his domestic tasks at home, he was finding his little daughter’s constant and unappeasable
crying exasperating. In the end, as people often do when they are annoyed, he told his daughter to go to
the devil. His unthinking commendation brought a quick response from a being who was ready to receive
her, and a whirlwind of demons laid invisible hands on the girl and carried her off.
Seven years after these events, while a local man was making his way along the foot of the mountain,
he saw someone passing by at a rapid pace; this person was bewailing his lot in a voice full of tears:
“Alas, woe is me!”, he said, “what am I to do, crushed as I am under such a heavy burden?” On being
asked by the other traveller what was causing him such great grief, he replied that he had now spent seven
years on Mount Canigou in the power of the demons, who used him every day as a vehicle. And in order
that his hearer should attach credence to such an incredible thing, he added incontrovertible proof, telling
him that there was a girl on that same mountain who was enslaved to the demons as the result of an oath:
she was a native of the village of La Junquera, the daughter of Peter de Cabinam. The demons were tired
of bringing this girl up, and would gladly restore her to him who had sent her to them, if only her father
would ask for her back on the mountain. His hearer was amazed, and hesitated as to whether he should
keep these incredible things to himself or tell them as he had been charged to do. He decided to report to
the father the state of the daughter, and on his arrival at the village in question, he found the girl’s father,
lamenting his long-lost daughter. He asked the reason for his weeping, and listened to his faithful account
of what had happened; he then told him that he had heard the things we have related above, from the man
whom the demons were using as a vehicle, saying that the father would be well-advised to go to the
appointed place and adjure the demons, invoking the Divine Name, to restore his lost daughter.
When her father heard the messenger’s words, he was dumb-founded; he engaged in an inward
meditation as to what was the wiser course of action, and eventually decided to follow the advice of his
reliable messenger. He climbed the mountain, and ran to and fro on the shores of the lake, adjuring the
demons to restore the daughter he had sent to them. At last, as if on a sudden gust of wind, his daughter
appeared. She was elongated in stature, emaciated, hideous, with rolling eyes, her bones and sinews and
skin hardly holding together, dreadful to behold; she had acquired no form of speech by which to
communicate, and hardly understood or recognized anything human. [...]
Not long afterwards, the man whom the spirits were using as a vehicle was released as a result of a
similar appeal by the father, and came back into their midst. And because when he had been seized he had
been of greater, more mature discernment, he was able to give a more reliable and intelligible description
of what went on among the demons. He maintained that in a subterranean cave beside the lake there was a
spacious palace: “at its entrance there is a door, and beyond the door an inner darkness, in which the
demons gather to greet each other after they have traversed the regions of the world, and report to their
superiors what they have done. But no one apart from themselves, and those who have passed into the
demons’ possession in the everlasting bonds of a gift, has ever gone inside this palace; those who are only
sent to the demons remain outside the door.”52
Although, as Walter’s story shows, rescues from the fairies are occasionally successful, madness is
the most common result of spending extended periods of time with the fairies and later returning to
the human world. It is interesting that Gervase posits a difference in effect between people taken by
spirits as children and those taken as adults. These spirits are clearly demonic, working for the
devil. Still, the only point on which this Catalonian story – as seen through English eyes – diverges
from later fairy folklore is the fact gifting of the girl to the spirits by an oath: Her restoration by the
invocation of God is altogether compatible with most strands of fairy belief. One further point
worth noting is that Gervase is here, as elsewhere, careful to provide names and locations for his
legends wherever possible.
Just as Walter Map and Gervase of Tilbury know Medieval accounts of fairy kidnapping,
Hübertz gives his own example from 19th Century Ærøskøbing:
In the Dreirehøj area of Købingsmark, there is a little hill inhabited by fairies. One of them had
fallen in love with a girl who was a servant on the corner of Sluttergyden (the place where
Joseph Jensen’s sons now live) and who had her cow standing in Dreirehøj, where she usually
went out to do the milking. Because she had trouble getting up early, another girl would wake
her every morning by knocking on the window as she walked past, on her way to the fields.
One time, she is woken up in this way by a knock on the window. She gets up, gets dressed,
takes her milking pail, and goes out to the fields. It certainly seems early to her, and she does
not see the other dairy maids like she usually does, but she goes out anyway to milk her cow. It
gets, however, to be midday, all of the other dairy maids have been out in the fields and come
home again, but she has not returned yet. Now, the farmer searches for her; he finds the milk
spilled in the grass and the pail lying in a thousand pieces beside the cow; but the girl could not
be found anywhere. Two years later, the girl comes back on her own accord yet quite out of her
head. There was “not a soul” who doubted that the fairy had woken her that night and that she
had been with him in the hill ever since.53
In Scandinavia, one who suffers from this illness is said to be mountain-taken [Danish
“bjergtaget”]. In English-speaking countries, one can be “in the hill.” This condition tends to
lasts from the moment of kidnapping for the rest of one’s life. If a person goes insane or, like
the servant-girl Hübertz describes, returns mad after a period of absence, there are two major
fairy-related explanations: Either the victim cannot bear to be parted from the fairies and
pines himself or herself to distraction, or the mindless body that resembles the victim is
nothing more than a stock, a well-crafted but lifeless puppet used to conceal the kidnapping.
A stock seems to have been used by the fairies in Walter Map’s story: When the stock “died”
everyone assumed that the wife herself had died, and the fairies were never suspected. It is
more difficult to interpret what happened to the girl in Gervase’s legend: Was she tormented
by the spirits? Has she become a spirit?
Fairy kidnappers are truly international and cross-cultural. The Classical nymph tradition
is relatively well-known today, but other strands of belief have been forgotten. For example,
Medieval European Jews would protect a male infant from supernatural kidnapping by
watching over him on the night preceding his circumcision. Unbaptised Christian babies –
considered still heathen – were protected in much the same way in the Middle Ages. Also, in
a custom still practised today, albeit without any recollection of its folkloric significance, a
glass would be broken during Jewish weddings in order to drive off evil spirits. It has been
said that these two traditions were Medieval Jewish borrowings from surrounding Christian
society, but this conclusion seems unwarranted.54 The theory is based on evidence of intense
debate within the Medieval rabbinical community over the possible non-Jewishness and thus
idolatry of these conventions, but this only proves that some Jewish scholars were
uncomfortable with belief in non-religious supernatural beings. After all, those contemporary
Christian scholars who warned against fairy belief reacted in precisely the same manner,
connecting fairies with Satan and/or the deities of other religions. Despite this, today’s
folklorists would never state that Christian fairy belief was borrowed from Jewish belief in the
Middle Ages.
Maintenance of a night watch on the eve and night of a wedding is also traditional, this
too being a time when people are particularly vulnerable to supernatural kidnapping. Those
who see the Medieval Jewish customs as borrowings might do well to consider a remarkable
passage in the Old Testament that has somehow survived the text’s many revisions. Right in
the midst of the narrative concerning God’s advice to Moses on how to liberate the enslaved
people of Israel, we find the following story, difficult to comprehend due to the extensive use
of pronouns. Our analysis here follows that of Hermann Gunkel55, whose opinions deviate
from those of the translators of the often unreliable King James Bible, the text used in the
present book:
And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him [Moses], and sought to kill
him. Then Zipporah [Moses’ wife] took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son
[Gunkel reads “son” as “husband”.], and cast it at his feet [Probably God’s feet though this is
often interpreted to mean Moses’ feet.], and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he
[God] let him [Moses] go.
We are, perhaps, justified in assuming that this Biblical story did not originally concern
Moses and God but, in the nature of so many legends, was later attached to famous figures.
Gunkel interprets the legend in terms of later European folklore of fairy kidnappings. This
passage seems to tell the story of a demon attacking a groom on his wedding night. Luckily,
the virgin bride resourcefully circumcises her husband with whatever tool lies at hand and
forestalls the demon from carrying her away by symbolically losing her virginity to it. Once
the demon has touched her nuptial blood, it has no power over her, and it releases her
husband.56
Certainly, this theory makes more sense than the various, non-folkloric interpretations of
the passage. Circumcision is, of course, unusual in Northern European Christian tradition, but
the overall plot of a nocturnal attack on a pair of newly-weds will not surprise a folklorist.
Anyone doubting the woman’s virginity at this time due to the textual reference to her son –
viewed by Gunkel as an ancient misinterpretation – will have trouble explaining her “Surely a
bloody husband art thou to me” comment. In any case, there is another similar Old Testament
story of a supernatural wedding night attack.57
As we have seen, people kidnapped by fairies are often replaced by stocks. Some people,
however, are replaced by nothing at all, and others – certainly the majority of babies – are
supplanted by changelings (fairies in the kidnapped’s guise), which are frequently disfigured
and apparently mentally-incompetent. Changeling stories are spread across the geographical
range of fairy belief and usually revolve around the discovery and ridding of the changeling,
sometimes resulting in the return of the stolen human. This last part represents a significant
difference between changelings and stocks: Stocks are mere blocks of dead matter, so while
discovery of the stock’s existence lets one know of the theft, there is not much that can be
done about it. Once changelings are found out, however, it is possible to gain some leverage
over the fairies. Although there are number of more minor methods of getting rid of a
changeling, the two most common are to trick the disguised fairy into revealing its identity or
to torture it out of the house. The first method takes a few forms. By undertaking a
particularly surprising action, such as brewing beer in an eggshell or cooking some
unprepared livestock, like an unplucked chicken, one can often elicit an exclamation from the
apparently-dumb changeling. The exclamations, not just the surprising actions, are
remarkably international, typically involving the changeling revealing its immense age. Here,
the two methods of removing a changeling coincide: After the changeling has revealed its true
identity, it must be tortured or at least threatened with torture. Common methods of torture
include being thrown on the fire, being whipped, being exposed outdoors, and being placed
on a red-hot shovel. It would seem that the tricking of the changeling is only necessary if one
is not already positive that the being is, in fact, a changeling. If one is lucky, upon torture or
the threat of torture, a fairy woman appears to exchange one’s own child with the changeling,
occasionally noting that she has treated the human child far better than the humans have
treated the fairy. Less luckily, the changeling might simply die or make its escape up the
chimney, but we can suppose that even this is something of a relief to the unfortunate human
family.
This is the sort of belief that was of great practical importance. There is no statistical
evidence on the subject, yet we can be sure that – assuming the non-existence of fairies –
many deformed and/or mentally-deficient children died terrible deaths under torture. Those
who survived by no means always escaped the stigma of their early years. W.Y. Evans-Wentz
translates the testimony of Goulven Le Scour from Brittany regarding a local changeling:
I remember very well that there was a woman of the village of Kergoff, in Plouneventer, who
was called—, the mother of the family. When she had her first child, a very strong and very
pretty boy, she noticed one morning that he had been changed during the night; there was no
longer the fine baby she had put to bed in the evening; there was, instead, an infant hideous to
look at, greatly deformed, hunchbacked, and crooked, and of a black colour. The poor woman
knew that a fée had entered the house and had changed her child.
This changed infant still lives, and to-day he is about seventy years old. He has all the
possible vices; and he has tried many times to kill his mother. He is a veritable demon; he often
predicts the future, and has a habit of running abroad during the night. They call him the “Little
Corrigan [A Breton social fairy.]”, and everybody flees from him. Being poor and infirm now,
he has been obliged to beg, and people give him alms because they have great fear of him. His
nickname is Olier.58
Similarly, a Newfoundland priest responds to a 1966 folklore survey with the following:
On the lower end of Merasheen Island living alone are a family called Travis, there is the father
and mother, three sons and a daughter [...]. Her son “dim Pat” is never there when we come
around but you see him hiding behind the door or running off up to the woods. Once I told her I
had to meet him, I said I was taking the census for the bishop so she brought him in. He’s about
thirty-two and he’s ordinary but he always wears a skirt made out of canvas like you’d make
sails with or you’d wear splitting fish. No pants underneath but the big boots and a shirt and this
skirt. He’s right odd but quite intelligent to speak to and he can fish and make little boats that
his brothers sell for him. People say he’s a changeling and the fairies took the real one away,
they’re always saying that about the odd ones.59
Though the priest does not date this encounter with an adult who is believed to be a fairy,
Barbara Rieti records other relatively-recent examples of Newfoundland changeling tradition,
including a legend of an event meant to have taken place in the city of St. John’s in the late
1960s.60
In 1895, Bridgit Cleary was slowly tortured and eventually burned to death by her
husband, relations, and neighbours, who suspected her of being a stock or changeling. This
case is famous on account of its late date, and there is no reason to disbelieve that torture – so
clearly and consistently described in the recorded legends – was practised in earlier times.61
There even seems to be mention of the practice of driving away changelings via exposure or
burning in “the penitential of Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (668-690),” which
“decrees that ‘if any woman puts her daughter upon a roof or into an oven for the cure of a
fever, she shall do penance for seven years.’”62 Although changeling-type beliefs are no
longer socially acceptable in the West, they have left behind a linguistic relic in English. Aulf,
derived from elf, was once yet another name for social fairies. Over time, however, aulf and
its further-evolved forms, ouph and ouphe, acquired the nuance of denoting a changeling.63
Today, despite our lacking any fairies to take the blame, oaf is still used to describe doltish
humans.
Those who are present in human society yet still “in the hill” are rarely long for this life.
Fairy companionship is addictive, and once you have tasted it, you will soon be going back
for more, at least in spirit. Stocks – whether of stolen humans or farm animals – quickly
decay, simulating the victim’s natural death. But what is it about the fairies that draws people
into their realm? We do not often read of men and women being physically forced into fairy
company; Gervase of Tilbury’s Catalonian legend is the exception rather than the rule. Why is
it that those who have, since childhood, guarded themselves against fairies with prayer, herbs,
and crosses so easily renounce their humanity when put to the test?
Frequently, magic is blamed, yet this just begs the question. The servant-girl in her
bedroom, the young man in the fields, the woodcutter in the forest are all prone to the fairies’
beauty. This beauty is sometimes considered illusory. In some examples of the midwife to the
fairies legend, the midwife’s smearing of fairy ointment in her eyes results in her ability to see
the fairies as they really are: Ugly, living in wretchedness and filth. There is also a general
reluctance to accept fairy food and drink. Most of this unwillingness is linked to fear of
imprisonment since many people who consume fairy food are thereafter consigned to living
with the fairies. In the legend of the Green Children, we find a hint that the burden of this
taboo might not rest wholly on the humans: the Green Children refuse to eat the food placed
before them – even to the point of starvation – until presented with beans still in the pods, that
is, with unprepared food.64 We also find sometimes that fairy food and drink is refused
because it is believed to be illusory in nature. Already in the 1190s, William of Newburgh
wrote of illusory food, here provided by demons to advance Satan’s cause. Regarding the
followers of Eon or Eudes de l’Etoile, a mid-12th-Century heretic, William records:
We subsequently heard from persons who had been in his retinue, and who after his decease
wandered through the world as a penitential exercise, that whenever they required them, bread,
meat, fish and any more elegant dishes were available to them. That these foods were ghostly
rather than substantial, being invisibly provided by spirits of the lower air to ensnare rather than
to nurture souls, is clear from the fact that however full they became from that food, the
slightest belch made them empty, and such great hunger then followed that they were at once
compelled to eat the same foodstuffs again. Any person who chanced to approach them and
tasted even a morsel of their food experienced a change of heart from sharing that table of
devils, and at once attached himself to that most foul crew; and anyone accepting from them
anything under whatever appearance was not immune from danger.65
If not for the fact that these demons are serving a human master, it would be tempting to
account the story as yet another instance of a Medieval writer quietly using the word devil as
a synonym for fairy.
Of course, if all fairy food and products were illusory, there would be no need for the
fairies to engage in theft, one of their most prominent occupations. Both your farm animals
and grain could end up in the hands of the fairies if you were not careful. Stolen animals were
likely to be replaced by stocks, bodies of pure illusion with no nutritional value. Grain could
be taken either from the stalk, as in Hübertz’s fairy midwife story, or from the barn. Legends
of fairy theft are difficult to come by in the Medieval sources, possibly because this was truly
an agrarian concern. Nevertheless, the story of the swineherd of the Peak, as well as another
story recorded by Gervase,66 is suggestive of theft of domestic animals. Similarly, the bizarre,
terrifying phantom seal in Iceland’s Eyrbyggja Saga67 is most certainly a thief and may well
be a kind of fairy.
Fairies could be awful thieves, but if treated well, they could also be fine neighbours.
Humans nearly always benefit from trade with the fairies unless – or until – they violate a
taboo. Hübertz’s legend of the broken ped68 is an example of this, and loans of grain or beer
to the fairies are usually repaid many times over. Being on good terms with the fairies
sometimes even provides people with their livelihoods. For example, records of 15th and 16th
Century Scottish witchcraft trials reveal that many witches attribute their powers to the fairies.
Unfortunately, these witches encounter a problem: To their Puritan accusers, fairies are
devils.
Amazingly, considering the passage of time and shift from Catholicism to Puritanism,
Gerald of Wales writes of something quite similar:
It is worth relating that in our days there lived in the neighbourhood of this City of the Legions a
certain Welshman called Meilyr [According to Gerald, d. 1174.] who could explain the occult
and foretell the future. He acquired his skill in the following way. One evening, and, to be
precise, it was Palm Sunday, he happened to meet a girl whom he had loved for a long time. She
was very beautiful, the spot was an attractive one, and it seemed too good an opportunity to be
missed. He was enjoying himself in her arms and tasting her delights, when suddenly, instead of
the beautiful girl, he found in his embrace a hairy creature, rough and shaggy, and, indeed,
repulsive beyond words. As he stared at the monster his wits deserted him and he became quite
mad. He remained in this condition for many years. Eventually he recovered his health in the
church of St. David’s, thanks to the virtues of the saintly men of that place. All the same, he
retained a very close and most remarkable familiarity with unclean spirits, being able to see
them, recognizing them, talking to them and calling them each by his own name, so that with
their help he could often prophesy the future. Just as they are, too, he was often mistaken about
events in the distant future, or happenings far away in space; but he was less often wrong about
matters nearer home or likely to occur within the coming year. He nearly always saw these
spirits standing close beside him and near at hand. They would appear in the form of huntsmen,
with horns hanging round their necks, but it was human souls which they were pursuing, not
animals or wild beasts. He saw them most often and in greatest numbers outside monasteries
and houses of religion. Wherever man is in revolt, there they deploy their full battalions, there
they need their greatest strength. Whenever anyone told a lie in his presence, Meilyr was
immediately aware of it, for he saw a demon dancing and exulting on the liar’s tongue.
Although he was completely illiterate, if he looked at a book which was incorrect, which
contained some false statement, or which aimed at deceiving the reader, he immediately put his
finger on the offending passage. If you asked him how he knew this, he said that a devil first
pointed out the place with its finger. In the same way, and again with a demon to help him,
whenever he went into the dormitory of a monastery, he would point to the bed of any false
monk whose religion was a pretext and did not come from the heart. [...] When he was harassed
beyond endurance by these unclean spirits, Saint John’s Gospel was placed on his lap, and then
they all vanished immediately, flying away like so many birds. If the Gospel were afterwards
removed and the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth put there in its
place, just to see what would happen, the demons would alight all over his body, and on the
book, too, staying there longer than usual and being even more demanding.69
Gerald, who casts a critical eye over Elidyr’s fairy abduction story, is fully convinced of this
legend’s truth. The explanation seems to be that, whereas the little people who hosted Elidyr
as a child were wholly good and pure of heart, the beings accompanying Meilyr are depicted
as devils. Unlike, say, Gervase of Tilbury who differentiates between demonic and simply
inexplicable orders of beings,70 Gerald places all supernatural events – and even many natural
ones – somewhere within a religious spectrum that ranges from good to evil. The problem of
learned authors’ opinions overshadowing those of the people about whom they write is
especially acute in Medieval texts.
We can never know for certain, but it is doubtful that Meilyr saw his companions in the
same light as Gerald did. After all, if we disregard for a moment that these demons possess
the job title Hunters of Human Souls, it is difficult to see what, precisely, they are doing that
is so absolutely demonic. Appearing in illusorily-beautiful guise is common fairy activity, and
since most fairies are seen as heathens, we would hardly expect them to worship on Palm
Sunday. In the Middle Ages, not being Christian would have made these beings evil but not
necessarily demonic. The primary charge against these beings is that they disdain liars and
hold them up for public ridicule via Meilyr. However it may be regarded among devils, this is
a popular fairy pastime. Fairies may not always be very pleasant, but as in Elidyr’s story, they
are exceptionally honest. We might not be overstepping the limits of probability to suggest
that, like an accused witch centuries later, Meilyr found that his fairies were not always wellreceived by men of religion like Archdeacon Gerald.
Gerald’s humorous dig at Geoffrey of Monmouth is instructive as well. Gerald was no fan
of this mid-12th Century writer who presented his historical fiction as straight history. It is
always difficult to decide just how much the Romance genre owes to folk belief, but at the
very least, Geoffrey’s claim that he merely translated his History of the Kings of Britain from
an ancient source is false. Although King Arthur and other players in his books are sparsely
referenced in prior texts, Geoffrey creates a great epic out of their lives, and his books
inspired and informed many – possibly all – of the later Arthurian Romances. At a very early
stage, some writers suspected the inauthenticity of Geoffrey’s work, but the mere fact that
William of Newburgh spends most of the prologue to his own history disproving specific
claims in this book71 shows that there must have been a good number of contemporary
scholars who viewed Geoffrey as a historian, not a writer of literature. Those who accuse
respected historians of this period of inventing legends or offering as fact legends that they
themselves believe to be false would do well to consider the professional dignity evinced in
Gerald’s joke at Geoffrey’s expense. Even though there is some irony in that fact that
Geoffrey’s inclusion in the story of Meilyr is likely Gerald’s own invention, the sentiment
here is that writers of false history are the worst of all possible liars. Gerald and the other
serious historians of his time might have cheated a little on the details, but they did not see
entertainment as a suitable excuse for “lying,” for writing about things in which they did not
believe.
What Kurt Johannesson says of the Scandinavian Renaissance historian, Johannes
Magnus, is true of Medieval English writers as well:
Historians have always affirmed that simple objective truth is the goal of their science. They have
acknowledged that this truth is in most cases uncertain or hard to attain, and have retired to a
second line of defense, probability. What is characteristic of Renaissance historians is that they
speak openly of their reliance on probability and use it with remarkable freedom and consistency.
Here we see both the heritage from historians of antiquity and the influence of rhetoric upon
Renaissance culture. [...] Rhetoricians used probability to weigh evidence and assertions against
one another, for example, or to discover the true causes and the motive force in a certain action.
Johannes Magnus used the method not to fantasize about the exodus of the Goths [An ancient event
about which there was little concrete information.] but to reconstruct some virtual course of action
within the limits of probability.72
The difference between Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales is not that the former
invents things while the latter does not; it is, rather, that Geoffrey invents things because these
inventions are pretty while Gerald invents “along the lines of probability.” Johannesson notes
that this probability method of composing history that is likely to be correct in its thrust but
incorrect in its details only began to fall out of fashion in the late 1800s.73
This is significant for us because it is possible to see the same rhetorical use of probability
in many of the oral narratives collected by folklorists from the 19th and onwards. As we will
have the opportunity to note later, the extent to which storytellers and audiences regard oral
legends of the supernatural as “truthful” is difficult to gauge. Believers in fairies are perfectly
capable of telling jocular stories, the cut-and-dried truth of which they clearly do not
believe.74 Nevertheless, even these humorous stories might contain elements that are truthful
in essence, if not in fact. This is a complicating factor when discussing belief for, keeping this
in mind, we have to be open to the possibility that the people of Medieval England and 19th
Century Ærø did not necessarily believe the utter truthfulness of, say, stories of midwives to
the fairies. They might have, like Johannes Magnus, seen it as sufficient that the stories
relayed the most probable sequence of events and/or some genuine message about the nature
of fairies.
For those who have not done much reading on folkloric fairies, the stories we have looked
at from the Middle Ages and from Hübertz’s little collection must be something of a
revelation. Unlike the fairies about which most people learn from literature and film,
Hübertz’s fairies – and the majority of their Northern European counterparts – lead quite
mundane lives. Most fairies do not live in a castle in the sky, do not flit about on dragonfly or
butterfly wings, do not make the flowers grow for little girls and boys. They can be beautiful,
grotesque, or comic, but the fairies of the common folk are themselves usually commoners,
carrying out the tasks necessary to survive in an agrarian society. Most of Hübertz’s fairy
legends and most fairy legends in general do not involve kidnapping or other dramatic events.
They are simply descriptions of chance or occasional, neighbourly encounters with another
type of intelligent being.
Barbara Rieti notes of Newfoundland fairylore that:
Death and disability, which loom so large in an archival “portrait” of fairy tradition, play little role
in these personal experience narratives. Yet as soon as comparative material is brought in, they are
back […]. The apparent discrepancy may have to do with the worst cases becoming public
property, instead of fixing at a private level as more inconsequential incidents might. It offers an
important perspective on the use of archival and field texts, for it shows that one would get quite
different pictures relying on either source alone. One might, with archival data alone, assemble a
falsely coherent overview, and make connections which do not actually have much meaning in
context or performance, that is, in real life. It could be equally misleading to depend completely on
field research, for it would be possible to conclude [...] that fairy traditions have mostly to do with
strange but harmless experiences of mischief or illusion.
Although tales of dreadful fairy fates do not figure in these informants’ personal experiences or
repertoires, they nevertheless form the backdrop for stories of the most innocuous nature, a potential for
disaster that imparts a necessary tension to such close encounters.75
I found this as well in my own fieldwork concerning the supernatural. The bulk of stories in
circulation concerning first-hand or second-hand experiences are relatively mundane, but they
are informed by traditions that give them meaning.
Hübertz’s collection of legends is also a mix between the dramatic and the relativelyinconsequential, but we should not be surprised if we remember examples of the former better
than the latter. Still, when Hübertz first writes about the inhabitants of Elverhøj, he does not
tell their most dramatic stories but begins with their daily, workaday lives:
Elverhøj lies just West of Dunkær Mill. The fairies that formerly lived in this hill occasioned the
majority of the legends on the island. They spent most of their time in Dunkær, where it was
their habit to loan one or thing or another. Sometimes they loaned yeast, sometimes a poker, a
cauldron, or the like. At times, they took what they required without permission; but always
brought it back in good shape. When, therefore, the farmers missed something, they tended to
nod their heads and say: “Yes, yes, it’s bound to return: The fairies have taken it.”
They usually came to all of the houses in Dunkær where they liked the people; but
particularly a house that has since moved out into Søndremarken, which they often visited, and
is, thus, called the Elleslottet [The Fairy Castle].76
Hübertz gives us another widespread legend relating to the borrowing of household supplies,
but this time, the story is humorous:
On the lowest farm in Lille Rise, fairies live under the oven. Once, a little fairy girl came in to
the wife and asked her for the loan of a pair of scissors. “What’re you going to use them for?”
“To cut my bridal gown.” “You can have the scissors on the condition that I get to see how it’s
going when you hold the wedding.” “Yes, gladly, you can watch it through a crack in the oven,
but if you laugh, then you won’t be able to see any more of it.” So, on the wedding day, the wife
peeped through the crack. Inside the oven, a whole company of small, well-adorned fairies sat at
dinner and ably partook of the courses. Meanwhile, it happened that two of the guests began to
disagree with one another. After they had quarrelled for some time, they sprang up upon the
table, grabbed each other by the hair, and tumbled about until they both fell into the soup
serving bowl. With that, the fight was over, the two tiny people crawled dispiritedly out of the
serving bowl, the entire company burst into howling laughter, and the farmer’s wife joined in
heartily. Then, the whole scene vanished.
Once, in the same house, two girls who had annoyed the fairies were carried from their bed
in their sleep and brought over to another, rather distant room. They lay sleeping there until long
past noon and were not found until after a long search.77
These fairies living under the oven must be extremely small. On account of its comic nature
and the minuteness of the fairies, it is difficult to credit this story with having been believed,
despite there existing a good number of similar legends internationally, some of which are
shaded more seriously. This is a good time to recall what we noted above, that jocular fairy
legends coexist with believed-in fairy legends. Additionally, as Rieti noted, plot-light
accounts of fairy experiences – phenomenologically-simple encounters – make up, perhaps,
the bulk of fairy stories in a community, and these experiences are interesting precisely
because they have an impressive, dangerous back-story. Earlier, we saw Gervase of Tilbury
use the story of the swineherd of Peak Castle to shed light on a number of more mundane but
equally mysterious phenomena. Hübertz does much the same thing, juxtaposing his serious
and comic stories with a cursory run-through of less-complex legends:
Fairies also live in Gallehøj [Gallows Hill] in Lille Rise. One frequently hears them slamming
the lid of a chest, and the smith in Lille Rise, who held watch there one night during the war,
solemnly wagered all of his credibility on that fact that, in the morning, he heard a clock strike
five from within the hill.
***
At the south-western end of Risemark, there is an ancient burial mound called Kongehøj [King
Hill]. At night, it has often been seen standing on four pillars with light and merriment beneath.
When the cliffs outside collapse and fall, the hill moves itself inland so that it is always the
same distance from the beach.
***
Synehøj lies just East of Bregninge Windmill. It is inhabited by fairies, and when the miller
grinds Christmas-grain at night, he sees it standing on four pillars, prettily lit-up, and with
fairies dancing beneath.
***
In Lånehøj, West of Vestermølle, one hears the slamming of a chest lid and so on. Once, during
the harvest season, the harvesters sat and had a bite to eat by the hill. They unmistakably heard
the fairies grinding grain inside. It was discussed whether the sound came from the hill or from
Søby. A pair of young farmhands inspected the case more closely and, by laying an ear to the
earth, sought to ascertain where the sound came from. One of them has assured me that, by
those means, they attained positive knowledge that the grain really was being ground inside the
hill.
In Hulehøj on Bregninge Mark, one hears the same sound.78
What do fairies do with their lives? I asked every person I interviewed this same question, and
their answers varied widely. Hübertz, at least, is clear enough: Fairies steal and grind grain,
borrow tools and food, play tricks on travellers, hold parties, and – every so often – lure
humans into their world. After concluding a story that tells of the Elverhøj fairies’ departure
from Ærø, Hübertz writes:
Even though this legend explains that the fairies no longer live in Elverhøj, there are,
nonetheless, reasonable people who believe that it is not so totally abandoned, that they will be
going about their business there for some time yet. At the very least, there is no other place in
the region where it is so easy to get lost on dark nights as it is there. This occurs very frequently,
and in the winter last year, a man from Dunkær strayed off-course three times in one night in
this area, and when he finally reached town, he was as pale as a corpse and dripping with sweat.
There are also those who believe that the discovery of ploughing the fields crosswise has helped
immensely to drive away the “fairy-lads”; for the fairies can travel well enough alongside the
furrows, but across and over them “not at all.”79
In Hübertz’s time, the fairies were still up to their old tricks, and elsewhere in Denmark and
the British Isles at least, they would be up to them a century later. Yet it is Ærø we want to
explore, and the Ærøese people we want to learn from. With two notable exceptions to be
discussed later, the quotes from Hübertz that have been set out above make up the entire
corpus of original work done on the island’s social fairies.
Although we have, so far, limited ourselves to comparing Hübertz with Medieval texts in
order to show the antiquity of fairy belief, younger sources are both more plentiful and more
easily set alongside 19th Century accounts of Ærøese folklore. We have been fortunate to find
late-12th and early-13th Century analogues to most elements of later belief, yet sometimes, as
with fairy theft and borrowing, hard evidence is difficult to come by. It should be remembered
that we are reliant on a relatively small sample of sources for our knowledge of Medieval
British and Nordic fairy belief. If we consider evidence from Norse mythology (for example,
The Poetic Edda, Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, and Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum)
and fiction/fictionalized history (for example, Icelandic family sagas, Icelandic Romances,
and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain) as being equivocal, we are left
with precious few named writers who have much to say about Northern European fairies.
Scholars who set out to study saints’ legends are much better off. This period was the golden
age of hagiography, and even those authors who we rely upon write far more about holy miracles
than they do about fairies. Gerald of Wales, for example, positively laps up saints’ legends. One
who researches such things can take a huge body of evidence and draw firm conclusions from it.
We will never know just how much reliable, fairy-related Medieval work has been lost over the
centuries, but with the meagre quantity that we possess, we must be careful in drawing conclusions.
Every collector of folklore records some legends that are not representative of international belief,
that are just local – perhaps individual – oddities. Although these are interesting in themselves, we
view them differently than we view a common legend such as the fairy midwife legend.
So far as our Medieval sources are concerned, it is easy enough to recognize as widespread
those beliefs that still recur six hundred years down the line. But what are we to do with the story of
the Green Children? The two men who record it, William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall,
date the event differently. Does this merely mean that the Green Children legend was a once-inhistory event and that either William or Ralph made a mistake? Or does it mean that the Green
Children legend was a long-lasting strand of Suffolk folklore, that every generation had its own
Green Children, that people had, somehow, experienced or come to believe in the legendary events
even a century or two before William did? Unless a new source is discovered someday, we will
simply have to make guesses.
We do know that most of the fairy legends prevalent in Hübertz’s time had already existed for
many years, in many locations. Hübertz’s contribution to international folklore research is a very
small one, and there were likely many common fairy legends that he did not record but that existed
on Ærø nonetheless. For this purpose and because my personal inquiries on Ærø concerned Danish
folklore in general and not merely local belief, we will continue investigating the characteristics of
Northern European social fairies chronologically, moving on to the late-Medieval and Early
Modern periods.
Chapter 5: Early Modern Fairies
It is just as well that we have reiterated our caution for using works of fiction as evidence about
fairy belief since the late-14th Century saw the emergence of a writer of fiction whose statements on
fairies are both difficult to interpret and of such cultural influence as to be impossible to ignore.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is perhaps the only piece of Medieval English fiction that is
still read somewhat widely read as a work of literature and not as a historical document. As such, its
mentions of fairies have had a somewhat inordinate impact on later fairy research. Best known of
Chaucer’s fairy references is the ironic opening to The Wife of Bath’s Tale:
In th’ olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye [fairies].
The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.
This was the olde opinion, as I rede;
I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.
But now kan no man se none elves mo,
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of lymytours [friars] and othere hooly freres,
That serchen every lond and every streem,
As thikke as motes in the sonne-beem,
Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,
Citees, burghes, castels, hye tours,
Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes—
This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf
Ther walketh now the lymytour hymself
In undermeles and in morwenynges,
And seyth his matyns and his hooly thynges
As he gooth in his lymtacioun [territory].
Wommen may go saufly up and doun.
In every bussh or under every tree,
Ther is noon oother incubus but he,
And he ne wol doon hem but dishonour.80
This text has been often cited and quoted by folklorists but rarely subjected to any sort of real
analysis. First, it needs to be stated that The Wife of Bath’s Tale is itself a Romance, and its narrator,
the Wife of Bath, uses this introduction to set the scene for her story. The relative fame of this
passage seems, then, a little odd since we can find any number of Romances that make mention of
fairies, yet we have, up till now, stuck to more reliably-traditional evidence of belief. Chaucer
seems to be so favoured because, unlike Chrétien de Troyes, he is still a renowned poet today.
The comment that attracts the most scholarly attention is that which states that fairies no longer
exist, “now kan no man se none elves mo.” This can be taken as the starting point for a theory that
holds that, ever since the largely-undocumented early Middles Ages, belief in fairies has undergone
a gradual process of decline. On the testimony of the Wife of Bath, this appears reasonable enough,
but we would then have to explain the evidence of widespread fairy belief that comes in the Early
Modern Period, when Englishmen begin researching the subject in earnest.
It is possible that the Wife of Bath’s fairies are simply the fairies or fays of Romance and that
she is not speaking of the numerous lesser beings – those described by the likes of Gerald of Wales,
William of Newburgh, and Gervase of Tilbury – that we have retrospectively come to call social
fairies. Certainly, the reference to the “elf-queene” and King Arthur suggest as much. Our greatest
interpretive difficulty, however, is rooted in this passage’s irony. Two-thirds of this quotation’s
lines are devoted to mocking the hypocrisy and literal rapacity of priests and monks who have taken
the fairies’ lands and their jobs: The monks of the Wife of Bath seduce maidens with the same
vigour as the fairies once did. Furthermore, this Romance’s plot involves a Christian knight raping a
maiden and only being redeemed by a fairy/fay’s feminist wisdom. In Chaucer’s time, when readers
would have known just how strong or weak belief in fairies actually was, the irony here would not
have been so muddled, but for our part, we can only make guesses. It is, in any case, noteworthy
that Sir Thopas, the satiric Romance in Canterbury Tales that Chaucer puts in the mouth of a
pilgrim named Geoffrey Chaucer, is almost never considered in discussions of folk belief despite its
concerning a trip to fairyland. Here, where there is no doubt as to the fairies identities as Romance
figures, folklorists find little of interest.
The extended talk of fairies in The Wife of Bath’s Tale has generally overshadowed Chaucer’s
other references to the beings, the most significant of which appears in The Miller’s Tale. In this
story, a rustic carpenter attempts to awake and cure a sick man by asking him to “thenk on Cristes
passioun.” The carpenter then blesses the patient and the house with the sign of the cross, protecting
them from “elves” and evil spirits.81 Although the tale is fictional and its characters absurd, the
carpenter’s reaction is only humorous if some people truly do fear elves. The juxtaposition of the
elves and wicked wights might make us think that, here, elf is just another word for devil, just as
Satan is sometimes called Pouke (forerunner of Shakespeare’s famous Puck) in the roughlycontemporary Piers Ploughman.82 One of the confusing factors in Medieval and Early Modern fairy
writing is that, at least in learned usage, names of fairies are often used as synonyms for devils.
Even those who do not see fairies as expressly demonic typically believe that they can be defeated
by liberal use of crucifixes and prayers. However, if the carpenter in The Miller’s Tale were
referring to demons alone, the joke would be lost as the educated classes of Chaucer’s age clearly
retained belief in devils, a belief that did not show signs of ebbing in England until the late-17th
Century.83 The humour here may lie in the carpenter’s immediate and rash assumption that the sick
man’s illness has been caused by elves and his subsequent reliance upon prayer to alleviate the
ailment.
The 150 or so years between Chaucer and the start of the English Early Modern Period are often
seen as a folkloric wasteland in which little of value was written. Several interesting theories have
been forwarded to account for this,84 yet it is just as well to consider that folklore is not the only
field about which this century and a half has relatively little to say.
In both England and Scandinavia, there is a tendency to see the regions’ Renaissance periods as
being linked to the Protestant Reformation. There is some truth in this, and it is certain that the
Reformation-fuelled decline of Latin boosted both popular literacy and the prospects for
vernacular literature,85 but one can easily push the point too far. The Reformation coincided with
the mostly-unrelated spread of the Italian Renaissance – which was, of course, Catholic – into the
rest of Europe, and that greatest of Renaissance inventions, the printing press, disseminated Papal
texts just as ably as it diffused Lutheran ones. Far from being a process that uniformly inspired the
philosophical, historical, literary, and artistic advancements that we now associate with the
Renaissance, the Reformation violently dissolved the monasteries, the traditional centres of
learning.
In the England, representatives of the monarch kindled the libraries at Oxford in 1550, burning
the accumulated knowledge of centuries in order to cleanse the country of “such books wherein
appeared Angles or Mathematical Diagrams” that were “accounted Popish, diabolical, or both.”86
This was no mere attempt to establish a new political system that was free from Rome: When the
English Reformation disapproved of Catholic mysticism in the form of the natural sciences, it did
so not because it disbelieved in the reality of this kind of magic but, rather, because this magic
could be traced back to Satan. In Scandinavia, the Reformation’s immediate impact was more
political than religious, but even here, the two Nordic universities (Copenhagen and Uppsala)
declined in prestige and viability on account of their now being bound to monarchies that, unlike
the Catholic Church, had little interest in educating future theologians.87 Throughout Northern
Europe, the Reformation led to the closure of the ancient monastic schools and libraries, institutions
that had nurtured the great majority of native academics since the conversion to Christianity. The
reforming King Christian III of Denmark, for example, appropriated Catholic Church property in
the mid-1500s, eventually leaving the monarchy in possession of half of all the land in Denmark.88
It is worth recalling that every English, Scottish, or Welsh Medieval historian who we have named
so far in this book was a churchman: Walter Map and Gerald of Wales were archdeacons, Geoffrey
of Monmouth was a bishop, Gervase of Tilbury and William of Newburgh were canons, Ralph of
Coggeshall was an abbot, and the religious accomplishments of Gildas and the Venerable Bede
Gildas were such that they became saints in death.
Religion is not terribly important to most Scandinavians today, yet the Nordic countries’
national churches are very much a part of their respective cultures. Today’s Nordic Christianity is
seen as tolerant and open, which is something of a necessity considering how bound-up it is with
public life. Until 2000, the Church of Sweden was a state church, and the churches of Denmark,
Norway, and Iceland are still connected to the state. I can only speak of Denmark from personal
experience, but even those who do not attend church regularly – and there are not many Danes who
do so – are likely to view the state church with pride, particularly when it is compared with the
Catholic Church. The popular Danish idea of Catholicism is that it is a religion riddled with
superstition and belief in the supernatural. The Catholic saints, many of whom were instrumental in
shaping the theological traditions that are as prominent in Lutheranism as in the Roman church, are
considered little more than fairy tale figures. There is a tendency to view previous generations of
religious belief suspiciously.
The brothers Johannes and Olaus Magnus, Sweden’s last archbishops, may be the two greatest
writers of the Scandinavian Renaissance, but they are unknown in Denmark today. Already eight
years prior to Sweden’s decisive switch to Lutheranism in 1531 and immediately following
Johannes’ consecration as archbishop, the developing anti-Roman tendencies of Sweden’s
revolutionary king, Gustav Vasa, were weakening the brothers’ positions, and they were,
eventually, both be forced into exile. As might be expected, the Magnus brothers’ writings are both
pointedly and subtly critical of Protestantism, yet their main topics are secular. For our purposes,
the most important of their writings is Olaus’ Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus. Although this
work is not immensely impressive by modern standards, partially because its gleefully wide-ranging
subject matter greatly resembles what English historians like Gervase of Tilbury were doing over
three centuries earlier, it was astoundingly popular at the time. Within twelve years of its initial
1555 Latin publication, Olaus’ Historia had been translated into French, Italian, Dutch, and
German, finally appearing in English in 1658.89 The book is lively enough, and Olaus is an artful
writer, but its real appeal came – and still comes – from its being the first overview of Nordic
history, geography, wildlife, and society available outside of Scandinavia. Like Gerald of Wales,
Olaus was an early ethnologist, and he writes about the lifestyles and beliefs of the region’s various
races alongside discussions of Scandinavia’s great wonders.
The sources for those events and phenomena that Olaus did not personally witness are,
however, mildly suspect. Olaus leans heavily on the late-12th Century Gesta Danorum by the
brilliant Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus. Saxo is just about the only extant Nordic yet nonIcelandic recorder of Norse mythology, a religious system that – via a hefty dose of Christianisation
– he works into his semi-legendary history of Scandinavia. Had Saxo written a work like Gesta
Danorum in England, he would have been regarded just as poorly as was Geoffrey of Monmouth,
yet the Nordic tradition for written literature, being only a few hundred years old, was not that of
England. The fact that a man as talented and historically-meticulous as Olaus Magnus could repeat
so many of Saxo’s mythological stories and still have them well-received not only in Rome but also
in Sweden, where people ought to have known better, is a sign of how far behind the rest of
“civilized” Western Europe Scandinavia was lagging in a literary sense. Olaus devotes many
chapters to wondrous events and writes some sections specifically about what we would today call
fairies, but whereas other contemporary sources merely complicate matters by not differentiating
fairies from devils, Olaus compounds the problem by also describing Old Norse gods and lesser
deities as devils or humans in the service of devils. Besides his basic acceptance of stories from
Norse mythology, Olaus – in common with most other contemporary historians – placed faith in
Ancient Greek and Roman histories, something that, today, appears incredible. In any case, we will
here limit ourselves to considering what Olaus has to say about overtly-folkloric fairies.
Olaus’ most detailed description of social fairies goes as follows:
It is therefore considered a certainty that such fauns and satyrs [as are found in Classical texts]
are like those supernatural beings which, in many places within the northern regions, especially
at night time, habitually dance round in a circle, with all the Muses singing in harmony. After
sunrise they can sometimes be detected by their footprints in the dew [...]. Sometimes, it is true,
they press so deep into the earth in their leaping that the area they constantly use is worn away
in a ring by the extraordinary heat and grows no new grass on its parched sod. This nocturnal
play of supernatural beings the natives call “the dance of the elves,” and this is their belief about
them: that the souls of people who devote themselves to bodily pleasures (becoming as it were
their servants), giving way to the incitement of their lusts and profaning the laws of God and
man, assume corporeal form and are whirled about the earth. It is reckoned that among them are
numbered those who still in our own age customarily take human shape and apply themselves to
the service of men by working during the night and tending horses and beasts of burden.90
This is the first Northern European documentation that I know of concerning what would later be
called fairy rings although the numerous literary references to the phenomenon that appear in
England’s Elizabethan golden age thirty or forty years later make it clear that belief in the fairy
origin of such rings must have been quite old and widespread. Today, fairy rings are known to be
caused by subterranean fungal growth, and the properties of these fungi determine whether a ring is,
as in Olaus’ example, barren of grass or, on the contrary, exceptionally verdant. This, however, in
no way explains why Northern Europeans seem to have almost universally assumed that the rings
were, in fact, created by dancing fairies. We must be cautious with the assertion that Early Modern
Scandinavians believed fairies to be lost souls as this sounds very much like a stance of a Catholic
clergyman, not the Catholic common folk, and indeed, Olaus never says otherwise. The final line of
the above quotation describes not social fairies but those solitary fairies who, in parts of England
and Scotland, are called brownies. Brownies have exact counterparts in the Danish/Norwegian
nisses, Swedish tomtes, and German kobolds and are such an important part of Northern European
folklore that they will be discussed later at greater length.
Olaus is not personally sure of the association of fairies with the souls of sinners:
In what I have said so far I have cited much patent evidence from sacred and profane writings
on how demons become visible and are of service to human beings and, by playing tricks upon
them in a thousand different ways, lead them by innumerable, inexplicable methods into various
fallacies and perils [...]. Demons, with unspeakable derision and in diverse shapes, express their
encouragement to people who live in those parts; and indeed they also do them injury, that is, by
overturning their houses, killing their cattle, destroying their fields, and ruining their castles and
watercourses in every way. It is superfluous to demonstrate to the learned and wise all these
examples of demonic hoaxes, whether they are deeply concealed or more openly displayed, just
as it is utterly useless to discover their full details to the inquisitive and empty-headed, who are
satisfied by no reasons or authorities.91
This idea that even apparently-friendly fairies – those who do farm work or otherwise aid their
human neighbours – are, in reality, devils is not unique, nor is Olaus’ means of accounting for their
good deeds. By acting pleasantly, the fairies gain the humans’ trust and can then lead them into
mischief. Of course, seeing as the height of this mischief lies in honouring the fairies and not
recognizing them as devils, in indirectly turning one’s back on God by associating with the Lord’s
enemies, the argument will seem somewhat circular to today’s reader. Nonetheless, assuming that
these fairies are devils, it is easy to grasp Olaus’ point. The less subtly-antagonistic acts described
here are also common in later folklore.
In the course of my fieldwork, I often asked my Ærøese contributors when Danish belief in
fairies ceased to be widespread. The answer I usually received was “after the Reformation.” Not
only is this indicative of a general lack of knowledge of past folklore (after all, those who think that
Danes stopped believing in fairies in the early 1500s would have trouble accurately analysing
Hübertz), but it is also close to being the opposite of historical reality. As one can see from the
statements of Gerald of Wales and even Church fathers like St. Augustine of Hippo, there had long
been a belief that fairies were demonic. However, some Medieval writers are unwilling to paint all
supernatural creatures with so broad a brush, the result being that, Gervase of Tilbury, for example,
is unable to decide whether specific instances of encounters with social fairies are demonic, nondemonic yet non-angelic (that is to say, wondrous but altogether “natural”), or merely
hallucinatory.92 Some beings that Gervase sees as quite possibly natural would definitely have been
seen as supernatural by many early Protestants. Even if Gervase is somewhat extreme in his openmindedness, the majority of our Medieval sources simply state the facts of a legend and refuse to
give the supernatural beings any labels whatsoever.
At least as far as the learned were concerned, all this changed with the Reformation.
Protestantism tended to be more polarizing than Catholicism and engaged in a kind of “either
you’re with us or against us” philosophy. It is clear from legends that even the most helpful and
friendly of supernatural beings are too fickle to be ascribed directly to divine agency, and because
so many legends recount harm done to humans by the supernatural, fairies and apparent-ghosts had
to be classified as demonic. For what could not be explained by natural law, there was no middle
ground. Since it was known that Satan exists and is God’s enemy, much of the disincentive to
believe in apparently-fantastic tales disappeared. Gervase, William of Newburgh, and even the
usually hard-line Gerald93 all had cause to doubt certain stories that either conflicted with their
religious views or seemed highly improbable, but the Protestants were on sure enough theological
ground that if they had questioned the existence of fairies/devils, they would, by extension, have
been questioning the existence of God.
All of this might appear rather vague, so it may be useful to give an example of early Protestant
belief in the supernatural. Table Talk, a compilation of accounts of both formal and informal
speeches given by Martin Luther, contains the following account of Luther’s opinion concerning a
12-year-old boy in Dessau who can do nothing but defecate and eat huge quantities of food:
Luther suggested that he be suffocated. Somebody asked, “For what reason?” He replied,
“Because I think he’s simply a mass of flesh without a soul. Couldn’t the devil have done this,
inasmuch as he gives such shape to the body and mind even of those who have reason that in
their obsession they hear, see, and feel nothing? The devil is himself their soul. The power of
the devil is great when in this way he holds the minds of all men captive, but he doesn’t dare
give full vent to the power on account of the angels.”94
This report, concerning events taking place in 1532, has become the focus of considerable
dispute. Another version of this statement by Luther has the reformer suggesting that this
“changeling” [“Wechselkind”] be drowned in a river.95 A popular means of banishing
changelings was to drown them in rivers,96 but even on the basis of what we have quoted
above, from our folkloric perspective, there is nothing unusual about Luther’s beliefs. The
passage has, however, been used by non-folklorists to accuse Luther of barbarity, of
espousing the killing of disabled children on the grounds of their being disabled. This is
horrifically unfair since Luther’s point here is not that disabled children should be killed but
that demons should be killed.97
However this may be, there is no lack of evidence showing that Luther believed in the
existence of demonic changelings. The above passage can be complimented by any number of
other quotes. For example, in 1535, Luther says of Satan that:
Through his witches, therefore, he is able to do harm to children, to give them heart trouble, to
blind them, to steal them, or even to remove a child completely and put himself into the cradle
in place of the stolen child. I have heard that in Saxony there was such a boy. He was suckled
by five women and still could not be satisfied. There are many similar instances.98
On a different note, Luther says in 1539 “that changelings should indeed be baptised, because
during the first year one could not tell that they were changelings.”99
This side of Luther will come as a shock to most Scandinavians, not because it is
particularly significant to Luther’s worldview or because it makes Luther exceptional for his
time but because Scandinavians have grown accustomed to seeing Lutheranism as a cuddly,
caring religion. And how should people learn otherwise? The most commonly-cited English
translation of Table Talk, produced by the 19th Century literary critic, William Hazlitt, omits
the above-mentioned episode of the boy from Dessau entirely.
Those without prior knowledge of supernatural folklore are liable to misinterpret Luther’s
alleged advocating of the murder of disabled infants. The big shock, however, lies in the fact
that Luther believed in the non-Heavenly supernatural at all. Anachronistically, knowing very
little about daily life 200 – much less 500 – years ago, most people assume that the great men
of the past somehow rose above their societies, that while the common folk might have feared
an ever-present Satan, Luther viewed the Bible symbolically.
This was simply not the case. Up until the past few centuries, churchmen and learned men
– who were almost invariably recipients of a religious rather than secular education – turned
to the Bible for advice regarding the supernatural. For example, the Old Testament story of
the Witch of Endor100 was used both to combat critics of the existence of witchcraft and to
prove that witchcraft was hateful to God. The oft-cited reference to supernatural beings in
Isaiah 34:14 was also much debated, in part because, in this case, the beings are depicted as
merely very unpleasant and not necessarily Satanic. Those looking up this passage at home
might be a bit confused as to its relevance to fairylore. After all, the 1611 King James Bible
translates the passage as follows: “The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild
beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there,
and find for herself a place of rest.” This is a far cry from the Latin Vulgate text: “Et
occurrent daemonia onocentauris et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum ibi cubavit lamia et
invenit sibi requiem.”
Most glaringly, the English wild beasts is wilfully mistranslated from the Latin daemonia
[demons], itself an inexact take on the Hebrew “original.” Equally serious are the assumptions
that the Latin pilosus, or hairy ones, are satyrs and that lamia means screech owl. The King
James’ translators presumably use satyr because this Classical creature was familiar to Early
Modern English readers. However, whereas a Latin or Greek hairy one might well have been
a satyr, it is hardly likely that a so-named being from the Holy Land would have been one.
More complex – and more controversial today – is the meaning of lamia. Lamia was an
individualized, deadly Classical demon that shared some of the attributes of lilith, the
supernatural being who it translates for from the Hebrew. The translation of lilith to lamia
dates back to Hieronymus of Cardia’s 4th Century BCE writings. The translation of lamia to
screech owl dates back to 1611. The latter was inspired by a general Anglicization and despiritualisation of biblical references, which is rather odd considering that King James himself
was a firm believer in and writer about demons. Notwithstanding the King James translation,
theologians continued to view this lamia as a supernatural creature until contemporary belief
in the supernatural fell out of fashion. It was only then that the major work of Biblical
revisionism got under way.
So, what, exactly, is a lilith? The earliest extant occurrence of a lilith is in the Sumerian Epic of
Gilgamesh from about 2100 BCE. The Gilgamesh passage is very inexact, but from about the 9th
century BCE, the being is widely documented in Babylonian folklore, seemingly in the same form
in which it appears in Isaiah.101 A lilith story is told in the arcane Hebrew Book of Raziel, a central
pillar of Cabalist, or Jewish mystical, thought. In this tale, Elijah, the prophet, encounters Lilith and
her demonic companions and is told by Lilith that she is on her way to slay a newborn baby. When
Elijah threatens Lilith with the wrath of God, she begs to be spared and gives her word that she will
not abide in any place where one of her various names is uttered. To make good her promise, she
tells Elijah her names.102
It is interesting to see that ancient Hebrew fairies are under some of the same name taboos as
those of Northern Europe. Just like Rumplestiltskin and countless Nordic and British giants, lilith –
who is sometimes individualized and sometimes simply a species – can be driven away by the
sound of her own name. Those who claim that the Bible includes no reference to fairies are not only
ignoring leviathan, behemoth, and the hairy ones, but also this child-slaying night demon. It may be
said that such demons are relegated to the Old Testament and works of Hebrew mysticism, yet this
is also false. There is, for example, the litany of devils encountered in the Book of Matthew, most
famously those demons that Jesus casts out into a herd of swine.103 These devils are hardly
Miltonian fallen angels. It is all well and good to argue that these are clearly demons and not fairies,
but the distinction between the two was frequently opaque until the 20th Century. If there is a
textually-evident demonological gap between books in the Old and New Testaments, it is a much
more subtle one and involves the nature of angels.
Angels have relatively-little place in Northern European legendary tradition. These were not,
after all, localized beings so far as people living in Scotland or Sweden were concerned. Early
Catholic theologians were, however, deeply interested in matters pertaining to the helpers of God.
How, for example, did they look? Were they corporeal? What did their varying ranks represent?
Looking at biblical angels from a folkloric standpoint, it is possible to see a shift in character over
time. The following passage is one of only two Old Testament references to anything comparable to
the revolt in Heaven:
“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the
ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into
heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the
congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be
like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.”104
This is not all that specific and is, at least contextually, though not, perhaps, metaphorically,
addressed to a human king. In fact, we must read the Bible all the way through to its final book,
Revelations, before we find an outright description of the revolt. Here is the full extent of it:
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon
fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And
the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the
whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.105
It is interesting that one of the most important events in the history of the Christian world-view has
so little canonical basis. Here is where scholarship of the Apocrypha once again proves informative.
In the beginning, Satan was not evil. As Katherine Briggs explains, “In the Old Testament
writings of the pre-exilic period [prior to the 6th Century BCE Babylonian Captivity] there is little
evidence of distinction between good and bad angels except as regards function. An evil spirit was
one who did harm to Man, but he served the will of Jehovah as dutifully as a good one.”106 Even
later, for example, we find that the Book of Job which, despite being among the best-known
parables in the Old Testament, portrays a Satan who is obedient to and a servant of God long after
the revolt in Heaven must have taken place. Medieval churchmen often looked to the non-canonical
Babylonian Talmud for advice on such matters. Although not compiled until the 4th Century CE, the
Babylonian Talmud contains some Hebrew texts of great antiquity. Here, we can see a middle stage
between that in which all angels were good and that in which the angelic ranks were absolutely
split. Just as people today have difficulty understanding why God would order a devastating
tsunami or earthquake, people thousands of years ago had to accept that even though God
sometimes did things that were unpleasant for individuals, these disasters were in some way
justified in the overall scheme of things. Thus, we have a Satan who tries to provoke Job in the
name of God, and Sammael, the Angel of Death (recently – and oddly – re-envisioned in the film,
Hellboy), who does the dirty work of killing people.
Death is, of course, necessary. We simply wish that it would happen to other people instead of
to us. To this end, the Babylonian Talmud shows how prayer and scriptural study can hold off
Sammael, and as Briggs notes, “the very good were out of his jurisdiction. Sammael has no power
over Moses, and God Himself took him with a kiss.”107 This change in Jewish belief is sometimes
attributed to the Babylonian Captivity, when Judaism was exposed to the dualistic Persian
religion.108 Under Persian influence, unfortunate occurrences were no longer the fault of God. They
could be blamed on God’s nemeses. Angels like Satan and Sammael, who had performed the same
functions as did malignant – or at least dislikeable – gods in polytheistic religions, now became
minor deities outright in Judaism. If it is true that this fundamental change in Judaism’s view of
angels occurred during the Babylonian Captivity, then we can date the emergence of evil angels to
between the capture of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and the regime change in Babylon in 539 BCE. Nor
are these merely questionable biblical dates; they are a matter of secular history as well.
This analysis of change within Judaism was not part of Medieval or Early Modern theology, yet
it is significant that, back then, despite the Apocrypha already long having been deemed
apocryphal, the holy scriptures were seen as a far-larger body of work than they are today. Those
portions of the non-canonical texts that were most used were those that shed light on unclear
passages within the canon. As long as we view the official Christianity of 500 years ago as spiritfree or even as based solely on a strict reading of what is nowadays considered the Bible-proper, we
risk being unable to comprehend the actions of major figures in the history of religion.
Sometimes, misunderstanding historical context can completely warp the way we interpret an
event, as is evident in popular and academic theories about witchcraft persecutions. Because the
study of witch hunts involves so many usually-unrelated fields of history, it is an incredibly difficult
thing to get right. An expert in the legal history of Western Europe and the American colonies will
be capable of writing knowledgeably about what happened to accused witches in the courtroom; a
political historian will have the skill to analyse the practical and non-religious concerns that may
have convinced rulers to tolerate or promote witch hunts; a social historian will know all about the
economic pressures and lives of hardship that domineered Early Modern Europeans; and a folklorist
like myself will be able to talk endlessly about the beliefs of both the accusers and the accused. On
the other hand, it would be crazy for me to try to write about courtroom procedures and the
specifics of Early Modern law. In order to write about that in an even vaguely-competent manner, I
would have to do significant research outside of my own field. Luckily, I am aware of this fact, and
it is an easy fact to be aware of since one need only ask me, “What was the process of officially
charging a witch?” before I realize that I am completely ignorant about it.
But ask the average social, political, or legal historian, “What was the folkloric conception of a
witch?” and you will probably get a very definite answer. Everyone, it appears, knows what a witch
is, just as everyone knows the truth about fairies. Like fairies, witches are often seen as too
ridiculous even to contemplate. No sane man could ever have believed in such things, so those who
accused innocent men and women of witchcraft must have either been insane or using witchcraft as
a cover-up for ulterior motives. So, the game becomes one of “guess the origin of the insanity or the
ulterior motives.” Were people persecuted because they were independent women living in
misogynistic, patriarchal societies?109 Because their neighbours had caught encephalitis?110 Because
they were enlightened pagans who refused to worship the oppressive Christian god? 111 The
possibilities are endless.
Without giving credence to any particular claim, Brian A. Pavlac’s beginners’ or students’
guide to the subject offers Ten General Theories about the Origins and Causes of the Witch
Hunts.112 Only one of these theories, “The (Mistaken) Conspiracy Theory” takes its base in
folkloric reality, that is, in the possibility that people actually believed in evil witches, and
even this theory assumes top-down, elite control of witch hunts, something that was not
always the case and, anyway, does not account for initial accusations made by commoners
against fellow commoners. Furthermore, Pavlac asks, “But how could a rather minor idea [of
an organized Satanic cult], with so little supporting evidence, lead to such enormous efforts
by so many people, especially those with little to gain?” As Pavlac sees it, the main flaw in
this theory is, then, that it assumes belief in witches. Yet we know that people believed in
witches, Satan, and the whole caboodle as well. Even people who pre- or post-dated the witch
hunt heyday that stretched from the mid-15th to the mid-18th Centuries, who had nothing
whatsoever to do with the witch hunts, believed in these things. And if you sincerely believed
that your neighbour was cooperating with Satan in order to destroy all that was good in the
universe and that the only way of preventing this dastardly crime was to kill the perpetrator,
you would probably have few scruples about doing right by God. In such circumstances,
when the very fate of humankind is in balance, it is absurd to speak, as Pavlac does, of people
“with little to gain.” People of the past cannot be held to today’s standards.
Although witch hunts occurred in both Catholic and Protestant regions, they were more
common among Protestants, partially for theological reasons and partially, it seems, because
the Protestant churches were decentralized and lacked the restraining influence of Rome.
There is no attempt here to absolve Catholics of atrocities; the Vatican, after all, simply had a
different focus and was far more apt to execute influential occultists for heresy than for
practising witchcraft.
Even within Protestant or Catholic societies, popular and elite theories of witchcraft were
fluid. Normand and Roberts’ superbly-researched Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland shows
the process by which Scottish theories of witches changed over time. Prior to the 1590s,
British witchcraft was “a diffuse, heterogeneous jumble of healing practices, predictions,
maleficium and relationships with, and calling upon, various supernatural beings [...]. Witches
might operate in small groups, but were not thought of as gathering at large meetings.”113 As
can be imagined, witches who practised healing rituals and prophesy were not necessarily
disliked or scorned by their communities although their potential to do ill could make them
become objects of fear. Cases of witchcraft generally came to the attention of church
authorities when the community’s fear of a witch outweighed the benefits that interaction
with a witch could bring. It is important to realize here that many of the men and women
accused of witchcraft believed in this charge themselves. They did go around giving people
remedies for illness and saying charms; for some of them, such occupation was their
livelihood, and it was an occupation that their neighbours needed to have filled.
There are recent comparisons here as well, for Rieti found that a number of licensed
Newfoundland doctors of the previous generation had acquired a reputation for having
dealings with the supernatural:
According to tradition, both Dr. Dunn and Dr. Cron encouraged stories about their fairy
connections. A Bell Island informant claimed that he heard from Dr. Cron himself how he had
to walk to a patient in Upper Island Cove when his car was stalled by the spirit of a murdered
woman (the next morning the car started immediately). […] Drs. Cron and Dunn’s easy
familiarity with the fairies no doubt enhanced their authority and their patients’ confidence in
their ability to effect a cure. Whether they cultivated the role or not, the image of doctors and
priests as intercessors with otherworldly powers makes them natural figures for the accretion of
supernatural legends.114
For a certain type of patient, a doctor with intimate knowledge of fairies and ghosts might
have been the very best type of medical practitioner. It is not difficult to see many Early
Modern witches in this light.
The Scottish Protestant church, or the Kirk, dates from 1560. It was and is Presbyterian,
primarily influenced by Calvinism and more Puritanical than the church that arose from the
English Reformation. Despite this fundamentalist religious stance, the early Scottish church’s
view of witchcraft did not much differ from the Catholic one, and for three decades,
witchcraft continued to be seen as merely immoral and not overtly Satanic:
Witchcraft, sorcery and enchantment appeared among “the horrible crymes as now abounds in
the realme without any correction” that the general assembly of the kirk complained of to Queen
Mary in June 1565, and called for judges in every diocese to punish. That was two years after
the passing of the witchcraft act, but when witchcraft prosecutions were still extremely rare.
Witchcraft, sorcery and enchantment were among sins by which the kirk depicted a state of
lawlessness and moral disorder, along with “idolatrie, blaspheming of God’s name, manifest
breaking of the Sabbath Day, [...] adulterie, incest, manifest whoredome, maintainance of
Brodells, murther, reiffe, slaughter and spulzie.” Magical activities were not connected with the
devil.115
Men of religion might have believed that witches were covertly given their powers by Satan,
but this is still a far cry from the institutionalized witches’ sabbaths with the Devil that one
reads about later. As Emma Wilby proves, however, men of religion would have had good
reason for accusing witches of forming overt pacts with demons even before this time. The
relationships that Early Modern British witches claim with their demonic or fairy familiars are
more similar than is generally realised to those relationships that their prosecutors accused
them of having. Furthermore, Wilby shows, “Even elements of familiar lore most commonly
assumed by historians to have been of learned origin, such as the selling of the soul and the
pact, are to be found present in some form in descriptions of relationships between [later
North American] shamans and their spirit-helpers.”116 That is to say, phenomenologicallyspeaking and divested of their overtly-Satanic contexts, the charges that witch hunters made
against witches were, so far as the witches were concerned, more or less accurate.
One of the aspects of witch hunts often overlooked by non-folkloric scholars is the
significance of the testimonies of accused witches. On account of some – though by no means
all, or even necessarily most – of these confessions having been produced by torture, they are
frequently thought to be devoid of real value. Assuming, however, that people of all classes
believed in the reality of witchcraft even if they held different interpretations of what
witchcraft meant, the testimonies are quite enlightening. Besides, Wilby has made a
convincing case for the idea that many prosecutors and juries in witch trials were – far from
being hell-bent on sentencing the accused witches to death – quite willing to let the witches
go. Unfortunately, when given the opportunity to deny accusations, many witches refused to
do so and continued asserting that they had had relationships with familiar spirits.117
The gap between Early Modern British lay and clerical interpretations of witches’ spiritual
helpers consists not of differing ideas as to what witches did but differing ideas as to who
witches did these things with, i.e. devils or fairies.118 Scotland’s 1576 case of Bessie Dunlop
is an excellent example of this. Dunlop obtained her sundry magic powers of healing,
midwifery, and prophesy from the fairies, particularly from one fairy, Thom Reid, who had
once been a mortal man but had apparently died in 1547. So far as Dunlop was concerned,
there was nothing wrong with interacting with the fairies so long as one could get away with
it, and indeed, her account of her first meetings with the fairies shows that she was cautious
and only accepted their help after assurances as to her safety. Those who were in charge of
trying Dunlop for witchcraft, however, did not view dealings with the fairies so lightly even
though the accused was known in the community to practice only beneficial magic. Her
interrogators, in a genuine effort to discover her crimes, “tried to fit her country beliefs into
the witchcraft notions of the educated, an attempt that Dunlop resisted.”119 The Kirk did not
believe that Dunlop had been associating with Satan himself, but it was convinced that her
fairies were devils. Dunlop was convicted and burned.
It was only with the sudden, politically-charged outbreak of witchcraft during the reign of
King James VI (later, King James I of England) that Scotland acquired the Continental
theology regarding witches’ personal pacts with Satan.120 The intense Scottish witch-scare of
the 1590s was, as Normand and Roberts fascinatingly detail, one of the more political of the
witch-scares though its political overtones are, of course, no proof that the supernatural
element was not believed in. Should anyone view political factors as the primary motivations
for the persecutions at this point, they would do well to consider that, in 1591, James himself
wrote his treatise on devils entitled Dæmonologie. This book is unique in that it is the only
such extant work written by a head-of-state, and it includes the interesting comment that the
so-called fairies, which are really devils, may appear:
to the Witches, to be a cullour of safetie for them, that ignorant Magistrates may not punish
them for it [For being witches.]. That sorte I say, ought as seuerely to be punished as any other
Witches, and rather the more, that that they goe dissemblingly to woorke.121
In James’ opinion witches – in full knowledge that fairies are demons – are likely to use the
fairies as an excuse, professing them to be non-demonic.
James was not the only person of this mind. One English witchcraft trial concerned a man
accused of obtaining healing medicine from the fairies. The jury – unwilling, it seems, to link
fairies with the Devil – acquitted the man, forcing the less generously-minded judge to let him
off with nothing more than a stern rebuke.122 As this case and that of Bessie Dunlop show, it
is difficult to get a feel for popular opinion on the basis of the opinion of the elite. Generally,
the beliefs of the unlearned majority of the population went undocumented. Well-travelled
writers like Gerald of Wales, Gervase of Tilbury, and Olaus Magnus often received their
supernatural stories from believers among the lower classes, but none of them record these
stories in the words of their narrators. That scholarly habit would not yet arrive until the close
of the 1600s.
The most famous court case involving fairies is, in fact, one of the most famous cases in
history, the 1431 heresy trial of Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc). Jeanne’s interrogators are not
overly concerned with fairies since, in this pre-Reformation world, association with fairies
was more likely to be simply immoral than outright Satanic although this is less consistent in
Continental than in British theology. The relevant portion of her first trial shows, however,
how easily various supernatural concepts could blend together in folk belief:
Then she [Jeanne.] was questioned about a certain tree growing near her village. To which she
answered that, fairly near Domrémy, there was a certain tree called the Ladies’ Tree, and others
called it the Fairies’ Tree; and near by is a fountain. And she has heard that people sick of the
fever drink of this fountain and seek its water to restore their health; that, she has seen herself;
but she does not know whether they are cured or not. […] She said sometimes she would go
playing with the other young girls, making garlands for Our Lady of Domrémy there; and often
she had heard the old folk say (not those of her family) that the fairies frequented it. And she
heard a certain Jeanne, the wife of mayor Aubery of Domrémy, her godmother, say that she had
seen the fairies; but she herself doesn’t know whether it is true or not. As far as she knew, she
said, she never saw the fairies at the tree. Asked if she saw them elsewhere, she does not know
at all. She had seen the young girls putting garlands on the branches of the tree, and she herself
sometimes hung them there with the other girls; sometimes they took them away, and
sometimes they left them there.
She said that since she learned that she must come to France, she had taken as little part as
possible in games or dancing; and did not know whether she had danced near the tree since she
had grown to understanding. Although on occasions she may well have danced there with the
children, she more often sang than danced. There is also a wood, called the oak-wood, in French
le Bois-chesnu, which can be seen from her father’s door; not more than half a league away. She
does not know, nor has she ever heard, that the fairies repair there; but she has heard from her
brother that in the country around it is said she received her message at the tree; but she says she
did not, and she told him quite the contrary. Further, she says, when she came to the king,
several people asked her if there were not in her part of the country a wood called the oakwood; for there was a prophecy [Said to have been made by the legendary Merlin.] which said
that out of this wood would come a maid who should work miracles; but Jeanne said that she
put no faith in that.123
The canny Jeanne makes a number of points against the implied accusation. She cannot say
whether or not the spring or tree have healing powers; she says that other families are behind
the idea that fairies haunt the places; her previous frolics at the tree were but childish games;
she cannot say that she has ever seen a fairy; and she disbelieves the prophecies that
apparently concern her.
Nevertheless, there is much of value for us in this short passage. The tree in question is
associated with both with fairies and saints. Whereas Jeanne, as a child, made garlands for the
Virgin Mary, others perhaps made them as gifts for the fairies. Although Jeanne has never
heard that fairies frequent the Oak-wood, her denial of having heard this hints at its
significance to her interrogators. If the prophecies of which Jeanne speaks were really
attributed to Merlin, it was almost surely Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fleshed-out image of
Merlin that people had in mind. It is noteworthy that Geoffrey gives Merlin a human mother
and a demonic father. Even if there is no folkloric “original” for Geoffrey’s work, it is very
likely that he got this idea from then-prevalent stories of couplings between hot-blooded
social fairies and mortal women.124 Since this would make Merlin a half-fairy, it would be a
dangerous thing for Jeanne indeed if fairies lived in the Oak-wood. Their residence there
would lend credence to the idea Jeanne both “received her mission at the Fairies’ Tree” and
was inspired by the prophecies regarding the wood, neither of which are too complimentary
with the more saintly explanations for her visions. Jeanne d’Arc would, of course, eventually
be executed for wearing men’s clothing, not for concourse with the fairies.
In spite of the witch hunt, in the England of the late 1500s and early 1600s, literature was
booming. John Lyly’s 1591 Endymion is the first extant piece of English theatre to include
fairies as characters. These fairies play a very minor role in the action and appear only in
order to punish the play’s villain by pinching him. This would not be of particular interest if
the fairies were not obviously folkloric in nature: Pinching is a major occupation of
diminutive fairies, and in this case, the villain’s offence is to spy upon fairy activities,
breaching fairy privacy being a serious crime. It seems that Lyly’s play sparked something in
the public imagination, and we all know where this literary imagination would lead: It would
lead to a world in which Tinkerbell is the archetypal fairy.
However, it would, as Katherine Briggs argues, be wrong to attribute fairies’ eventual
trivialization solely to the inventions of poets. Increased literacy following the invention of the
printing press diversified and popularized literature. Broadside ballads – no more than cheap,
mass-produced, single-sheet texts of songs – proliferated and catered to new readers by
offering up old, familiar stories. “Folk-lore began to seep upwards into literature,” and as time
went on, traditional fairies “mixed with the literary fairy-folk [...] and became fashionable
with the more sophisticated classes. The pleasing and poetic traits of the little flower-loving
fairies had long existed in solution, as it were, in the alembic of fairy-lore; the Elizabethan
poets merely precipitated it.”125
Lyly’s fairies are cute ornamentation in a play not at all focused on fairies. When
Shakespeare gets in on the act with A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the mid-1590s, he pushes
fairies to the forefront. There are a host of genuinely-folkloric Northern European fairy
attributes in this play, and the character of Puck in particular rises up like a great
amalgamation of disparate strands of belief: Shakespeare’s treatment of him would vault this
formerly shadowy name for a type of hobgoblin or brownie into renown and widespread
literary imitation. Most importantly, however, Shakespeare presents us with a miniature fairy
court: Oberon and Tatiana may be human-sized, but many of their subjects are brilliantly tiny,
small enough to crawl into flowers. Furthermore, although powerful and tricksy, these fairies
are also friendly. Briggs sees this diminutiveness as proof that the folkloric fairies informing
Shakespeare’s creativity were likewise minuscule,126 yet however this may be, it is surely a
sign of Shakespeare’s huge contemporary influence that – within a few decades of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream’s first performance – dainty, diminutive fairies had become all
the rage. Formerly, Romances had been peopled by human-sized, stately fairies, but these
beings were completely drowned under a wave of wee folk that has rushed on, more or less
uninterrupted, until the present day.
Although our Medieval sources present us with but a single example of truly tiny
fairies,127 we can be fairly certain that they pre-dated Shakespeare in some regions. Even so,
their post-Shakespearean success is staggering. Robert Herrick, William Browne, and
Michael Drayton all wrote fairy poetry in the early- and mid-17th Century and not only further
decreased the fairies’ stature but also largely disinherited them of their traditional powers.
Shakespeare’s comic fairies still lord over the world of man; those of the Jacobean poets are
so helplessly small that they are primarily instruments for court satire.128 By today’s
standards, only one thing is missing: Wings.
We cannot know for sure when wings first appeared on fairies. Even if there were a broad
folkloric basis for winged fairies prior to the 17th Century, the fact would not necessarily have
been recorded; after all, our Medieval historical texts are short on physical description.
Nevertheless, winged fairies outside of the arts are a definite oddity, and their near-complete
absence in legendary sources throughout history strongly suggests that they never penetrated
rural folklore.129 In any case, the first fairies who can be positively identified as possessing
wings are those in Alexander Pope’s “heroi-comical poem” The Rape of the Lock, completed
in 1714:130
Some [of the fairies] to the sun their insect-wings unfold,
Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;
Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid bodies half dissolved in light.131
These fairies are minuscule, winged, and so delicate as to be scarcely visible. Indeed, the very
identification of these beings as fairies is problematic since Pope sees them as sylphs, as
alchemical elementals. Although Pope writes about these winged spirits near the start of the
1700s, winged fairies first appear in the visual arts at the close of this century. Fuseli painted
a bat-winged Puck in 1790, and insect wings first crept onto the scene in 1798, with
Stothard’s illustrations for The Rape of the Lock. Nicola Brown notes that Stothard’s fairies
“are clearly derived from putti”, the result being that art’s first insect-winged fairies look
rather like the plump, angelic children of Italian Renaissance art.132
Briggs intriguingly theorizes that fairies obtained their wings “about the time when angels
became predominantly feminine, and were popularly supposed to be departed spirits rather
than beings of another order,”133 a conception of angels that is still common today despite
having no Biblical foundation134. As we have noted, fairies are sometimes seen as the dead as
well but usually either as the pagan dead or people who are only illusorily dead and were, in
fact, kidnapped by other fairies. The connection here would seem to be that, when angels
became personalised and deeply concerned with human minutiae, they began to resemble
literary fairies in everything but size. There is little difference between the today’s popular
idea of a guardian angel and, for example, the Blue Fairy in Collodi’s Pinocchio. Whereas
both heavenly angels and their fallen brethren have traditionally been depicted with bird-style
wings, winged fairies usually have to make do with dragonfly or butterfly wings. This might
be on account of glittering insect wings being prettier than bird wings, or, more practically, it
could simply be a matter of scale: An insect-sized fairy would look faintly ridiculous with
wings transplanted from an albatross.
However they came about, wings have become ubiquitous on fairies in the arts. Many of
the Romantic and National Romantic artists returned to folkloric sources, but widely read as
the works of Keats and Coleridge may have been, they never supplanted the image of the
literary flower-fairy in popular culture. That the type of fairy written about with such
sophistication by Drayton and Pope is now primarily relegated to art aimed at children and
only rarely makes its way into the adult world highlights the hopelessness of the Romantic
attempt to re-establish folkloric fairies. Most people are introduced to fairies by Disney’s
Peter Pan, not Keats’ La Belle Dame sans Merci. Flower-fairies are so far removed from
folkloric fairies that it is as if writers of children’s literature and folklorists are speaking
different languages.
Indeed, in Scandinavia, they are speaking different languages. In Denmark, the present-day
name for a tiny, winged fairy is either alf or fé. In Old Norse, an alf is a member of a race of
mythological beings and is related to the Anglo-Saxon word that we have translated as elf. As Old
Norse evolved into the younger Scandinavian languages, alf evolved as well, becoming elverfolk,
ellefolk, and a number of other variations on this theme. Just as today’s English-speakers do not
refer to fairies by the Old English ylfe, Danish speakers in the Early Modern period did not speak of
alfs. In English, the Latin-rooted forms of what would, eventually, become the word fairy gradually
replaced elf in most contexts, and elf would not truly re-enter the mainstream until J.R.R. Tolkien
took up the cause. When literary flower-fairies were imported to Scandinavia from England, they
did not, of course, resemble the Scandinavian folkloric elverfolk any more than they resembled
social fairies from English folklore. The flower-fairies were, then, translated into the Scandinavian
languages as fé (ultimately derived from the same source as fairy) or alf (the long-disused name of
their folkloric forefathers). The result is that, in Denmark, there is significantly-less confusion
between folkloric and literary fairies than in English-speaking countries simply because the Danes
have had the benefit of different words describing different concepts.
This is not to say that most Danes have much knowledge of folkloric fairies. When I ask people
to tell me about the fairies [“elverfolk” or “ellefolk”] that were objects of belief in Denmark three
hundred years ago, some people know almost nothing and some others do the translation
themselves and talk to me about alfs, about literary flower-fairies. Others speak about fés in this
context, but this usage may be limited by yet another historical complication: Fairy and fé both
have the same Latin root, but the latter entered Danish with the French fairy tales and has, as a
result, come to be primarily associated with the “fairy godmothers” that are so common in these
fictional stories. Thus, the linguistic “advantage” held by the Danes can be seen to be double-edged:
Whereas a culturally-knowledgeable Englishman might be able to tell me that flower-fairies are
literary descendants of folkloric fairies, only very few Danes are aware of the alfs’ pedigree, and
even those people who can tell me the most about elverfolk tend to treat alfs or fés simply as a
separate strand of folklore, as largely unrelated to elverfolk but still a part of past belief.
An oft-forgotten fact is that, back in the 1590s, some members of the audience at performances
of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream must have, themselves, believed in fairies. As we
have seen, belief does not rule out fictionalisation, and there is no evidence either way as to
Shakespeare’s own beliefs. Unfortunately, most people today who read or watch this play are
completely unaware of its context, cannot even begin to comprehend its creative depth since they
work under the assumption that fairies are and were but creatures of fiction. They may be fictional
in the 21st Century, yet in the Early Modern period, they were widely accepted as realities even
though explanations for their existence were mixed.
As Hunter explains in his captivating Occult Laboratory, in the second half of the 1600s, a
number of scientists, led by Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society, discovered a new
use for fairies. Scepticism in the supernatural had become popular among some fashionable
Londoners, and this was seen as representing a grave danger to the Christian faith. In the
words of a member of the more respectable crowd, “It is plain the rejecting of the being and
commerce of Demons or Infernal Spirits opens a door to the denial of the Deity.”135 This
sentiment that disbelief in the supernatural is a precursor to atheism is relayed with greater
passion already in the 1640s by Sir Thomas Browne:
So many learned hands [...] so far forget their metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale of
creatures, as to question the existence of spirits; for my part, I have ever believed, and do now
know, that there are witches. They that doubt of these do not only deny them, but spirits: and are
obliquely, and upon consequence, a sort, not of infidels, but atheists.136
The task for men of science was to prove the existence of the supernatural. There existed
plenty of supernatural accounts, yet as Boyle soon learned, large swathes of folklore were
inappropriate for the project, not only because the scientists deemed some of the purported
experiences untrue but because their sceptical opponents found it easy to laugh-off apparently
outlandish stories. The scientists studied “witchcraft and spirit phenomena with a view to
deleting the mass of poorly authenticated stories, and leaving a residuum which could not
admit explanation by other than supernatural means.”137 Scientific focus turned north, towards
Scotland, where a prophetic phenomenon known as second sight was an object of widespread
belief. Unlike stories of ghosts and witches, second sight narratives were impressive without
being freakish.
Although we will have more to say about second sight later, our concern at the moment is
with the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, an unusually well-educated rural minister who
had, at Boyle’s request, produced a Scots Gaelic translation of the Bible in the 1880s. Kirk
became involved in the second sight project through this association with Boyle, and the
resultant 1692 treatise, The Secret Common-Wealth, is surely among the most fascinating
fairy documents ever written. As this work is one of the few learned, detailed, scientific, and
first-hand descriptions of fairies to come out of post-Medieval, pre-Romantic Europe138, we
will quote it extensively.
The fairies of Kirk’s Scottish community are frequently visible to those who possess
second sight, and though the minister approaches his subject theologically, he does not draw
the demonic conclusions of many of his contemporaries, possibly because he is a seer himself,
a possessor of second sight. Kirk begins with a simple description of the fairies:
These siths or Fairies, they [The locals.] call sluagh maith or the good people: (it would seem, to
prevent the dint of their ill attempts: for the Irish [Gaelic-speakers.] use to bless all they fear
harme of) and are said to be of a middle nature betwixt man and Angell [...]. Some have bodies
or vehicles so spungious, thin and defecate, that they are fed by only sucking into some fine
spirituous liquor that pierce like pure air and oyl: others feed more gross on the foyson or
substance of cornes and liquors, or on corn itselfe, that grows on the surface of the Earth; which
these fairies steall away, partly invisible, partly preying on the grain as do Crows and Mice.
Wherfore in this sam age they are sometimes heard to bake bread, strike hammers, and to do
such like services within the litle hillocks where they most haunt: som whereof of old befor the
Gospel dispell’s paganism, and in som Barbarous places as yett, enter houses after all are at rest,
and set the kitchins in order cleansing all the vessells. Such drudgs goe under the name of
Brownies. when we have plentie, they have scarcity at their homes; and on the Contrarie (for
they are not impowered to catch as much prey everie where as they please.) Their robberies
notwithstanding, oftimes occasione great Ricks of corn not to bleed so well (as they call it) or
prove so copious by verie far as was expected by the owner.139
Here, we find a number of fairy activities that occur on Hübertz’s Ærø: Fairies steal grain
from the fields as in the midwife legend; they bake bread in their hills as they do in the tale of
the broken ped; and by the sounds of their daily toils, they are known to pursue human
occupations beneath the earth. Surprisingly, Kirk tempers his description of the fairies’ thefts
by noting that, prior to human settlement in regions inhabited by the subterraneans, the fairies
“had their easy tillage, above ground as we now,”140 hinting that they only steal out of
necessity and the loss of their traditional farmland.
One of Kirk’s more intriguing suggestions is that the fairies might live inauthentic lives,
acting out human labours for appearance’s sake only: “They are distributed in Tribes and
Orders; and have children, Nurses, marriages, deaths and burials, in appearance even as wee
(unless they do so for a mock-show, or to prognosticate som such thing to be among us.)”141
The kernel of this is not new, and it is interesting to compare it with Shakespeare’s treatment
of the emotionless Ariel in The Tempest142 some eighty years earlier. Kirk, however, takes the
idea of the fairies’ intimate connection with humans much further, holding that some fairies,
usually visible only to those with second sight, take the forms of certain men and follow them
about, aping their actions.143
However odd this behaviour may be, Kirk does not go so far as to claim that all fairies are
mere doubles to humans. Fairy houses are “large & fair” though generally invisible.144 Also,
the subterraneans sometimes require human assistance in regards to their children. One of
these instances is described in some detail:
I add these subsequent relations, som whereof I have from my acquaintance with the actors and
patients. And the rest from Eye-witnesses to the matter of fact. The first whereof shall be of a
Woman taken out of <her> Child-bed, and having a living Image of her substituted in her room,
which resemblance decay’d, dy’d, and was buri’d, but the person stoln returning to her husband
after two years space, he being convinc’d by many undeniable tockens, that she was his former
wife, admitted her hom, and had diverse children by her. among other reports, she gave her
husband this was one, that she perceiv’d little what they did in the spacious hous she lodg’d in;
until she annoynted one of her Eyes with a certan unctione that was by her, which they
perceiving to have acquainted her with their actions, they fann’d her blind of that Eye with a
puff of their breath; she found the place full of light without anie fountain or Lamp from whenc
it did spring. This person livd in the countrey nixt to that of my last residence [Balquhidder.],
and might furnish matter of disput among Causists, whither If her husband had been mary’d in
the interim of her two years absenc, he was oblidg’d to divorce from the second spous, at the
return of the first. There is an art appearingly without superstition, for recovering of such as are
thus stoln, but I think it superfluous to insert it.145
Here, we have a chronological link between the fairy midwife/nurse stories of Gervase of
Tilbury and Hübertz. This is just one such link: Countless analogues were to be recorded in
the folklorically-productive 19th century. It will be seen once again that the legends in Hübertz
and Gervase are not simply isolated accidents of history. Belief in fairies remained
substantially unchanged throughout the interim six centuries.
Kirk proceeds to describe the fairies’ habits, further showing that these beings do not live
entirely alien lives from those of men:
Their apparell and speech is like that of the people and countrey under which they live: so are
they seen to wear plaids and variegated garments in the high-lands of Scotland and Suanochs
heretofore in Ireland. [...]
Their men travell much abroad, either pressageing or apeing the dismall and tragical
actiones of som among us, and have also manie disastrous doings of their own, as
Convocationes, fightings, Gashes, wounds, and Burials, both in the Earth and air:146 They live
much longer than wee, yet die at last, or least, vanish from that state. [...]
They are said to have Aristocratical Rulers and Laws, but no discernible Religion, Love or
Devotione towards God the Blessed Maker of all. They disappear whenever they hear his name
invocked [...]. They do not all the harm which appearingly they have the power to do: nor are
they perceived to be in great pain, save that they are usually silent & sullen. They are said to
have many Toyish Books. But the operation of these peeces only appears in som paroxysms of
antic Corybantick [Ecstatic frenzy.] jollity— As if ravish’t and prompted by a new Spirit entring
into them at that instant, lighter and merrier than their own. Other Books they have of involved
abstruse sense, much like Rosicrucian stile. [...] They are not subject to sore sickness, but
dwindl and decay at a certain period, all about one age. Som say their continuall sadness is
because of their pendulous state (like those men Luc. 13. 26.) as uncertain what at the last
Revolution will becom of them, when they are lockt up into an unchangable condition: and if
they have any frolic fits of mirth, ‘tis as the constrained grinding of a Mort-head [A human skull,
possibly personifying Death.], or, rather as acted on a stage, and moved by another, then
cordially coming of themselves: But other Men of the second sight being illiterate and unwary
in their observationes, vary from these.147
Here is the fairy sadness and sombreness that so inspired the Romantic poets. For Kirk’s
fairies, happiness is either an act or some kind of bizarre, fleeting sickness. That the fairies are
in possession of complex metaphysical and mathematical books like those of the Rosicrucians
(a supposed secret society, which we shall consider later, active in the early-17th Century) is
highly unusual, suggesting that there is more to the fairy psychology than Kirk is letting on.
The final lines of the above passage reveal that Kirk is aware of the gap between his and
the uneducated folk’s interpretations of fairies. Up until this point, transcripts from witch
trials have been our only direct source of knowledge about unlearned belief, but the methods
of scholarship were shifting in the late 1600s, and while greater value was still placed on the
accounts of educated men than on those of commoners, there was a definite focus on the
scientific recording of first-hand experiences, frequently in the narrator’s own words. Kirk, a
rural minister, is a bit behind the scholarly trends pioneered by those like John Aubrey and
Boyle, yet even he follows up the above statement with a brief rundown of popular belief as
to the fairies’ nature.
Further on, Kirk writes at length of elf-shot, the same phenomenon we encountered in the
Anglo-Saxon medical texts, and gives us another rare glimpse into truly popular folk belief
when he describes the “superstitious” opinions of those who connect the fairies with the dead:
There Be manie places called Fayrie hills, which the mountain-people think impious and
dangerous to peel or discover, by taking earth or wood from them; superstitiously believing the
souls of their predecessors to dwell there. And for that end (say they) a Mote or Mount was
dedicate beside everie Churchyard, to receave the souls, till their adjacent Bodies arise, and so
become as a Fayrie-hill.148
The uneducated folk may be incorrect to view fairies as their departed ancestors, but they may
be on to something when they note the close proximity of churches to burial mounds. As with
Jeanne d’Arc’s Fairy Tree, Christian and non-Christian holy sites often coincide. Across
Northern Europe, churches and graveyards were set-up beside pre-Christian holy sites such as
mounds or wells, probably either because, during the conversion period, it made sense to
continue burying people where people had always been buried or, more likely, because the
sites that were sacred to pagans were also sacred to Christians.
We have spent much time in the world of the Reverend Robert Kirk, but it important to
remember that he is but one narrator, selected from among an inestimable many, who seeks to
relay the truth about fairies. Kirk is not special because he is an educated believer. Many of
his far more prolific and famous contemporaries were believers as well, and the later
Romantic and National Romantic movements would bring with them a wave of geniuses who
either believed or very much wanted to believe. Kirk is special because fairies were a part of
his everyday life, and he had the ability to write about them and theorize on them without
needing a scholarly middleman. In Kirk’s treatise, we find a self-awareness of his role in
combating the untruths that he believes to be prevalent among the literate, fashionable
Londoners at whom his work is aimed, and he couches his criticism of disbelief and
falsification in a subtle analogy suggesting moral polarities between humans and fairies:
These subterraneans have Controversies, doubts, disputs, Feuds, and syding of parties, there
being som ignoranc in all Creatures, and the vastest created intelligences not encompassing all
things. As to vice and sin, whatever their own Laws be, sure according to ours, and Equity
naturall, civil and reveald, they transgress and committ acts of Injustice, and sin by what is
abovesaid; as to their Stealing of Nurses, to their Children, and [...] catching our Children away
(may seem to Heir some Estate in those invisible dominions) which never return. For the
incontinence of their leannain sith or succubi who tryst with men, it is abominable. But for
swearing and intemperance they are not observed to those irregularities, as to Envy, Spit,
Hypocrisy, lying and dissimulatione.
As our Religione obleidges us not, to make peremptory & curious search into these
abstrusebesses; so Historys of all Ages give as many plain exemples of extraordinary
occurences as make a modest inquiry, not contemptible. How much is written of pigmie’s,
Fayries, Nymphs, Syrens, Apparitions, which tho not the tenth part true, yet could not spring of
nothing?149
Kirk is best known today not for The Secret Common-Wealth itself, which is hardly suitable
reading material for flower-fairy enthusiasts, but for the circumstances regarding this work’s
composition. Shortly after its completion, Kirk’s body was discovered at the foot of Aberfoyle’s
Fairy Knowe, and it was rumoured that, due to his having breached fairy privacy, he had been taken
into the fairy hill and a stock, or false body, had been left in his place.150 In 1806, the then-Minister
of Aberfoyle, Reverend P. Graham, related the story concerning what happened after Kirk’s
apparent death, and this was, in turn, retold by Sir Walter Scott:
After the ceremony of a seeming funeral, the form of the Rev. Robert Kirke appeared to a
relation, and commanded him to go to Grahame of Duchray, ancestor of the present General
Graham Stirling. “Say to Duchray, who is my cousin as well as your own, that I am not dead,
but a captive in Fairyland, and only one chance remains for my liberation. When the
posthumous child, of which my wife has been delivered since my disappearance, shall be
brought to baptism, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the
knife or dirk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this opportunity is
neglected, I am lost for ever.” Duchray was apprised of what was to be done. The ceremony
took place, and the apparition of Mr. Kirke was visibly seen while they were seated at table; but
151
Grahame of Duchray, in his astonishment, failed to perform the ceremony enjoined […].
Kirk may have been lost forever, but folklore research into the supernatural continued to
progress over time, eventually reaching its pinnacle with the various Romantic movements of
the 1800s, which urged political independence on the basis of the elevation of distinctive folk
cultures. These national folk cultures were, of course, distinctive, but considering the parallels
between fairy beliefs across Northern Europe, it is difficult to see a foundation for claims to
independence on these grounds. Those Irishmen and Scotsmen who sought cultural, if not
political, separation from England studied fairies very much like those found in enemy
territory. Those Norwegian folklorists who shaped a national consciousness inspired a
movement with similar results in Denmark, the country to which Norway was bound. Where
folklore of the supernatural has historically been used to promote nationalism, we cannot help
but suspect that it would have been put to more logical use promoting pan-Northern
Europeanism.
Most of the information we have about past fairy belief – as opposed to today’s fairy
belief, which is both less widespread and of a different sort than that prevalent from the
Middle Ages until the early 20th Century – comes from this Romantic era, from the time in
which Hübertz wrote. Most of the assumptions on which we judge older sources are drawn
from this period. We will not, however, go into any great detail here about this golden age.
Our focus on the older – the Medieval and Early Modern – accounts of fairies has offered us
substantially the same insights as can be gleaned from younger sources, albeit in lesser bulk,
and for those interested in the Romantic collectors, there are any number of fine books
available on the subject, both contemporary and retrospective, some of which are listed in the
present volume’s bibliography.
Chapter 6: In Search of the Troll Stone
In the summer of 2005, as I was driving through Mid-Jutland, I took a detour to the tiny
village of Tømmerby in search of a piece of physical folklore called Troll Stone. In common
with so many large, solitary boulders in Northern Europe, this rock is connected to stories
regarding stone-throwing giants, and as Briggs notes, such stories are usually too comic and
absurd to have ever been objects of belief.152 What makes Troll Stone special and what made
me want to see it is another legend concerning it: Starkad, one of the great heroes in Saxo’s
Gesta Danorum, is said to have sat upon it after a particularly hard battle and, in so doing, to
have left his impression in the rock.153
Tømmerby is a minuscule, one-road village and lying a few kilometres to the west of
Them, a rather larger town famed for its cheese. Although my source of information about
Troll Stone gave no precise details as to its location and stated only that the boulder rests “in a
little valley,” I expected that the locals would be able to point it out to me. After all, what else
could there be in Tømmerby? If the locals did not know about Troll Stone, it would mean, I
reasoned, that they knew no local history whatsoever. My worst expectations were of having
to scamper a few hundred meters across some farmer’s unmowed rye field in order to find a
large but unexceptional rock.
Getting to Tømmerby in the first place took a bit of a drive, so when I got to town, I
quickly sought out a house with a car in the driveway. A man in his mid-fifties answered the
doorbell, and I told him what I was looking for.
“What do you say it’s called?” he asked.
“Troll Stone.”
“Huh. I’ve lived in Tømmerby for 26 years, and I’ve never heard of any Troll Stone!” He
suggested, however, that I drive back to Them and visit the local history museum, an
establishment that, providentially, resided on Museum Road.
So, a short trip back to Them. I drove up and down Museum Road with no museum in
sight. It eventually became clear that my inability to find the museum – much less the highlyanticipated Troll Stone – lay in my having kept an eye out for a museum and not, as was the
case, a prettily-restored, half-timbered cottage. In the museum’s window was taped a paper
sign sporting the soul-deadening words “Open the first Saturday of every month.”
Since this kind of experience just made me want to find the Troll Stone even more, I
drove back to Tømmerby and pulled over alongside another house. As I approached the door,
I was met by a pair of profoundly articulate black dogs that did their best to let me know I was
not wanted. A woman, probably in her late forties responded to my knock. From inside, I
could hear some men socializing, evidently with the aid of beer. I asked the woman and her
two teenage daughters about Troll Stone.
The woman answered, “I’ve lived here for 10 years, and I’ve never heard of a Troll
Stone...”
She popped inside to hear if the men were any better informed, but they were of no use
either. Of course, had I dropped by a week ago, I could spoken with the old man living down
the street because he was a fellow who knew about that of sort thing, but since he had just
died, well... There was always Simon, living in house #13 on Tømmerby Road.
Simon was, at might have been expected, not home. Finally, discouraged and needing to
catch a ferry, I left town without having seen Starkad’s resting place.
It took me eight months to investigate the matter any further and ring up the Them
Historical Archives to inquire after the elusive Troll Stone. By this point, for the sake of my
argument concerning Danish lack of folkloric knowledge, I was half-hoping that the archivist
would have no idea what I was talking about. A man named Preben answered the phone.
After I stated my request, there was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, then
Preben asked meekly, “Are you sure you have the right Tømmerby?”
“Oh, yes, quite sure.”
“Well, I don’t know of any Troll Throne.”
“Troll Stone.”
“Ah! Troll Stone!”
“So, you know of it?”
“No,” confided Preben, “I’m afraid not.”
Although Preben was surprised that he had not heard of Troll Stone, he wisely conjectured
that it had probably been “broken up by a mason a long time ago.”154 This, as we have seen
with Grydehøj, is the way of many monuments, particularly those that, like Troll Stone, have
only folkloric significance and no place in material history. Today, everyone recognizes a
Bronze Age burial mound as something historic even without knowing anything about fairies.
But a naturally-occurring stone? It only gains historical value with knowledge of cultural
history. It would be unfair to assume that the people of Tømmerby know no local history on
the basis of the regional consciousness having lost track of Troll Stone. Simply, Troll Stone is
not the kind of history in which people are interested. Even if Tømmerby had no other site of
historical interest of any kind, the locals would be unlikely to regard Troll Stone as historical.
As long as trolls and Old Norse legendary heroes are merely fit for fairy tales, places like
Troll Stone are bound to be forgotten.
My experience with Troll Stone was a humbling one, but it is not surprising. If I were
searching for scraps of present-day belief in traditional fairies, Denmark would not be the best
place to look. Here, as elsewhere in this book, traditional denotes beliefs belonging to the
body of Northern European supernatural folklore that was prevalent from at least the 12th
Century until the early-19th Century. It takes little effort to find people who believe in fairies
who exist outside of this tradition. In the course of my studies on Ærø, I met only a single
man whose beliefs are of the old kind, yet I encountered numerous people who have strong
faith in other types of supernatural beings that they label fairies.
Today, in reaction to the philosophies behind Romanticism, some folklorists look down
upon the attempt to differentiate between authentic and inauthentic belief.155 This is a positive
development so far as it goes. After all, present-day beliefs are no less genuine or authentic
than those of the past: If people believe in fairies, the belief itself is true, no matter to which
tradition the fairies belong. On a folkloric level, authenticity is an empty concept. When one
looks at a belief historically, however, the situation is rather different. The flower-fairies of a
present-day spiritualist might be authentic, but the spiritualist’s assumption that these fairies
belong to ancient folk tradition is incorrect. To say so is not to denounce spiritualism; it is to
state a historical truth. Since today’s flower-fairy enthusiasts do not often use old folklore
collections as proof for their beliefs, disassociation between spiritualism and traditional belief
is hardly philosophy-shattering. In any case, it would be cruel to wish upon people the fairies
of tradition, the fairies who steal, kidnap, and murder. It is surely superior on a personal level
to believe in fairies who prance about in buttercups and act as guardians of nature. Yet none
of this changes the fact that belief in the antiquity of flower-fairies is mistaken. The extent to
which this mistaken belief exists today will be made clear over the following pages.
Within Northern Europe, Denmark is second only to England in the thoroughness of its
industrialization, meaning that, in general, traditional folk belief was of uncertain prevalence
by the time scientific folklore collection began in earnest in the Romantic period. Also, like
England, Denmark was historically an “occupying power,” not an occupied territory, and the
Danish Romantic movement lacked the impetus of political nationalism. This means that
some of the great lights of the Danish folklore movement – men like N.F.S. and Svend
Grundtvig, J.M. Thiele, Axel Olrik, and Evald Tang Kristensen – might have worked to
define and promote a national folk character, but they did not do so vis-à-vis a foreign
character and had rather more limited motivations than their contemporaries in Scotland,
Ireland, Iceland, Faroe, Norway, and Germany. In Denmark, then, it seems that traditional
folk belief not only died out more quickly than it did in neighbouring countries; it was also
less-enthusiastically recorded.
Even today, Denmark seems less interested in cultural history than are the other Nordic
lands. The best example of this might be in regards to Norse mythology. Worldwide,
Scandinavia is surely best known for its Viking heritage, of which the Old Norse religion is
part and parcel. Norse mythology is, indeed, taught at a basic level in every Danish child’s
primary school education, but an adult Dane who wishes to learn about this portion of her
cultural history in any serious way will run into trouble as long as she confines herself to
Danish-language texts. Denmark’s national epic is Saxo Grammaticus’ late-12th Century
Gesta Danorum, and it is no exaggeration to compare Saxo to Homer in terms of historical
significance within their respective homelands. Amazingly, however, up until Peter Zeeberg’s
2000 translation of Saxo’s Latin, the most recent translation into Danish had been that of
Jørgen Olrik in 1912, and the most widely-available translation was the work of Winkel Horn
in 1898.156 Despite the 2000 edition, Horn’s version is still the one you are most likely to find
in a book store, mainly because its text and illustrations have become classics, but also, one
suspects, because copyright has lapsed on the translation, making it considerably cheaper to
produce and sell. Unfortunately, Horn was toiling under the academic fashions of his era.
Besides Horn’s decision to heavily bowdlerize the text,157 the translator’s most surprising
deviation from his source material is his decision to rewrite Saxo’s occasional sections of
arch-Classical verse into a much abbreviated, theoretical Old Norse style, his choice “to
translate the text back to the style that Saxo translated it away from.”158 Those passages from
Gesta Danorum that are best known also tend to be those verses to which Horn bent his
creativity, the result being that Saxo’s current readership have, unknowingly, praised the
translation and bypassed the original.159
If Saxo’s Danish reputation has been allowed to suffer, he is, at least, better off than his
contemporary Old Norse writers. The other two major primary sources for Norse mythology,
The Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, have not been translated into Danish
since 1926 and 1928 respectively. It may appear odd to focus on Danish reading habits
concerning mythology rather than folklore, but whereas the mythology texts are readily
available (albeit in sub-standard translations), the works of the great Danish folklorists are
out-of-print. Thiele’s Legends of Denmark has not been printed since 1968 and Kristensen’s
Danish Legends was last printed in 1980. These and other significant figures from Denmark’s
19th century folkloric golden age tend to be easier to find in excerpted English translations
than in the original Danish. Simply put, folklore is not of great interest to today’s Danes.
That said, if one were to identify the type of place within Denmark in which one could
expect to find knowledge of traditional folk belief, Ærø would appear ideal. Ærø’s population
is small and generally rural, yet Marstal’s maritime history has ensured that the island has
long been connected with the outside world. Moreover, the strong sense of localness evinced
by the island’s inhabitants has made local history a relatively-popular subject of discussion.
From July 2005 until June 2006, I conducted formal interviews with 61 people, all but two
of whom were resident on Ærø at the time. A total of 51 of these interviews were both
digitally recorded and conducted according to a single methodology that is explained below.
Thus, when I offer statistics, they are, unless otherwise noted, derived from a 51-person
sample size. My contributors are not confined to any one social group but vary widely in
terms of age, sex, occupation, and education. It cannot, however, be said that they represent a
random selection of the island’s population. Because my own social connections are largely
confined to East Ærø, the communities of West Ærø are under-represented. A related factor is
that, particularly at the start of my period of study, I most frequently interviewed people with
whom I was already on familiar terms: My work in Marstal Youth Club and my wife’s job at
Marstal School means that teachers and others employed in the education sector are
overrepresented. The more people I interviewed, however, the wider I travelled socially, and
many of my contributors were suggested to me by other contributors. This, in itself, is
problematic as it allowed me to seek out strangers who I knew in advance to be, in one way or
another, especially “interesting” as regards folk belief. Finally, I purposefully sought
interviews among pastors and historians (both amateur and professional) since it seemed to
me that people within these two occupations might have special insights into my work. All of
this means that, however much I might make use of statistics gleaned from my research, the
results are probably not representative of Ærø, much less of Denmark. Although my sampling
of contributors is not representative, many of those with whom I spoke are those who would
be expected to possess the most knowledge of cultural history and past belief. We can, then,
conjecture that the truly “average Dane” will possess significantly-less knowledge than that
part of the population that is overrepresented in my study, those people whose educations,
professions, and interests have brought them into contact with folklore scholarship.
My interviews set out not only to gauge levels of historical knowledge but also to gauge
levels of present-day belief in a non-religious supernatural realm. My contributors generally
assume that highly-educated people are less likely to hold such beliefs than people with little
formal education, and however true this may be, it will be noted that, in this respect as well,
the over-representation of educated individuals in my sampling makes itself felt. If it is the
case that people with education have less belief than people without it, then we can expect
that our illusive “average Dane” to be more faithful than the figures we consider here will
suggest. I believe, however, that my research will show that this assumption on the part of the
well-educated is little more than a self-congratulatory fallacy and that while the expression of
belief varies according to social background, the level of belief does not.
The format of the interviews can be broken-up into two theoretically-distinct but often
practically-blurred stages: The knowledge-gauging stage concerned assessing the
contributor’s knowledge of past folk belief by means of asking a series of objective questions.
These questions were answered at greater or lesser length, with more or less interactivity on
my part depending on the individual contributor. With social fairies, for example, I asked my
contributors: 1) How did people living in Denmark about 300 or 400 years ago think fairies
looked? 2) In this old mindset, what did fairies do with their lives? 3) Do you know of any
stories or legends – local or otherwise – about fairies? It was always made clear in advance
that we were speaking of beings from past folk belief, not literature or other arts. Despite my
asking fixed questions in the knowledge-gauging stage, contributors’ replies usually led to
further, individually-tailored questions. It was typically not until the end of the knowledgegauging stage that the contributor and I began to discuss the contributor’s own beliefs in
earnest although more forthright and confident contributors sometimes mingled discussion of
their own beliefs with discussion of past beliefs. The knowledge-gauging stage typically took
between 30 and 40 minutes to complete for adult contributors. The subsequent belief-gauging
stage could last anywhere from just a few minutes to a few hours, depending on a
contributor’s experiences and willingness to talk. Nonetheless, few interviews with adults
were less than an hour in length. Interviews with youths were of far shorter duration and
could, on occasion, take as little as 20 minutes, presumably because young people have had
both less time to encounter texts concerning past folk belief and less time to experience
apparently-supernatural events themselves.
In the following chapter, we will consider what the knowledge-gauging stage of the
interviews tells us about the inhabitants of Ærø’s knowledge of past belief in social fairies.
Unless otherwise noted, I have used my contributors’ real names: All of my contributors were
informed of my intention to write a book on the basis of my research and were offered
anonymity on multiple occasions. There were instances where I felt that it might have been
better had particular contributors requested anonymity, but it is not my right to deny them
having their words properly attributed. In general, I think it is the duty of a folklorist to name
his or her contributors unless anonymity is requested.
Chapter 7: Perceptions of Past Belief in Social Fairies
In Denmark, social fairies come in a number of different forms and names but are all
functionally similar. Elvere, ellefolk, and elverfolk are pretty much synonymous in the
primary sources, and although they vary greatly in size, they are generally human in
appearance. Those human-sized Danish fairies of this type are sometimes hobbled by some
kind of distinguishing disability, most often a hollow back. Trolde, on the other hand, while
also of differing sizes, tend to be hairy, ugly creatures. Nonetheless, in terms of personality
and the kinds of stories in which they appear, trolde and the various forms of elvere seem to
be the same even if, for obvious reasons, unsightly trolde occur less frequently in tales of
human seduction than do beautiful elvere. Under the influence of literary and visual art,
today’s Danes are apt to consider trolde a completely separate kind of folkloric being from
elvere. Even though this assumption has little historical basis in folklore, because we are
looking at how people today view their ancestors’ beliefs, we will differentiate between trolde
and elvere by calling the former trolls and the latter fairies.
The essential unity of these trolls and fairies has not always been obvious to folklorists.
For example, the 19th Century Thomas Keightley, one of the earliest comparative folklorists,
first writes about Scandinavian fairies and then proceeds to discuss “dwarfs or trolls” in a
separate chapter. Interestingly, Keightley’s section on fairies includes a trio of haunting
ballads concerning seduction by beautiful fairy women alongside a pair of typical stories
involving stolen fairy cups,160 yet despite the chapter separation, both of these types of legend
also occur in the section on trolls.161 It is noteworthy that the range of troll stories is even
wider than that of fairies, which is saying a lot considering the massive body of fairy belief.
Denmark, with its decidedly-unmajestic landscape, often places trolls in the sorts of comic
stories that are usually attributed to giants in mountainous regions. With this in mind, the
etymology of Tømmerby’s Troll Stone becomes much less muddled: Boulder-throwing is
certainly the occupation of giants and not trolls, but with so few native folkloric giants
available, trolls have to take up the narrative burden, presumably increasing in size in the
process. Thus, rather disconcertingly, in today’s Danish popular conception, trolls are either
quite small or extremely large beings.
I had anticipated that J.R.R. Tolkien-style pseudo-mythological fairies or elves would be
prevalent in the popular consciousness, but here, I was mistaken. It should be recalled that, in
Danish, the most common word for fairies, elvere, is also the name for the beings in Tolkien.
Despite this, I found that the fairies of fantasy novels and film really only have bearing on the
ideas of youths and, even among them, are not universally accepted. Just three out of eight
teenage contributors unambiguously derive their social fairies from The Lord of the Rings.
One of these three contributors, 14-year-old Karoline Strand, restricts her Tolkien-borrowing
to comments on the fairies’ lifestyle:
Karoline Strand: They were a bunch of small things who lived in the trees. I mean, they dug
down under the trees, and then they had caves underground. And then, they came up when they
had to help people because I think they were good. I don’t think they were evil. I think they
wanted to help. They were small too. A meter, a bit more maybe. And then, they wore white
clothes. They were pretty. And then, this big nose and long, blond hair. And the men, they were
also sort of warriors who had to help and were also pretty and that kind of thing.
Adam Grydehøj: They only lived in the forest?
KS: Yes, they only lived in the forest.
AG: Did people believe in this type of thing on the island?
KS: Yes, I think so. I mean, out in Drej Forest, for example, that they lived there. So, I think
they did in the old days, at least in Marstal.
Karoline blends two literary conceptions that are not entirely compatible with one another.
Diminutive, forest-dwelling fairies who live under trees are the sort of beings one might
expect from a relatively-recent children’s fairy tale whereas beautiful, blond warriors
definitely belong to Tolkien. It is unclear what kind of “help” these fairies offer and what sort
of wars they would get involved in while living on Ærø, but it is, perhaps, being overly
ambitious to make a historical account out of Karoline’s testimony. There is a good reason
why Hübertz never mentions fairies living in Drej Forest, a remarkably slender pine tree
plantation running alongside Drejet, the road connecting East and West Ærø: Up until the
damming project of 1856, Drejet was an isthmus, and Gråsten Nor – the piece of land on
which Drej Forest lies – was covered by water. This is a sign of the decontextualization that
fairies have undergone. All of Ærø’s tiny share of forested land has been planted by man, and
by the standards of one living in, say, Mid-Jutland, none of it would be expansive or wild
enough to be considered a true forest. For a young person raised on the island, however, Drej
Forest has to measure up as best it can.
Even if the land had not been subaquatic in Hübertz’s time, even if the forest had existed
in the 1830s at its present-day size, it would still be ridiculous to think of it as being large
enough to house a race of meter-tall fairies. This thought process certainly does not lie beyond
Karoline’s abilities; it is simply that, for her, fairies are fairy tale creatures to whom normal
rules do not apply, and her attempt to integrate them into the actual, historical world ends in
absurdity. Despite knowing that, long ago, people believed in fairies, she evidently cannot
fathom this belief, cannot give a credible description of it. We come again to one of this
study’s primary questions: If people today believe that their ancestors believed in a race of
small, benevolent warriors who lived in the roots of trees growing in a tiny, artificial forest,
what kind of fools do we take our ancestors for? Fairies who live their own lives, who can
steal, kill, or give gifts at will may be foreign to today’s Western worldview, but they are
nothing compared with the fairies of Karoline Strand, fairies who – despite living on a little
island – are great warriors whose major purpose in life is, it seems, to fight for the sake of
humankind. With this in mind, we should not be surprised that Karoline does not know of any
local stories or legends regarding fairies.
Karoline’s synthesis of multiple literary ideas about social fairies is unique within my
sample group. This suggests either that people’s thoughts concerning fairies are more
sophisticated than I had suspected or that, notwithstanding the current popularity of The Lord
of the Rings, people are receiving very little information about fairies from any sources
whatsoever. Unfortunately, on the basis of what I found about knowledge of past brownie
belief, to be discussed later, the second of these options would seem to be the case.
Nonetheless, the total absence of Tolkien in discussions with adults does point to an
understanding that, at least as regards social fairies, the arts cannot be trusted to teach us
about history.
Although the present-day literary concept of beautiful warrior fairies is due to Tolkien,
this writer did not invent these beings haphazardly. Tolkien, a skilled mythologist, took the
fairies and fays of Romance and Celtic myth and placed them within the mythological system
of the Old Norse elves [alfs]. As such, they inheritors of an ancient tradition. The fairies of
Edmund Spenser’s celebrated The Faerie Queen of the 1590s represent perhaps the pinnacle –
and certainly the climax – of the Romance fairy. His fairy knights are chivalric warriors and
champions of Christianity. While there is more folklore in Spenser than one might suspect,
the individual elves and fairies of his epic poem are indistinguishable from humans, so much
so that a number of major plot lines are centred on a hero discovering that even though he has
thought that he was a fairy, he is actually a human who the fairies stole from his family as a
baby.162 Unfortunately, such is the length and complexity of this literary masterpiece that
folklorists do not always take the time to actually read any of it prior to making assumptions
about its influence: For example, Holbek and Piø, the authors of Denmark’s most popular
comprehensive and serious book on folklore, for example, attribute the emergence of the
flower-fairy concept to The Faerie Queen, which really could not be further from the truth.163
In any case, Tolkien’s genius is to take Spenser’s all-too-human Romance fairies, instil them
with the folkloric sense of longing and melancholy beloved by the19th Century Romantics,
and plop them down into a world based on Norse mythology.
When I spoke with 15-year-old Kresten Landro – an intelligent, engaging young man and
son of the then-mayor of Marstal Kommune – about fairies, it became clear that his
conception is different than that of Karoline Strand. In its own way, however, his is even
more confused, partially on account of the variety of Danish names for social fairies. He
differentiates between elves [elverfolk]; trolls [trolde]; and the subterraneans [de
underjordiske], the term preferred by Hübertz:
Kresten Landro: [The subterraneans are] very shy beings who’re afraid of sunlight and keep to
themselves beneath the earth.
Adam Grydehøj: How do they look?
KL: How do they look? Small. [...] Maybe, between trolls and humans.
AG: How big are trolls?
KL: [Laughing.] Oh, of course! [A subterranean is] about one and a half meters tall or
something like that. Small, compact. [...] It’s a little person who’s compactly-built and a bit shy,
or maybe not. [...]
AG: Are they social beings?
KL: I’d say that they’re social in the sense that they’re social with those beings they live with
underground, not with people above the earth.
AG: What did they do?
KL: What they did? I think they dug and that kind of thing, lived a normal life underground. [...]
AG: Do you know any stories about the subterraneans?
KL: No, I don’t know any stories. There are just a lot of pictures I have from movies and all
kinds of strange images of subterranean animals.
AG: What kinds of films?
KL: Everything from Disney’s Adventures of the Gummi Bears to The Lord of the Rings and
various Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales.
AG: A troll— What’s that?
KL: A troll? Big beard and, then, a craving for pipes. Always an axe… No, that’s a dwarf!
Sorry! A troll! No, a troll! Sorry, I was talking about dwarves! A troll is very hairy. Big nails on
its feet. Not a nice person. Not a nice being. Afraid of the light. They keep to themselves. An
unsocial being. Of aggressive character. And then, there’s some sort of spell around them, I
mean, some mystery or other.
AG: There was belief about elves who lured people away. Do you know anything about that?
KL: Yes, those are the elves who are in woods who lure people to themselves.
AG: So, you differentiate between the subterraneans and those who live in the forest?
KL: Yes.
AG: Could you describe those others, the ones in the forest?
KL: Yes, I’d call them elves. They’re maybe a bit more social beings and a bit taller and have
pointy ears and keep themselves clean. A very pious person. Mild person, not of an aggressive
nature. But maybe, under the surface, behind the façade, something else is lurking.
During interviews, I tended to introduce my questions about social fairies with the following
statement: “This next group of beings has many different names in Denmark. For example,
they can be called ellefolk, elverfolk, elvere, or de underjordiske. Can you try to describe them
for me?” A good number of contributors, like Kresten, who differentiate between the beings
holding these various names, focus on a single category. In Kresten’s case, he pays attention
to the last item on the list, the subterraneans. Knowing that most people do not consider trolls
to be the same as elves, I chose not to treat them alongside the other social fairies in order to
prevent confusion. From Kresten’s response to my question, it would seem that, had I
mentioned trolls, he would have decided to tell me about trolls, for his subterraneans are odd
beings indeed, part-troll and part-mole. I am unsure what he has in mind here, especially since
he attributes some of his knowledge of the subject to ideas about real-world subterranean
animals. Strangely, these subterraneans probably have more in common with the
subterraneans of Hübertz than Kresten’s aggressive, solitary trolls do with the trolls of
tradition.
Fear of light is an attribute of some Northern European fairies. It is also to be found in the
Bible, in the Old Testament story of Jacob’s encounter with what is usually interpreted as an
angel. Like so many Bible stories relating to the supernatural, it has been nearly reduced to
nonsense by the poor translation of key words into English:164
And he [Jacob.] rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his
eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. And he took them, and sent them over the brook,
and sent over that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the
breaking of the day. And when he [The man.] saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched
the hollow of his [Jacob’s.] thigh, and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he
wrestled with him. And he [The man.] said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he [Jacob.]
said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he [The man.] said unto him, What is thy
name? And he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for
as a prince has thou power with God [“‘Elohim”, not meaning “God” but the plural for divine
beings “of a lower kind”.165] and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked him, Tell me, I
pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he
blessed him there.166
If this is, indeed, an angel, it is a very strange angel. Although the man has dislocated Jacob’s
hip and could be expected to have the long-term advantage in the fight, he begs to be released
because “the day breaketh.” One might even suspect that the dislocation of Jacob’s knee is
mentioned specifically to draw our attention to the fact that the strange man needs to leave
despite his martial advantage. Jacob cannily exploits his opponent’s predicament by
demanding a blessing or wish, a common but risky ploy used by individuals who have
somehow gotten a supernatural being under their power. The man blesses Jacob by way of
giving him a new name, a further testament to the power of names. Jacob, not content, asks
for the stranger’s name although it is unclear from the text whether or not he receives it. As
we noted in the apocryphal story of Lilith that we considered earlier, knowing the name or
names of a supernatural being offers a degree of protection against it. It might, furthermore,
not be a coincidence that this being attacks Jacob at a river’s ford, the traditional haunt of the
Northern European kelpie and similar beings, which we shall consider later.
We must, however, return to Kresten Landro’s testimony. The most interesting element in
it comes when he thinks of his sources of knowledge. The Gummi Bears animated television
series are just another source of fairy tale fairies, but when he mentions The Lord of the Rings,
his thoughts start moving in a different direction, hence his mistake in describing a dwarf
when he intends to describe a troll. This is, moreover, no ordinary dwarf: The big-bearded,
pipe-loving, axe-wielding fellow is obviously none other than John Rhys-Davies, the actor
who plays Gimli, the dwarf, in the recent filmatisation of The Lord of the Rings. When I
subsequently ask Kresten about seductive fairies, he still has Tolkien in mind. That Kresten
now speaks of taller, fairer elves is a sign that he is aware of folk tradition concerning
seductive fairies. It is obvious though that he connects human-sized fairies with Tolkien’s
elves; traditional fairies may be tall, noble, and mysterious, but the mildness and piety of
Kresten’s vision surely belongs to Tolkien via Romance, and the pointy ears are, so far as I
am aware, Tolkien’s responsibility alone. In any case, these elves’ piety clashes with the item
that started up the conversation, stories of elves who lure people into their society. Kresten’s
conceptions of social fairies’ personalities are almost entirely visual. Nothing is said as to the
subterraneans’ good looks, so unsurprisingly, these beings have neutral personalities. The
ugly trolls of fairy tales and children books are, on the other hand, very unpleasant. Finally,
the beautiful elves are nobly benevolent, albeit with a mysterious twist. This is entirely in
keeping with literary trends in which beauty is a corollary to goodness and ugliness
accompanies mean-spiritedness or, at the very least, mischievousness.
Tolkien’s elves are based on the elves and fairies of mythology, and the elves and fairies
of mythology are, to an uncertain extent, related to those of later folklore. In a sense, then,
Kresten’s Tolkien-inspired testimony is not too far from the truth; he has simply – in dating
these as objects of belief 300-400 years ago – misdated his fairies. For example, the Túatha
Dé Danann, a race of ancient Irish gods that resemble social fairies in many respects, would
not seem unfamiliar to him. The following passage, taken from the 12th Century Tales of the
Elders of Ireland, a blend hagiography and heroic legend based on far earlier traditions, shows
that while we cannot see the Túatha Dé Danann and folkloric fairies as analogous, they have
similarities. In this scene, the three sons of the King of Ireland have come to a Túatha Dé
Danann dwelling (the massive burial mound at Newgrange) in order to ask a favour of the
gods. The three brothers:
saw a young man approaching them. He had a brown, two-forked beard and lovely curly hair of
light-yellow gold coming down over his shoulders. His long golden hair was held by fastenings
of thin gold thread, lest the stormy coastal wind blow it before his face or eyes. He had a sandal
of bright silver on his foot, and his sandalled foot, where it touched the ground, did not disturb
the dewdrops on the ends of the blades of grass. He greeted the sons of the Kings of Ireland and
they responded in this way, “Who are you, young man, and where have you come from?”
“From the dew-covered, shimmering Bruig close by,” said the young man. “What is your
name?” they asked? “Bodb Derg ‘the Red’, the son of Dagda,” he replied. “It was revealed to
the Túatha Dé Danann that you would come to make your fast here tonight so that you might
acquire land and great wealth. Come along with me, young warriors.” They arose together and
went into the Bruig and chairs of bright crystal were placed on the floor of the síd for them.
Food was brought to them, but they did not eat it. Bodb asked why they would not eat any food
and they answered, “Since our father, the King of Ireland, has refused us land and territory, and,
since there are but two aristocracies of equal merit in Ireland, the Sons of Míl and the Túatha Dé
Danann, we have come to seek out the other of the two, that is, to you.”167
Whatever we may think of the relationship between the mythological Túatha Dé Danann and
social fairies, it is certain that, in later eras, many Christian Irishmen viewed them as the
same. It was not that Christianity had expelled the old gods; it had merely made them less
powerful. Already at the time the above story takes place, the Túatha Dé Danann have been
disempowered by the Sons of Míl and no longer lord over Ireland.
The appearance of Bodb, barring his now-unfashionable beard, is precisely what Kresten
would expect of a Tolkienian elf. The nobility, the beauty, the aristocracy: Everything appears
to fit. But what of the fact that Bodb and his people live in a burial mound, like so many later
fairies, like the fairies of Grydehøj? Similarly, the humans refuse to eat the Túatha Dé
Danann’s food as surely as if it had belonged to the fairies, and the explanation they give to
Bodb for their refusal must be one of the greatest non sequiturs in all of Medieval literature.
We run into trouble here with the dating of traditions. The idea that the Túatha Dé Danann
lived in ancient fortifications and burial places such as the 3,200 BCE mound at Newgrange is
undoubtedly old, and we know that many of the legends related by Tales of the Elders of
Ireland date back to, at the latest, the latter centuries of the first millennium. Still, it is
altogether possible that the book’s 12th Century writer – so distant from belief in the Túatha
Dé Danann as gods – imbued them with then-current fairy characteristics. The fact remains,
however, that Tolkien’s elves gain much from accounts of the social fairy-like Túatha Dé
Danann, and Kresten Landro has quite ignorantly imbibed some actual mythology, if not
folklore.
No such knowledge is evident in the declaration of the last of the contributors who have
been influenced by Tolkien, 15-year-old Thomas Eriksen:
Thomas Eriksen: The elves, they have long ears, simply big. They’re good at finding their way
around, at finding their way around and living in nature and that kind of thing. And they speak
elf-language. And they’re good with arrows and live mostly in the forest and that kind of thing.
Adam Grydehøj: Where’ve you learned about elves?
TE: The Lord of the Rings.
AG: Do you think that this is what people believed in many years ago?
TE: I don’t know. Maybe.
AG: Are there women too, or just men?
TE: No, there’re both women and men. And they live forever, they don’t get old. I mean, when
they get to a certain age, then they stop existing.
I have little doubt that, had I interviewed a large number of young people, I would have
encountered more derivations from Tolkien, and it is because of this that we have spent so
much time looking at these last three examples. Still, however influential The Lord of the
Rings may be for youths, it has had little noticeable impact on the ideas of adults regarding
social fairies.
It struck us as unusual that Kresten Landro was able to use stories of seductive fairies as a
segue into a discussion of Tolkien’s elves, showing that, at some level, the young man was
aware of this portion of folk tradition. One need not spend much time asking adults about
fairies before realising that it is this seductive dimension of fairy folklore – the image of
luring, dancing fairy women who steal men away from the human world – that has held out in
the popular consciousness far better than the others. It is interesting that this particular aspect
of belief has been recalled since, despite its immense popularity among the Romantics, it has
lain nearly untouched by more recent popular culture.
Michael Banke, a 39-year-old school teacher and youth club worker, provides an
unusually-long description of social fairies but one that is in very much the same vein as
many of the other accounts I received:
Michael Banke: They didn’t have solid forms. They were these hazy figures like fog or... I’d say
that people conceived it as if they could have solid forms sometimes, but usually, they were the
foggy or misty types. And then, the clothes, they were a kind of light clothes, a kind of light veil
or light dress. I don’t think there was any colour in them when it was that misty figure, foggy
figure. So, it was like a ghost or I don’t know what, sort of like a see-through thing without
colour. They were, maybe, a bit smaller than humans when they appeared in those veils. I mean,
then, they weren’t that big. But I also think that there was an idea that a person could... It was
possible for a person to confuse a real human with a fairy. In any case with fairy-girls because
you had to be careful of those, as far as I know. That young people had to be careful not to be
enticed by a girl. There were something about, if she had a hollow back, then she was a fairygirl. What I mean is, she could have a solid form, human, but if she had a hollow back, she was
actually a fairy who was undercover. There, fairies resembled normal people, regular people.
So, they could take a form, different forms, I think. [...] You had to be careful with fairies
because they had magical abilities. I haven’t engaged myself all that much with fairies, but it’s
my impression that they could both do good things and bad things, a bit like witches. And I
could certainly imagine that... I think I remember that they could cause death, accidents,
sickness. Death and sickness. For example, a young man who was together with a woman who’s
a fairy, he could die shortly thereafter because he became sick.
Adam Grydehøj: Why did they kill people?
MB: I actually don’t know. I don’t know. I think that they killed people because you wanted to
scare people, scare young men from going off with girls. I could imagine! I don’t know what the
fairies – if we say, “There are fairies” – what their motive was, I don’t know. Maybe, so that
they weren’t exposed, so as not to be discovered. What do I know? [...] You can protect yourself
against fairies if you – as a young couple – get together and make love under an elderberry tree
at night. Then, from then on, you find yourself protected from the fairies’ bad powers.
Michael is an accomplished storyteller, known by school children for his lively classroom tales of
ghosts and the supernatural. This pastime of his has, perhaps, made him more likely to remember
what he has heard about fairies, but more importantly, it has given him the ability to deduce certain
unclear points on the basis of what he knows. Although Michael always tempers his guesswork
with statements of his inexpertise on the subject, there is, nonetheless, considerable guesswork at
work in the above extract. The idea of gaining protection by coupling under an elderberry tree is
new to me though this is no proof against its being traditional. As the elderberry is often a magical
plant in folk belief, frequently associated with fairies and witches, it is an interesting touch. If
nothing else, the elderberry is a great taboo plant though, in this role, one would have suspected the
fairies to take revenge on humans who defile their property. In any case, what is most prominent
here is the fairies’ ethereal character, something that we heard of briefly in Kirk’s Secret CommonWealth. The fairies can sometimes appear in human form, particularly when they are in seductive
mode, but mist is in their nature. Later, Michael even states that mist can transform into dancing
fairy-girls, and since it is at a fairy dance that young men are typically stolen away, one gets the
idea that the solid form is not always a disguise but sometimes just the final step in fairy
transformation.
Among those I interviewed, fog is a common element, occurring in one form or another in about
21% of all accounts of social fairies. As fog and mist are not terribly prevalent in the primary
sources (that is, 19th- and 20th Century collections of legends and Medieval and Early Modern
historical works), this might be a matter of atmosphere-building on the part of my contributors.
Even Kirk simply states that the fairies are more or less ethereal, not that they have any great love
for fog. It is noteworthy that neither the typical format of legend collections nor the old historical
works are the kinds of texts in which one looks for scene-setting of this type, meaning that
fogginess could be a traditional motif that has somehow survived until today but gone largely
unrecorded. More likely, however, is that my contributors are making a connection between fairies
and a being called the Bog Wife [Mosekonen]. Eight contributors mention the Bog Wife by name
and without prompting on my part, an astounding rate when one considers how few people are able
to mention any supernatural figure from past folklore besides fairies, brownies and mermaids
without prompting.
Often, the Bog Wife is named explicitly alongside social fairies. My father-in-law, Peter
Grydehøj, for example, says, “I don’t know if I associate fairy girls with bogs, low-lying areas. It
has something to do with fog. It has something to do with the night. It involves reduced safety. One
also says that ‘the Bog Wife is brewing.’” Sophie Elisabeth Seidelin, a Marstal pastor, meanwhile,
brings the Bog Wife into an otherwise exemplary account of fairy folklore, nearly as if this figure
were a touch of flavour. She says that social fairies:
need people in order to reproduce. It’s an experience which people have, that they lure, right?
They’re almost without age, without substance. There’s almost nothing to them. They have
hollow backs. They have no backs. But they lure people to themselves, inside their forbidden
areas, dangerous areas […], especially if they’re on their way to their lovers. They can either be
married or on their way to tryst with a lover. In that situation, a person is particularly
susceptible. Someone has ridden through the dark forest, comes out. The fairies are dancing
there, or the Bog Wife is brewing. Then, they lure and sing. Then, it’s as if he can’t move a foot,
and he can’t do anything about it. He becomes drawn in, and so, he disappears. Then, he lives
there in the hill. He becomes timeless.
Who is this Bog Wife? If she appears so frequently in modern-day accounts of social fairies, why
have we not heard about her before in our older sources?
The Bog Wife – unlike social fairies, brownies, mermaids, and ghosts – is merely a figure
of speech. Both of the above statements concerning the Bog Wife are phrased the same way:
“The Bog Wife is brewing [Mosekonen brygger].” This is no coincidence. Although, in my
interviews, some people expound on the Bog Wife at greater length than others, she is nearly
always introduced with this same simple statement. Today, “the Bog Wife is brewing” is used
metaphorically when the weather is foggy or misty, but people usually regard the Bog Wife as
a folkloric being, not realizing that this expression was simply metaphoric two centuries ago
as well. Holbek and Piø, after pointing out Nordic analogues to the Bog Wife expression,
suggest that the idea of the Bog Wife – the concept of a supernatural being causing fog –
might well be traditional even if the figure of speech is not traditionally associated with any
legends.168 However this may be, it is clear that my contributors are not thinking on so high a
theoretical level.
The cause of this misunderstanding is probably of literary origin, and as is so often the case
in Denmark, the literature in question seems to be that of Hans Christian Andersen. Although
other authors have used the Bog Wife as a fictional character, Andersen is certainly the most
influential writer to have done so. Consider the following example from Andersen’s Fairy
Hill [Elverhøj] in which a fairy woman talks to a raven about who will be invited to a fairy
party:
“The merman [havmanden] and his daughters must be invited first. They are not too fond of
coming up onto dry land, but they shall each get a wet stone to sit upon or something better, and
then I do not imagine they will decline this time. All of the old first-class trolls with tails, the
kelpie [åmanden] and the brownies [nisses] are indispensable. And then, I think, that we cannot
well avoid the grave-sow [gravsoen], Death-horse [helhesten], and church grim [kirkegrimen]; it
is true that they belong to the clergy, who are not members of our race, but that is, after all, their
office. They are close family with us and visit often.” [...]
The fairy-girls were already dancing on Elverhøj, and they danced in long shawls woven of
mist and moonshine, and it was quite an enjoyable sight for those who like that kind of thing.
The large hall within the centre of Elverhøj was really shined up; the floor was washed with
moonshine, and the walls were rubbed with witch fat so that they shone like tulip petals in the
light. The kitchen was filled with frogs roasting on spits; adder skins stuffed with little
children’s fingers; and salads of mushroom-seed, wet mouse snouts, and hemlock; beer from the
Bog Wife’s brew; shining salt-petre wine from the grave cellar. It was all quite robust.169
This is truly a fairy tale fairy world in which all sorts of supernatural elements are thrown
together, mingling social fairies with solitary fairies. The social fairies, though of solid
substance, prance about in ethereal array. A kind of happy cannibalism is a matter of course.
Today’s readers of this story will receive much the same general impression of this fairy
world as readers did in 1845. The difference is, in 1845, people would have been able to grasp
the specifics. How many Danes today have any knowledge of grave-sows, Death-horses, and
church grims? This is not just a rhetorical question. Of my 51 contributors, only two could
present a relatively-accurate description of all three of these intimately-related supernatural
beings.170 The kelpie is likewise liable to be unfamiliar to a modern-day Dane. The result is
that a person reading this excerpt today will see the first paragraph mostly as a list of
evocative though foreign names. What such a reader knows about belief in mermen and trolls
is, for its part, likely to be far removed from Hans Christian Andersen’s own knowledge.
It is not just a coincidence that every one of the folkloric beings mentioned in this text was
also present in my list of set interview questions. I chose to ask contributors only about the
Northern European supernatural beings in which belief was most common a few centuries
ago. What Andersen is doing here, then, is providing a pleasant laundry list of the beings most
prevalent in his contemporary folk belief. Despite the immense popularity of Andersen in
Denmark, present-day readers will have very little idea of what he is writing about. It all must
be terribly confusing.
But then, relief: As today’s reader reaches the end of the excerpt, she happens upon the
Bog Wife. Finally, a supernatural being with which she is familiar! Whereas Andersen was
simply playing off of the popular expression “the Bog Wife is brewing” in 1845, he is today
interpreted as reinforcing the popular expression. A reader today will always have known that
the Bog Wife’s brewing causes mist, but now, it also becomes clear why she is brewing— For
the festive fairies of course! A pair of folklorically-interested contributors who we will meet
later, the Ærøskøbing tour guide and storyteller, Jan Pedersen, and Ærø’s local folklore
expert, Dion Abrahamsen, both take the literalist position in respect to the Bog Wife, saying
that she brews beer for the fairies. On the other hand, only a single contributor correctly tells
me that although the expression “The Bog Wife is brewing” is very old, the Bog Wife is not a
folkloric being, was never an object of belief.171 I do not mean to say that it is from precisely
this short story that Danes get the impression that the Bog Wife is a figure from traditional
folklore, yet if this is not the source, it is probable that the impression comes from either
another Andersen story172 or a fairy tale derivative of Andersen.
So, without prompting, a fair proportion of my contributors mention the Bog Wife in
connection with dancing social fairies, and it is probably, in part, because of the Bog Wife’s
presence that these contributors associate dancing fairies with fog and mist. Why, however,
we may wonder, is the fairies’ dance so well known? Immediately, suspicion falls on Hans
Christian Andersen again, but since most contributors who mention the dance hold the
folklorically-accurate idea that these fairies try to lure men into their company, it seems
unlikely that Denmark’s most popular author is to blame this time around. Fairy tales like
Fairy Hill are not the home of dangerous, seductive fairies, regardless of their cannibalistic
tendencies. Despite this, Andersen’s Fairy Hill gives us a nod in the right direction for Fairy
Hill [Elverhøj] is also the name of a ballad concerning attempted abduction by social fairies.
Fairy Hill and Elf-Shot [Elverskud] are, perhaps, the two most famous Danish Medieval
or Early Modern ballads. These are both thoroughly international in character with extremelysimilar versions being found elsewhere in Scandinavia.173 The Fairy Hill ballad is best
remembered today on account of the so-called “Danish national play” by Johan Ludvig
Heiberg bearing the same name. Heiberg’s 1828 Fairy Hill cannot be said to be based on the
ballad, and unlike in the ballad, this play’s fairies are non-existent, are inventions of the
commoners’ superstition. A number of contributors suggest to me that they learned about
fairies from the play although, on the basis of the play’s plot, this seems rather doubtful. More
likely is that the Fairy Hill and Elf-Shot ballads – both of which are sometimes taught in
Danish schools – have somehow made an impression on their readers.
Medieval and Early Modern balladry is interesting in the sense that it can give us rare
insight into folk belief without intervention from scholarly or ecclesiastic collectors.
Furthermore, those ballads concerning supernatural beings can generally be held to be works
of fiction that contain legendary motifs. Elf-Shot, which we shall look at below, has a certain
Herr Oluf as its main character. The things that Herr Oluf experiences in the ballad are
certainly in line with legendary tradition, are things that were believed to have been
experienced by many people. Nonetheless, because the origin of this ballad is lost in preliterate secular history, we must assume that it is a work of conscious fiction. The ballad, then,
may be made up of legendary elements, but we cannot truly consider it to be a legend.
Additionally, a ballad’s artistic nature means that it is likely to migrate from one place to
another by print or word of mouth, so it would be naïve to believe that all of the various
versions of, say, Elf-Shot developed independently of one another. We are probably justified
regardless in holding that had not legends similar to the story told in Elf-Shot not existed in
the countries to which the ballad migrated, the ballad would not have found a home there.
Local belief is still a prerequisite for a supernatural ballad’s success.
The fact that a ballad like Elf-Shot is both a work of fiction and still appealing to today’s
literary tastes means that, uniquely among our pre-Romantic sources of information about
folklore, it can find its way into the literary canon. And it is thus that most Danes first
encounter folkloric fairies, as characters in a song included in the school canon on account of
its age, its beauty, and, ostensibly, its Danishness. What most students make of these fairies
and of the ballads as a whole I cannot say; it would take a more focused study to discover to
what extent youths view the ballad fairies as fictional beings in a fictional universe. In any
case, we can cautiously say that it is from Fairy Hill, Elf-Shot, and later literary references to
these two ballads that the relatively-extensive knowledge of dancing, seductive fairies stems.
With no attempt to preserve the meter of the original, I offer a translation of Elf-Shot:
Herr Oluf, he rides so wide
All to his wedding to bid.
But the dance, it goes
So easy in the grove.
There four dance, and there five dance:
The elf-king’s daughter, her hand grants.
“Hail, Herr Oluf, slow thy speed:
Stay here a while, dance with me.”
“I do not dare, I must not stay:
Tomorrow is my wedding day.”
“Hark, Herr Ole, tread the dance with me:
Two buckskin boots, I will give to thee.
“Two buckskin boots grace stout the leg:
Upon them, gilded spurs are pegged.
“Hark, Herr Oluf, tread the dance with me:
A silken shirt, I will give to thee.
“A silken shirt so white and fine:
My mother, she bleached it in moonshine.”
“I do not dare, I must not stay:
Tomorrow is my wedding day.”
“Hark, Herr Oluf, tread the dance with me:
A crown of gold, I will give to thee.”
“A crown of gold, I can well use:
But dance with thee, I must refuse.”
“And if you will not dance with me,
Plague and sickness will follow thee.”
His shoulders, she struck between:
Hit worse, he had never been.
She sits Herr Oluf on his charger red:
“And ride home now to thy betrothéd.”
There he came to the manor’s gate:
There his reposing mother sate.
“Hark, Herr Oluf, my son dear:
Why this pale cheek do thee bare?”
“And well may I bare a cheek pale:
The fairy maid did me assail.”
“Hark, Herr Ole, son I pride:
What shall I tell thy young bride?”
“You shall say, I hunt on the grounds,
To try my horse and then my hounds.”
Early in the morning, bright as day:
There came the bride with her assembly.
They poured mead, and they poured wine:
“Where is Herr Ole, bridegroom mine?”
“Herr Oluf, he hunted on the grounds,
He tried his horse and then his hounds.”
She took up the cloth so red:
There lay Herr Oluf and was dead.
Early in the morning, it was day:
There came three corpses from the gateway.
Herr Oluf and his young bride,
His mother of sorrow died.174
Although we have not previously studied this type of legendary narrative in great depth, it is
an international story concerning social fairies. Its occurrence in folklore collections and
Romantic art is probably exaggerated in relation to its real-world frequency on account of the
story being so appealing, but it seems that most Northern European communities possessed
legends of this sort.
One of the idiosyncrasies – and indeed, one of the charms – of the ballad genre is its
abruptness, its incompleteness. Elf-Shot offers us very little explanation as to why its tragic events
occur. Is Herr Oluf simply unlucky to meet a strange fairy, or has he previously had a relationship
with the fairy, a relationship that his marriage threatens to disrupt? Either is possible. If this second
option appears unlikely, consider that we previously learned from Gervase of Tilbury that “Some
men have become the lovers of [...] fays, and when they have transferred their affections with a
view to marrying other women, they have died before they could enjoy carnal union with their new
partners.”175 It is, furthermore, useful to note that Faroese versions of this ballad are explicit in
having the hero seek out his former fairy mistress in order to tell her of his impending wedding.
Additionally, a similar English ballad, Clerk Colvill, which we shall look at later, actually has the
hero attempt to carry on the affair with his otherworldly mistress despite his having a mortal love.176
The important point is that, on the basis of the Danish Elf-Shot ballad, we can never know the full
story and must sort it out for ourselves. Nor does the ambiguity end there. We have also seen that
people “killed” by the fairies are often not really dead at all, their “deaths” being just a sham
performed to mislead their loved ones. Should we interpret that Herr Oluf stolen away by the fairy
woman? Regardless, the idea that Herr Oluf had once been the fairy’s lover implies a more nuanced
appraisal of relations between fairies and humans than does today’s popular interpretation of cruel
fairy seduction. Without a broader base of folkloric knowledge, however, the average Danish reader
of Elf-Shot has no means of realising this.177
Native English-speakers are likely to first encounter the story of this kind of ballad
indirectly, via John Keats’ haunting, balladic La Belle Dame Sans Merci of 1819:
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful— a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed – Ah! woe betide! –
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried— “La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.178
Keats is attracted to the solemnity and sorrow of the fairy stories, a sorrow that seems to exist
both on behalf of the wretched humans and the powerful but strangely-mournful fairies. As in
Elf-Shot, the knight of Keats’ poem makes a temporary escape from the fairy but is thereafter
lost to the world of man.
Elf-Shot, Fairy Hill, and other Danish ballads of the supernatural are not bad starting
points for learning about past folklore. They may lack the immediate accessibility of a
Romantic treatise on the subject, but due to their literary appeal, one need not be folkloricallyinterested in advance in order to enjoy them. While it is surely helpful that ballads – though,
note, no particular ballads – are part of the official, national literature canon in Danish
schools, the relative prevalence of the story of dancing and, frequently, seductive fairies in the
popular mindset suggests that only a very few supernatural ballads are being read, Elf-Shot
and Fairy Hill among them. We speak of “relative prevalence” because, although this
conception of social fairies is the most common in my interviews, it is still only mentioned by
just over 20% of contributors, not counting those who speak exclusively about a legend in
Hübertz concerning a stolen fairy cup, a story that involves dancing fairies but has a very
different narrative than, say, Elf-Shot. We can assume that other contributors would recognize
the Elf-Shot-type story upon prompting, but this is neither here nor there since, in my
experience, although some people possess passive, latent knowledge of past folk belief, many
more people can be prompted into recognizing just about anything. The corpus of Medieval
and Early Modern Danish ballads is varied enough, presenting many different legendary
stories regarding various supernatural beings, yet when the mass of these ballads is only being
read by folklorists and theologians, their popular influence is negligible.
It is significant that, of those contributors who present me with an image of dancing
fairies, most are unable to structure anything like a story around the image. Even when people
present seductive fairies, the fairies’ motives are unclear. Of course, fairies are mysterious,
but in tradition, their motives for stealing away young men and women during a dance tend to
be easy enough to pinpoint: It is usually a matter either of a one of the fairies loving the
human victim or of the victim being such a fine specimen of humanity that the fairies would
like to bring him or her into their own society. These two explanations are not so universally
applicable to other types of fairy kidnapping like the stealing of children, midwives,
musicians, antagonistic individuals, or what have you. When it comes to dances, however,
fairy psychology is not that complex.
Typically, my contributors do not attempt any explanation of abductions by dancing
fairies. Those explanations that I do receive can at times be intriguing. Consider the following
from my 53-year-old father-in-law:
Peter Grydehøj: Fairies, they’re a sort of people who live in a hill, who live in one like a burial
mound, and my notion of them is along the lines that there’re some fairy girls who are dancing,
and then the hill closes and you never see them [The humans trapped inside.] again. [...]
Adam Grydehøj: Are there males as well?
PG: One does talk of fairy-girls. I think that there are also men, but the women are used to lure
people, especially young men.
AG: Why do they want to lure?
PG: Maybe, so as to put them to death, kill them.
Of course, “to kill them” is not really an explanation of motives, particularly when
contributors make it clear that the fairy girls are dancing in order to lure people and that it is
not merely that young men happen upon and interrupt the dances. In any case, we have seen
that, when fairies want people dead, they can accomplish the task just as well abroad as at
home. While there is a widespread motif of mortals being killed during the fairy dance itself,
of sometimes literally being danced to death, none of my contributors hint at this. A more
specific explanation for the fairies’ proclivity to lure is given by 32-year-old Nicolai
Christiansen, holder of a Masters in History and head of the Ærø Youth School:
There is, after all, a strong fairy tradition in Denmark. In any case, for many people, it’s
thoroughly based on Fairy Hill, Kuhlau’s play [Friedrich Kuhlau composed the music to “Fairy
Hill”.] or whatever one should call it. You could also say that, in fairy tales, the fairies, they’re
folk who lived away under the earth and lived a life that was mysterious in relation to the life
people knew that was a bit Christian by comparison. Again, mysterious beings who you didn’t
know precisely what they did but knew, in any case, that it wasn’t anything good. You had to
watch out because the fairies could both be—. I mean, they could both help—. But it was
seldom. And the chance that you could be taken away with them and have to slave underground
or do unwilling labour in some other way, that was around as well. One also speaks of the water
nymphs [vandnymferne], or they aren’t called that in Danish tradition, but I mean, the water
fairies [vandelverne], people who lived down in the water, in brooks and rivers and a bit like the
Pan figure in Greek mythology, right?
Nicolai has not personally read or seen Fairy Hill, and he later suggests, rather ingeniously,
that most people view fairies as small – a little over a meter tall in his opinion – because they
are accustomed to seeing children play the fairies in the Fairy Hill ballet. The idea that fairies
keep humans as slaves underground is not common though neither is it unknown.179 The
concept of aquatic social fairies living in freshwater is also unusual in Northern Europe
although we have seen it in the form of Gervase of Tilbury’s French dracs.
The physical slavery that Nicolai seems to have in mind may be unusual, but captivity of a
fixed duration within a fairy hill is to be found more frequently. It figures, indeed, in one of
the best-known fairy stories of all, that relating to True Thomas or Thomas the Rhymer, a 13th
Century Scottish historical figure who seems to have been made legendary shortly after – if
not during – his own lifetime. Evidence within the text shows that the earliest versions of a
poem concerning Thomas could not have been written after 1400, and although the ballad,
Thomas Rymer, based on the story seems very old, the earliest-extent version of it is from the
early 1700s:180
True Thomas lay oer yond grassy bank,
And he beheld a ladie gay,
A ladie that was brisk and bold,
Come riding oer the fernie brae.
Her skirt was of the grass-green silk,
Her mantel of the velvet fine,
At ilka tett of her horse’s mane
Hung fifty silver bells and nine.
True Thomas he took off his hat,
And bowed him low down till his knee:
“All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!
For your peer on earth I never did see.”
“O no, O no, True Thomas,” she says,
“That name does not belong to me;
I am but the queen of fair Elfland,
And I’m come here for to visit thee.
“But ye maun go wi me now, Thomas,
True Thomas, ye maun go wi me,
For ye maun serve me seven years,
Thro weel or was as may chance to be.”
She turned about her milk-white steed,
And took True Thomas up behind,
And aye wheneer her bridle rang,
The steed flew swifter than the wind.
For forty days and forty nights
He wade thro red blade to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea.
O they rade on, and further on,
Until they came to a garden green:
“Light down, light down, ye ladie free,
Some of that fruit let me pull to thee.”
“O no, O no, True Thomas,” she says,
“That fruit maun not be touched by thee,
For a’ the plagues that are in hell
Light on the fruit of this countrie.
“But I have a loaf here in my lap,
Likewise a bottle of claret wine,
And now ere we go farther on,
We’ll rest a while, and ye may dine.”
When he had eaten and drunk his fill,
“Lay down your head upon my knee,”
The lady sayd, “‘ere we climb yon hill,
And I will show you fairlies three.
“O see not ye yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.
“And see not ye that braid braid road,
That lies across yon lillie leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.
“And see not ye that bonny road,
Which winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae.
“But Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever you may hear or see,
For gin ae word you should chance to speak,
You will neer get back to your ain countrie.”
He has gotten a coat of the even cloth,
And a pair of shoes of velvet green,
And till seven years were past and gone
True Thomas on earth was never seen.181
The length of Thomas’ stay with the fairies is seven years, seven being a sacred number. In
this ballad, we find many motifs that are solidly documented in later folk belief. For example,
Thomas comes under the fairy queen’s control by greeting her as the Virgin Mary, illustrating
the power of names in folk belief. It is, perhaps, doubly bad for Thomas that he not only gives
the fairy the wrong title but one quite contrary to her spiritual nature. Presumably, if Thomas
had recognized her and hailed her correctly, he would have been safe; likewise, had she not
known his name, he might have preserved his freedom. The taboo against partaking of fairy
produce is also present here if we assume that the wine and bread carried by the fairy is of
mortal origin. Most striking is the passage concerning the three roads, which alludes to the
metaphoric roads to Heaven and Hell in the Bible.182 However dangerous fairies may be, this
ballad does not view them as demonic for there is a third road leading to their realm, showing
them to be balanced between salvation and damnation. Finally, it is important not to speak to
the fairies because speech in general, like revealing one’s own name in particular, opens the
door to magical manipulation.
The fairies of Thomas Rymer are not devils. This does not, however, make them terribly
pleasant. Even the path on the way to the path to fairyland is ghastly, involving as it does
forty days and forty nights of wading through a sea of blood. That this realm is lit neither by
the sun nor moon is suggestive of the subterranean, as long as we do not strain our analytic
powers by trying to interpret “the roaring of the sea.”
That this ballad concerns a historical personage – purportedly the first poet in Scotland to
compose in Scots/English rather than Gaelic183 – makes it particularly useful in understanding
past belief. Had the ballad been about someone like Napoleon or King Henry VIII, we might
have viewed it as a rather grand attempt at mythologizing, but the historical Thomas the
Rhymer was famous for his prophecies and his inability to tell a lie, both of which were said
to have resulted from his stay in fairyland. As mystical truthfulness and the ability to foretell
the future are today commonly-considered folkloric or, less sympathetically, “superstitious,”
we are dealing with a person who – even without considering his dealings with the fairies – is
beyond the ken of a present-day, rational historical mindset. The “superstitious” beliefs of the
past were neither occasional logical aberrations nor unsophisticated explanations for
inexplicable natural events. They were inextricably integrated into the way people viewed the
world.
Thomas Rymer has little to offer lovers of flower-fairies, and like most of the extant
Danish ballads, it ends unhappily even if we know from other stories that Thomas’ life will
not be one of perpetual agony. From what we have seen earlier, it seems that the protagonists
of legends escape the clutches of malicious fairies with greater frequency than their balladic
counterparts. In speaking of present-day fairy literature, we have focused so far on two
distinct strands, that involving flower-fairies and that with generally-benevolent pseudomythological fairies. There is, however, a third strand as well. So-called dark fantasy, written
for either children or adults, is a genre all its own and one that, as far as legendary fairies are
concerned, is generally closer to tradition than the others. It would be deviating too far from
our subject to make any in-depth account of this genre fiction here, particularly since, relative
to flower-fairies and Tolkien-type fairies, the fairies of dark fantasy are not widely dispersed
in the popular consciousness. Dark fantasy may sell extremely well, but it is nonetheless a
niche market that has not yet found mass appeal. Not everyone has read The Lord of the
Rings or Cicely Mary Barker’s The Complete Book of Flower Fairies, but the
conceptualizations they contain are frequently encountered regardless. I can say, for example,
that no one who I interviewed had ever interested himself or herself in dark fantasy whereas
everyone had met with Tolkien and flower-fairies in one form or another.
We asserted previously that, after the Middle Ages, folkloric fairies were less and less
likely to live in highly hierarchical societies, possibly as a result of parallel developments in
the believers’ own societal structures. Many ballads containing social fairies present a fairy
monarchy, sometimes allusively, as in Elf-Shot, and sometimes overtly, as in Thomas Rymer.
There is, then, nothing historically inaccurate in the idea that fairies have kings and queens.
Still, once we enter the period of scientific folklore collection, during which the great majority
of our pieces of evidence for fairy belief were gathered, fairy monarchies are uncommon in
most regions. This makes it a bit odd that, in today’s climate of general ignorance about past
belief, existence of belief in fairy kings and queens is remembered, with five of my
contributors explicitly mentioning such fairy monarchies.184 After all, we might have
suspected that the more recent beliefs would be those better known. This stance, however,
assumes that the average person is reading scientific folklore collections. When past belief is
primarily accessed either through Medieval ballads or literature partially-based on Medieval
ballads, such as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is no surprise that the idea
persists. We should also consider the possibility that contributors – associating fairies with
folktales (like those of the Grimms) and fairy tales (like those of Hans Christian Andersen) –
automatically place these beings in folktale and fairy tale worlds, which tend to be filled to
the brim with human kings, queens, princes, and princesses.185
When my contributors mention the fairy king, it is without recognition of historical shifts
in the nature of belief. Three of the five contributors who speak of the fairy king are among
the more folklorically knowledgeable of those who I interviewed, and they bring up the fairy
king in the incongruous context of stories that do not immediately reflect a variegated fairy
hierarchy. Gervase of Tilbury’s story of the subterranean land beneath the Peak mentions a
fairy overseer, suggesting a complex social hierarchy containing peasants, smallholders, lords,
knights, and a king. In contrast, the fairy world of my contributors simply contains a king on
the one hand and run-of-the-mill of fairies on the other: This does not mirror the human
monarchical systems on which the Medieval legends seem to be based.
All of this relates, in one way or another, to the popular conception of what fairies do with
their lives. On the basis of the evidence we have looked at so far, we can say that most
traditional fairies live rather mundanely. While their interactions with humans may be
exciting, they must nonetheless work for a living, and their lives do not seem all that different
from those of men. This point does not come across very clearly in my interviews. Only a few
contributors present the matter along the following, banal lines: “They lived, it’s true, in some
hills and the like. And if they were allowed to live in peace, they didn’t do any harm, but if
they were harassed, then they could definitely be unpleasant to people.”186 Of course, this is
not entirely true as fairies can do real harm without provocation. One can, however, say that –
barring cases of kidnapping and theft – fairies generally do not lash out unless provoked, and
the above statement is truer than the equally-simplistic alternative.
If kidnapping sounds like a rather glaring exception, we would do well to remember that it
is not a one-way street. There may be many stories of fairies stealing-away mortal men and
women, but there is likewise no lack of legends relating to mortal men stealing fairies. Such a
story, involving a historical figure, is documented by Walter Map already in the 1180s:
Like to this is the story of Eadric Wild (i.e. the savage) [d. circa 1072], so named from his
bodily activity, and his rollicking talk and deeds, a man of great prowess; lord of Lydbury
North: he when returning late from hunting through wild country, uncertain of his path, till
midnight, was accompanied only by one page, and came upon a large building at the edge of the
forest […]; and when he was near it, seeing a light inside, he looked in and saw a great dance of
numbers of noble ladies. They were most comely to look upon, and finely clad in fair habits of
linen only, and were greater and taller than our women. The knight remarked one among all the
rest as excelling in form and face, desirable beyond any favourite of a king. They were circling
with airy motion and gay gesture, and from their subdued voices singing in solemn harmony a
delicate sound came to his ears; but their words he could not understand. At the sight the knight
received a wound to the very heart [.... He] had learnt of the vengeance of the gods when
offended, and how they inflict sudden punishment on those who suddenly catch sight of them,
how they will keep themselves strictly apart, and dwell unknown, secretly and remote, how they
dislike those who try to surprise and detect their assemblies, who search after them to make
them public, with what care they shut themselves from view lest, if seen, they be contemned;
those vengeances and the examples of the sufferers he had heard; but as Cupid is rightly painted
blind, he forgets it all; thinks it no illusion, sees no avenger, and recklessly stumbles because he
has no light. He goes round the building, finds the entrance, rushes in, catches her by whom he
has been caught, and is instantly set upon by the rest; for a time he is delayed by a fierce
struggle, but at last extricated by the utmost efforts of himself and his page, yet not quite
undamaged— hurt in feet and legs by all that the nails and teeth of women could inflict. He took
her with him, and for three days and nights used her as he would, yet could not wring a word
from her. She yielded quietly to his will. On the fourth day she spoke to him in these terms:
“Hail to you, my dearest! and whole shall you be, and enjoy prosperity in body and affairs, until
you reproach me either with the sisters from whom you snatched me, or the place or wood or
anything thereabout, from which I come: but from that day you will fail with successive losses,
and anticipate your day of doom by your own impatience.” He vowed by every assurance
possible to be firm and faithful to his love. So he called together the nobles near and far, and in
a great concourse joined her to him solemnly in marriage. At that time William the Bastard
[William the Conqueror, reigned in England 1066-1087.], then newly king of England, was on
the throne: he, hearing of this prodigy, and desirous to prove it and know plainly if it were true,
summoned the pair to come together to London, and with them there came many witnesses, and
much evidence from those who could not come. A great proof of her fairy nature was the beauty
of the woman, the like of which had never been seen or heard of; and amid the amazement of all
they were sent home again. It happened later, after the lapse of many years, that Eadric, coming
back from hunting about the third hour of the night and not finding her, called her and bade her
be summoned, and because she was slow to come said, with an angry look: “Was it your sisters
kept you so long?” The rest of his abuse was addressed to the air, for when her sisters were
named she vanished. Bitterly did the youth repent his perverse and disastrous outbreak, and he
sought the spot where he had made her captive, but by no tears nor outcries could he regain her.
Day and night he kept calling for her, but all turned to his own confusion, for his life came to an
end in that place of unceasing sorrow.187
It is an exceptional case in which a mortal man who kidnaps a fairy for a wife ends his days in
happiness,188 and it is one of the oddities of these legends that the almost-inevitable departure
of the fairy is usually caused by a breach of conduct on the mortal’s side. This does not hold
true for cases of kidnapped aquatic fairies, but those will be dealt with in their own place.
Kidnapped fairies usually make for loving wives while they are in the human world and only
escape or are forced to leave upon the breaking of an oath. Again, we notice that, for all their
negative attributes, fairies are exceptionally honest, perhaps cannot lie.
One difference between fairy kidnapping of mortals and mortal kidnapping of fairies lies
in the methods used. When fairies take mortals, it is generally accomplished by what is
perceived as a form of enchantment; the human does not resist and is drawn into their
company. On the other hand, when men steal fairy wives, it is typically by force. In the
example of Eadric Wild, there is no subtlety involved: The hero rushes in, fights off his
beloved’s companions with the help of his page, and proceeds to rape the passive fairy over a
period of three days (and nights!). Mortal kidnapping of fairies is mentioned by just one of
my contributors, who received a legend of a kidnapped aquatic fairy from her Faroese
family.189 The Ærøese historians and folklorists, both amateur and professional, know nothing
of kidnapped social fairies because Hübertz gives no examples, and those with no great
interest in history – those who rely on literature for their knowledge – do not encounter such
stories in fiction.
Both on the basis of logic and our historical sources, it would seem that human-sized
fairies are essential to the idea of fairies and mortals falling love with one another. Eadric
Wild’s wife is taller than mortal women, and it is not always immediately evident that
dancing fairies are, in fact, fairies. Considering the relative prevalence of knowledge of
seductive fairies, we might assume that most people view fairies as about human-sized. This,
however, is not the case. Of the 39 contributors who tell me about the size of social fairies,
only about 10% see them as being about as large as humans. This is fair enough since the old
legends are hardly consistent in this regard and contain fairies of all different sizes, even if
human-sized fairies are perhaps most common. Still, only 13% of contributors view fairies
either as being variously-sized or being capable of changing size at will. This means that just
23% give what could be considered a “correct” answer to that most fundamental of fairy
questions. We are no longer on the uncertain ground of remembering specific folklore without
prompting; the question of fairy size is basic to understanding belief. How large do people
think fairies were? 15% of contributors guess somewhere between a few centimetres and 25
centimetres tall, 33% between 26 centimetres and 70 centimetres tall, 18% about a meter tall,
and 10% about a meter and a half tall. There is, furthermore, little correlation between
knowledge of legends and knowledge of fairy size. Those who I interviewed who possess a
broad knowledge of local folklore are split between the different camps, and there seems to be
no conceptual differentiation among various social groups.
If nearly half of my contributors think that their ancestors believed solely in fairies under
70 centimetres tall, what would they make of a story like that told in Elf-Shot, a story that
becomes ridiculous when the seductive fairy is the height of a coffee table? What happens
when the elf-king’s daughter is further reduced to the height of a mouse? We find that not
only are people generally ignorant of particular types of fairy legends but that, even when
they do recall legends, they do not integrate the legendary information into their overall
conceptions of the supernatural beings. One contributor, a pastor who is familiar with
folklore, realizes that something is amiss but synthesises in the wrong direction, suspecting
that human-sized fairies first came about when the beings were placed in a literary context,
thus necessitating an increase in stature for dramatic effect.190
We have noted the slightness of Tolkien’s influence, and this is particularly clear when so
few people see fairies as being human-sized. If people are likewise unable to deduce from the
ballads of fairy seduction, where have my contributors picked up their ideas about fairy size?
This is not a question that I have been able to answer. Due to the language issues described
earlier, folkloric social fairies are rarely confused with literary flower-fairies in Denmark, and
among my contributors, it is primarily those interested in spiritualism who make such a
connection.191 Besides the spiritualists, just one contributor responds to my social fairy
question with a description of flower-fairies [alfs]. For her, fairies are “good beings,” about
10 centimetres tall, who have small wings and wear silken dresses. Significantly, this
contributor readily states that her knowledge of folkloric beings comes from films,
particularly Disney films.192 Three other non-spiritualist contributors think that there was
belief in flower-fairies [fés] in Denmark but do not view these as synonymous with ellefolk.193
A further two contributors see flower-fairies as part of foreign folk belief. One says,
“They’re these small, angel-like things, some people who hop around and do good things.” In
her view, they carry magic wands and give babies silver spoons.194 The gift of a silver spoon
is a good example of the way knowledge of tradition can be perverted over time: Silver
spoons do, indeed, play a role in folklore, but traditionally, humans place them near babies as
protection against fairies. The other contributor, 14-year-old Niels Condrup, who is of the
opinion that flower-fairies belong to folklore outside of Denmark gives a perfect description
of children’s books fairies:
A fairy [fé], that’s kind of a tiny, tiny, tiny being [...] that lives in Fairyland. It’s 10 centimetres
or something like that, with wings, can conjure, use magic or whatever it’s called, and in Peter
Pan, it’s the sort who can make them fly and that sort of thing... And if it’s an evil fairy, then it
can lay a curse, you know, use magic, but only in an evil way. Fairies, I don’t know... I don’t
think that there are any fairies... Fairies are a bit American or English. I don’t think they’ve
existed in Denmark.
Niels has learned an uncommon amount of folklore from his father, a sailor, and does not
recognize flower-fairies as members of the Danish folkloric pantheon. Finally, two other
contributors, both pastors,195 suspect that flower-fairies are artistic creations although one
notes that alfs are surely related to elves [elver] etymologically196.
Since it is evident that flower-fairies are not the basis of non-spiritualists’ conceptions of
uniformly-small social fairies, we must look elsewhere. One promising explanation is that
literary versions of trolls [trolde] are well-known from Danish fairy tales and children’s books
and that their characteristics have rubbed off on social fairies in the popular consciousness.
The irony here is that, in tradition, the Danish troll is simply a type of social fairy – typically
an unattractive type – that is not functionally different from those beings called ellefolk,
elverfolk, or de underjordiske. The troll of Danish literature is not very much like the troll of
tradition. There are two major strands of troll literature, those in which trolls are little, ugly
beings and those in which they are giants. The latter idea likely comes from Norway in which
the folkloric troll could, in fact, be the same as a giant. Significantly for the trolls’ fate, no
matter what their size, trolls are conceived of as being exceptionally ugly. As ugliness in fairy
tales and children’s literature is a byword for wickedness (except in those cases in which
either the ugliness is illusory, such as in Andersen The Ugly Duckling, or the moral points to
the dangers of haughtiness), trolls have become the bad guys even when they retain their
social fairy-size. The result is that many of the negative attributes of traditional social fairies
have become attached to literary trolls, but few of their good aspects have survived. Since
trolls have come to symbolize evil, they have, naturally, been removed from their society and
been turned into solitary fairies. Often, children’s books – Dines Skafte Jespersen’s Troldepus
series springs to mind – include positive though mischievous portraits of trolls, but here, part
of the joke is that the troll confounds expectations.
Fourteen of my contributors highlight the dangerous or at least malicious side to trolls and
eleven mention their ugliness, this despite the fact that I do not usually initiate conversation
about the beings myself. Most people who state that trolls are aggressive give no details to
support this, and one gets the feeling that the beings, though unfriendly, are not too dangerous
if avoided. So far as their ugliness is concerned, there is some variety in description. The
following, from a joint husband and wife interview with Frede and Tove Pedersen197, who are
69 and 66 years old respectively, is typical of what I heard I about trolls though with a
heightened sense of danger:
Tove Pedersen: Then, there are trolls. Witches and trolls.
Adam Grydehøj: What’s a troll?
Frede Pedersen: It’s one with horns on its forehead, right? And a tail—.
TP: Big nose...
AG: Tail?
FP: Yes.
AG: How big are they?
TP: They aren’t too big.
FP: They were also a meter—.
TP: Half a meter. Think of half a meter, [Tove measures out the distance from the floor.] it comes
up to about here. They weren’t much bigger. They were also a bit evil, you know?
AG: Oh? Then, they did other things than—?
TP: They didn’t do anything good.
FP: No, I don’t think so.
TP: They were also something you threatened children with. I mean, “That’s naughty, so the troll
will come and take you” and that kind of thing, right? I haven’t really heard that trolls did anything
good.
FP: No.
TP: I don’t believe so.
Horned fairies are exceedingly rare in Northern European folk belief. Tails, while not a
common element in Danish troll lore, are likely an import from the Norway. The huldre,
Norway’s primary variety of social fairy, do not much differ from social fairies elsewhere but
often possess cow’s tails, a parallel to the hollow backs of so many Danish fairies, of which
we will have more to say later. Both Tove and Frede describe fairies [elverfolk] in relation to
trolls, saying that the two classes of beings look the same, making particular note of the
fairies’ horns. I heard no other accounts of horned elverfolk, but it nevertheless illustrates how
the fairy/troll distinction is coming full-circle with the literary trolls influencing literary fairy
conceptions. In all, three contributors state that trolls have horns, four that trolls are hairy, and
four that trolls are dirty. I assume that, if prompted, most contributors would hold that trolls
are hairy and dirty, but I try to keep this kind of prompting to a minimum. Some contributors,
furthermore, offer the idea that trolls live in forests.
We have seen that there is, to some extent, a connection between trolls and social fairies
in the popular consciousness. Could this be an explanation for the general conception of
social fairies as diminutive beings? Of the 19 contributors who tell me the size of trolls, four
view them as only a few centimetres tall, two as half a meter tall, two as one meter tall, one as
human-sized, nine as giant-sized, and a further one as appearing in multiple sizes (as either
one meter tall or in gigantic proportions). In light of this, it would be unwise to conclude that
the small trolls of literature have influenced the size of the small social fairies of the popular
consciousness. Since the general public does not attain knowledge of diminutive fairies –
whether traditional or otherwise – from academic folklore texts, Medieval ballads, Tolkien,
literature’s flower-fairies, or literary trolls, it must receive its conception of small social
fairies from elsewhere.
In this way, brownies are introduced into our investigation.
Chapter 8: The Conversion of the Danish Brownie
The Danish brownie [nisse] is at once everywhere and nowhere. On the one hand, today, it is
far and away the best-known supernatural being from traditional folklore of the supernatural
in Denmark. On the other hand, the present-day conception of the brownie only superficially
resembles the traditional one. Although the current cultural prominence of the brownie in
Denmark has very little to do with the fact, it is somehow fitting that brownies are far and
away the most commonly-encountered solitary fairies in Northern European folklore.
The brownie is a solitary fairy, essentially a household spirit, its own life explicitly linked
with that of humans. With a few exceptions,198 brownies are male and have no family life
whatsoever. In contrast to most solitary fairies, brownies are basically benevolent, only
turning malicious when provoked although, like fairies of all types, brownies often indulge in
revenge profoundly disproportionate to the offence. This propensity to react strongly to
insults contrasts with the brownie’s sole purpose in life: The serving of its human masters.
There is a degree of inconsistency in tradition as to whether it is the family owning the farm
or the farm itself to which brownies are tied, but however that may be, a well-treated brownie
is an exceptional drudge, carrying out far more labour than a mortal ever could. Common
brownie work includes milling the corn, reaping, binding the hay, cleaning the kitchen, caring
for the livestock, and punishing lazy maids and farmhands. Some brownies go even further in
their quest to help their masters by stealing grain from neighbouring farms and acting as the
master’s and mistress’ advisor. For all that, brownies are fiercely independent and resent
attempts to coerce them into doing work that they would be glad to do of their own accord.
Solid documentation for belief in brownies goes almost as far back as for belief in social
fairies. Gervase of Tilbury writes about beings who play brownie roles already in 1215:
Just as nature produces certain marvels in the world of humans, so spirits perpetrate their jokes
in human bodies made of air, which they put on with God’s permission. For instance, England
has certain demons (though I admit I do not know whether I should call them demons, or
mysterious ghosts of unknown origin), which the French call neptunes, and the English
portunes. It belongs to their nature to take pleasure in the simplicity of happy peasants. When
peasants stay up late at night for the sake of their domestic tasks, suddenly, though the doors are
closed, they are there warming themselves at the fire and eating little frogs which they bring out
of their pockets and roast on the coals. They have an aged appearance, and a wrinkled face; they
are very small in stature, measuring less than half a thumb, and they wear tiny rags sewn
together. If there should be anything to be carried in the house or any heavy task to be done,
they apply themselves to the work, and accomplish it more quickly than it could be done by
human means. It is a law of their nature that they can be useful but cannot do harm. However,
they do have one way of being a nuisance: when on occasions Englishmen ride alone through
the uncertain shadows of night, a portune sometimes attaches himself to the rider without being
seen, and when he has accompanied him on his way for some time, there comes a moment when
he seizes the reins and leads the horse into some nearby mud. While the horse wallows stuck in
the mud, the portune goes off roaring with laughter, and so with a trick of this kind he makes
fun of human simplicity.199
Gervase’s portunes are not quite the brownies we know from Early Modern texts. For one
thing, these are social fairies and thus bear some resemblance to the fairies native to
Cornwall, the pixies, who sometimes get together to perform brownie labours. Also, they are
exceedingly diminutive, the only flower-fairy-size fairies I have seen documented prior to
Shakespeare. The sceptic might suspect that Gervase has somehow become confused as to
these creatures’ true heights: After all, if the portunes themselves are only half a thumb tall,
their roasted frogs must be minuscule indeed. What is most surprising here is Gervase’s
sympathetic approach to the portunes. At a time when the likes of Gerald of Wales is finding
devils in every nook and cranny, Gervase is unable to decide how to classify these unerringlyfriendly spirits. Shrewdly, and according to his usual methods, he stops short of stating
outright that the portunes are not demons, but his claim that “they can be useful but cannot do
harm” would certainly seem to place them well out of the demonologists’ range.
The portunes are not quite brownies, but Gervase also briefly mentions lares (Ancient
Roman solitary fairies who have much in common with brownies) in the context of spirits
native to Northern Europe, saying that these spirits look like “human beings, although they
are not human, but merely appear so by some mysterious divine permission. For with respect
to the human body, and likewise the human mind or soul, demons can do nothing except by
divine permission.”200 As usual, Gervase is circumspect and makes this sympathetic statement
directly after citing Saint Augustine’s opinion on an evil Classical spirit, the lamia, a
juxtaposition that cannot help but make the lares or brownies seem blessed by comparison.
The mischievousness of Gervase’s portunes is, at least, in holding with brownie tradition.
Brownies play tricks on people for fun as well as revenge. What makes this particular
example – the leading of a rider off-track – so unusual is that it takes the household spirit
away from the realm of the farm. As Briggs has pointed out,201 there is a strong link between
brownies and the more varied group of solitary spirits that falls under the catch-all term of
goblins. The link is, in fact, so strong that brownies might properly be seen as a type of
goblin. Unlike brownies, most goblins live independently of humans and can be dangerous
without any provocation. The kind of activity ascribed by Gervase to the portunes seems to be
purely in the name of innocent fun and is perhaps the most popular pastime of bored goblins.
The beings who lead men and women off-course are usually not heavily characterised; in
fact, the beings themselves tend to remain invisible throughout the legends in which they
appear. Leading people astray is not, however, the preserve of goblins. Social fairies
sometimes partake of this guilty pleasure,202 and ghosts can do so as well.203 The most
common means of tricking a night-time traveller off the road is to appear as a distant light
toward which the pedestrian – mistaking it either for the lantern of another walker or the light
of a farmhouse – makes. The light itself seems to move, always keeping a bit ahead of its
quarry. Eventually, the traveller either realizes that he has been tricked; ends up in some
unenviable – and often very wet – place; or must struggle to break whatever “spell” has kept
him, against his better judgement, lost.
In the absence of any positive identifying features, the beings who undertake this irritating
and occasionally-deadly game are known by a number of different regional names, including
will-o’-the-wisp204; Jack-o’-Lantern, now of Halloween fame205; the Danish lygtemand
[lantern man], which also functions as the Danish name for a carved Halloween vegetable;
and the Latin ignis fatuus [foolish fire]. At times, we may speak of a goblin, brownie, ghost,
or social fairy acting like a will-o’-the-wisp, but those names specific to the act of misleading
travellers with a moving light are usually applied to beings with no other known function. It is
safe to assume the propensity for attributing these activities to, say, social fairies or some
other folklorically-complex variety of fairy increases when travellers are misled in an area
that is otherwise known for being the haunt the type of being in question. This argument is, of
course, a bit circular, and one can easily imagine legends of misled travellers helping to
initiate belief in the nearby residence of, say, social fairies. The point here is that will-o’-thewisp is, essentially, a functional term, like shoemaker or fishmonger: It may be that people
never believed in will-o’-the-wisps in and of themselves and always felt them to fall under
some other category of supernatural being but, in the absence of a positive identification, they
were sometimes referred to by their job titles. This point concerning roles played by multiple
types of supernatural beings is one to which we shall return later.
When the will-o’-the-wisp role is filled by a goblin who is misleading for fun, the being
tends to let its victim know about it eventually, often by breaking into laughter, just like
Shakespeare’s hobgoblin/brownie, Puck. A great many seemingly-earnest goblin and brownie
legends are humorous, and these solitary fairies seem to be more comically-inclined than their
social brethren.
If we may be excused for partaking of some idle speculation, a theory to explain this
could go as follows: There is no great social gap between humans and brownies as there is
between humans and social fairies. With the exception of a chosen few who can take and
leave the social fairies’ company as they wish, to merely sight social fairies is anomalous and
worthy of note even if it is not terribly uncommon. Some “legends” about social fairies
consist of nothing more than a person hearing fairy music or glimpsing a fairy dance; social
fairies are so much “the other” that, in their legends, plots are unnecessary. But brownies?
Brownies hang around the farm every day of the year. A master or member of the household
who is on particularly good terms with the farm’s brownie speaks with him regularly, treats
him as a loyal friend. Although – assuming again that brownies have never actually existed –
this makes it all the more difficult to understand how, just a few hundred years ago, the
majority of Northern European country-folk could believe in brownies, it does offer an
explanation as to why so many brownie legends have comic undertones. The everyday quality
of brownies means that a legend consisting of “Jens Jensen saw a brownie in the barn one
night last year” will never be memorable. In an era when many farms were assumed to house
brownies, it would have been more surprising not to experience a brownie. Thus, the stories
that have survived about brownies are those that are exceptional: A brownie gets his
comeuppance on a teasing maid; a brownie takes especially good care of his favourite cow;
two neighbouring brownies get into a fight. When it comes to brownies, only the most comic
or the most dramatic stories are “good enough” to survive in oral tradition.
Pleasing though this theory may be, it does not fully explain the differences in personality
between social fairies versus goblins and brownies on the other. There is some evidence to
suggest that some goblins – for example, the boggarts – can be viewed as brownies-gone-bad.
A mistreated brownie has two courses of action, either to simply leave his master in the lurch
and find another farm to work on or to become an outright pest by taking up poltergeist
activity and actively seeking to harm his old master’s welfare. Technically speaking,
poltergeists are beings that, for example, make strange noises and cast around furniture so as
to cause disorder in the house, yet poltergeist is, like will-o’-the-wisp just a functional term.
Despite poltergeist’s etymology (German for noisy ghost), some poltergeists are ghosts while
others are disaffected brownies or what have you. From on here on, moreover, we will define
poltergeist rather loosely as an irritating supernatural being with no physical manifestation.
Gervase places a type of French goblin, the follet, in the poltergeist role, and we might
wonder whether it is merely a disgruntled brownie. Although this might not be the case, it is
evident that brownies and prankster goblins were sharing characteristics already in the early
13th Century:
There are other demons also which the common folk call follets. These inhabit the homes of
simple peasants, and they are not deterred either by holy water or by exorcisms. Taking
advantage of their invisibility, they pelt anyone who comes in with stones, sticks, and household
utensils. Their words sound just like human speech, but their forms are never seen.206
Gervase is not the only Medieval writer to mention poltergeist activity. Poltergeists are a
dime a dozen in our Medieval texts, and Gerald of Wales in particular is absolutely wild about
them. I have not seen it noted before, but Gerald seems to describe mischievous brownies and
ill-intentioned goblins/boggarts in a long passage on poltergeist activities:
In these parts of Pembroke, in our own times, unclean spirits have been in close communication
with human beings. They are not visible, but their presence is felt all the same. First in the home
of Stephen Wiriet, then, at a later date, in the house of William Not, they have been in the habit
of manifesting themselves, throwing refuse all over the place, more keen perhaps to be a
nuisance than to do any real harm. In William’s house they were a cause of annoyance to both
host and guests alike, ripping up their clothes of linen, and their woollen ones, too, and even
cutting holes in them. No matter what precautions were taken, there seemed to be no way of
protecting these garments, not even if the doors were kept bolted and barred. In Stephen’s home
things were even more odd, for the spirit there was in the habit of arguing with humans. When
they protested, and this they would often do in sport, he would upbraid them in public for every
nasty little act which they had committed from the day of their birth onwards, things which they
did not like to hear discussed and which they would have preferred to keep secret.
If you ask me the cause and explanation of an event of this sort, I do not know what to
answer, except that it has often been the presage, as they call it, of a sudden change from
poverty to wealth, or more often still from wealth to poverty and utter desolation, as, indeed, it
was in both these cases. It seems most remarkable to me that places cannot be cleansed of
visitations of this sort by the sprinkling of holy water, which is in general use and could be
applied liberally, or by the performing of some other religious ceremony. On the contrary, when
priests go in, however devoutly and protected by the crucifix and holy water, they are among
the first to suffer the ignominy of having filth thrown over them.207
This passage is interesting enough if only viewed as description of unidentified poltergeists,
but consider the chain of events: 1) A supernatural being continually plays pranks in the
house, 2) the farmer calls for a priest to banish the demon, 3) “it has often been the presage of
a sudden change from […] wealth to poverty.” In those cases in which these events have,
instead, presaged a change from poverty to wealth, can we guess that no priest was called, and
the farmer came to terms with his irritating but possibly helpful guest? This logic is
speculative but not as speculative as it at first might appear. In my opinion, Gerald is about
instances in which mistreatment of annoying brownies led to poverty and instances in which
acceptance of annoying brownies bodes well for a household. Precisely how brownies can
cause a farm to become impoverished will be discussed later.
Gerald also offers us Northern Europe’s first extant legend concerning an individualized
brownie, this time focusing on the being’s positive traits:
In this province of Pembroke which I have been describing to you, a third manifestation
occurred, in the home of Elidyr of Stackpole. It took the form of a young man with red hair
called Simon. This was a full incarnation, for he could be seen and touched. He removed the
household keys from the man in charge of them, and with complete self-assurance took on the
function of steward. He administered the household with such foresight and attention to detail,
or so it seemed, that in his hands everything prospered and nothing was ever lacking. Elidyr and
his wife had only to think of something which they would like for their table or their day-to-day
use, mentioning it perhaps to each other, but certainly not to Simon, and he would immediately
procure it, without having been asked to do so. “You wanted this,” he would say, “and I have
got it for you.” He knew all about their family finances, and the money they were trying to save,
and he would sometimes grumble at them. Whenever they planned to avoid some particular
expense, or to practise some economy, he would say: “Why on earth are you afraid to spend this
money? Your days are numbered. The money you are making such an effort to hoard will never
be of any use to you. It will simply go to others.” He liked to see the farm-labourers and
household servants eat and drink well. These things had been acquired by the sweat of their
brow, he would say, and it was only fair that they should enjoy them. Whatever he made up his
mind to do, whether it pleased his master and mistress or not, for, as I have told you, he knew
all their secrets, he would carry out immediately, brooking no opposition. He never went to
church, and no Christian word was ever heard on his lips. He never slept in the house, but
reported for work each morning with amazing punctuality. Then by chance he was seen one
night by some member of the family conversing with his fellow-demons by the water-mill and
the pool. The next morning he was interviewed by his master and mistress. He was dismissed on
the spot and he handed over the keys which he had held for forty days or more. When he left
they questioned him closely and asked him who he really was. He said that he had been born to
some rustic bedlam in the same parish, fathered on her by an incubus who had appeared in the
shape of her husband. He gave the husband’s name and that of the man’s father-in-law, who
was dead. Then he revealed who his mother was. She was still alive. They looked into the
matter with some care. The mother said that it was all true.208
This account is atypical by later standards of brownie lore. For one thing, Simon’s half-mortal
status is unusual. One can only wonder about the devil-hating Gerald’s personal views
concerning this story since although Simon is pronounced a demon, he does no harm
whatsoever. Unlike most brownies, Simon does no hard labour himself, but it is not unusual
for brownies to take on the stewardship of a farm alongside their baser duties. Similarly,
Simon’s interest in the servants’ well-being is quite normal: As much as brownies despise
lazy maids, they tend to stand up for the rights of industrious menials.
It is also strange, though not unique, that Simon has a name. Many brownies are highly
personalized, but they are only rarely referred to by name. Traditionally, names are sources of
power, and just as humans are advised not to tell fairies their names, even benevolent fairies
can be driven off by the sound of their own names. Perhaps in relation to this latter point,
fairies are generally antagonistic to those who call them by their true names, leading to the
use of noa-words, words that are used to replace taboo words in spoken and written language.
Thus, contributors of the 19th Century folklore collectors often refer to the fairies by
euphemistic names such as the good people, the good neighbours, the gentry, the wee folk, or
the ever-popular them. The same idea seems to be in the minds of the Jaloff people of what is
today Senegal, who called the Yumboe – the local fairy race – Bakhna Rakhna [The Good
People].209 Even the Ancient Greeks and Romans labelled as Eumenides [The GoodTempered Ones] their decidedly-unfriendly Furies. This latter example might appear merely
coincidental if we do not note that the Furies are sometimes theorized to be a conglomerate of
localized fertility spirits,210 the same line of thought that convincingly-presents the Old Norse
race of fertility deities, the Vanir, as mythologized social fairies.
The Danish name for the brownie, nisse, is a case in point. Nisse is nothing more than an
abbreviation of the common Danish given name, Niels, equivalent to Nicolas. Though some
authorities suggest that Denmark’s brownies are called Nisse in order to express the close,
personal relationship between the farmer and the fairy,211 this would seem to be wishful
thinking, if only because it would be very odd if all of these brownies were, in fact, named
Niels. In any case, legends show that one of the surest ways of losing or getting rid of a
brownie – not the easiest of tasks – is to name it.
As we have seen above, Olaus Magnus gives a slight nod to brownies in 1555,212 yet it is
in late-16th Century England that brownie writing really takes off. Reginald Scot, author of the
anti-witch hunt treatise, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, makes his famous statement regarding
these beings in 1584:
In deede your grandams maides were woont to set a boll of milke before him [Incubus] and his
cousine Robin goodfellow, for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at
midnight: and you haue also heard that he would chafe exceedingly, if the maid or goodwife of
the house, having compassion of his nakedness, laid anie clothes for him, that case he saith;
What haue we here? Hemton hamten, here will I neuer more tread nor stampen.213
Here, the brownie is called Robin Goodfellow, which, the astute will note, is another familiar
noa-name. Incidentally, Robin is derived from Robert, which is also the source of Hob a
common personal name for brownies and hobgoblins.214
Scot’s account is the typical brownie story in miniature: So long as the brownie is given a
meagre ration of food, it will do a great deal of work. Any gift above this bowl of milk and,
perhaps, a bit of bread or porridge, anything that is suggestive of payment, will not be
interpreted kindly by the brownie. In one of the strange quirks of Northern European folklore,
brownies are frequently unintentionally banished by gifts of clothing. This also ties into the
idea that brownies are usually either naked or very poorly clothed. It is strange that Scot
should relegate belief in brownies to previous generations, something that he does more than
once,215 since brownies certainly long-outlasted Scot’s own era.
King James VI’s Dæmonologie of 1597, written partly in response to Scot, also contains a
passage on brownies. Whereas Scot views brownies as old wives’ tales, James believes them
to be actual representations of Satan that flourished in Catholic times and did “as it were
necessarie turnes up and down the house: and this spirit they called Brownie in our language,
who appeared like a rough-man: yea, some were so blinded, as to beleeve that their house was
all the sonsier, as they called it, that such spirites resorted there.”216 It is noteworthy that, both
in Scot and James, there is no hint of brownies being small, something that is generally
assumed today. James’ creature, at least, is human-sized. As with social fairies, however,
tradition is inconsistent on this count, and dwarf-sized as well as man-sized brownies both
appear in later folklore.
Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (otherwise known as Robin
Goodfellow) led to an explosion of the brownie’s literary appeal, but the brownie’s
popularization did result in the prettification foisted upon its contemporary social fairies. Like
Shakespeare’s Puck, most literary Robin Goodfellows split their time between the home and
the highway, helping various farmers and playing merry pranks on travellers whenever the
mood suits them. This does not quite fit either the brownie or the other goblins of folk
tradition, but as we have seen, these two concepts were blended very early on in the history of
goblindom. Since both Gervase of Tilbury and Olaus Magnus actually describe Puck-like
beings and not strictly-domestic brownies, we might even have cause to wonder whether,
instead of Puck being a case of fusion, the “brownie/other goblin” dichotomy is, in fact, a
case of fission.
A story nicely illustrative both of the brownie’s devotion to its work and its propensity for
playing tricks is recorded by the Danish folklorist, Evald Tang Kristensen, in the late 1800s:
On a farm out on Sletten on Fyn, there was a brownie. It was such a little, good-natured one
who never did anyone harm when they left him in peace; on the contrary, he was always
assisting people with the work, both in the stable and in the barn. He mucked out, cut chaff, and
threshed grain, but always at night, so there was rarely anyone who saw him although, every
now and then, one could see him through a trapdoor with his pipe in his mouth. The people
were very fond of him, and therefore, every evening, he received his porridge in a little bowl
that was set over in a corner of the barn. Once he got angry though. A new farmhand had come
to the farm, and he thought that it could be fun to trick the brownie. One evening, then, he
poured a good deal of grit into the porridge that the brownie was meant to have, and after that,
he hid himself and lay in wait. The brownie did come and began eating the porridge but noticed
soon enough that there was grit in it although he pretended that nothing was wrong and ate the
lot of it. But at night, while the farmhand slept, he crept into his chamber and took his clothes
and dipped them in tar. The next morning, there was hell to pay trying to wash the clothes well
enough for them to be useable, and even though nobody knew how it had happened, people
could pretty well guess that the brownie must have been involved, and the farmhand himself
eventually had to explain what he had done.217
The farmhand in this legend was lucky that nothing worse happened. Although most brownies
content themselves with little jokes, some can be quite vicious. For example, Kristensen’s
also records that:
It was in that time when brownies were around that a farmhand went out one night to feed their
horses. So, the brownie is sitting up on the crossbeam in their barn and playing with his
patrilaller [meaning unknown]. Then, the farmhand feeds the horses, and when he’s done, he
takes their barn rake and hits out at him, so that the brownie loses his grip and plummets down.
Then, the brownie said as he walked out of the barn that the farmhand would be paid back in
kind. But he didn’t count on the payment. The farmhand was the boyfriend of a girl on the farm
where they worked, and one evening, she followed him to feed the horses. Then, they happened
to hear someone walking. “Now someone’s coming!” says girl and jumps out of the barn, and
so, the farmhand stays there and doesn’t come back. The people thought, after all, that he had
gone to bed, so they never thought of looking for him that night. But in the morning, they asked
after him all right, and they looked for him, but the farmhand wasn’t anywhere, and rumour says
that they didn’t find him before the harvest, before they brought the grain in. Then, they found
him way up in their barn, under a cross-beam. There he sat, withered and eaten-away. They
believed that the brownie had stuffed him in there.218
This kind of behaviour would astound the typical modern-day Dane who, at worst, associates
brownies with harmless pranks. The previous two examples were Danish, but parallel legends
exist throughout Scandinavia, Germany, and the British Isles. It is tempting to dwell on the
less-pleasant side of brownie lore since, today, Danes see them as wholly-benevolent, but
most encounters with brownies are clearly beneficial to humans, and it is the contrast that
makes the exceptions striking. Certainly, brownies are safer to interact with than any other
race of traditional supernatural being widespread in Northern Europe.
The first extant unambiguous mention of Danish brownies appears in 1587, and the
earliest Danish first-hand account of the being is dated at 1734.219 About a century later, the
great shift in the Danish brownies’ character would finally begin.220 At this time, Danish
Christmas celebrations were accruing secular elements, and the holiday gradually turned into
a family festival involving decorated trees and gift exchanges. In 1818, J.M. Thiele began
releasing his folklore books, which proved popular with the urban upper-class, an audience, it
seems, that had lost its belief in brownies. Thiele’s books showed, among other things, that
brownies traditionally received a liberally-buttered portion of porridge at Christmas— Just
like, we must hasten to add, most farm labourers, for whom well-buttered porridge would
have represented an improvement in rations.
The subsequent development of the Christmas-brownie [julenisse] took place in Rome. In
1836, the Danish painter, Constantin Hansen, decorated an exilic holiday party with pictures
of Christmas-brownies, presumably because brownies had already taken on a hint of
Christmas spice and because they were seen – incorrectly – as characteristically Danish. The
popularity of brownies grew among the Danes in Rome, and the trend made its way back to
the homeland. By 1858, illustrated Christmas-brownies started appearing bearing gifts, and
female brownies [nissekoner] entered the fray, presenting Denmark with a supernatural
family-life of which the folkloric brownies could only dream. In the late 1800s, German
Christmas cards and books introduced the St. Nicholas tradition to Denmark. These German
items pictured Santa Claus with dwarfish helpers. Since Scandinavia, like the British Isles, is
poor in native dwarf lore, these dwarves were associated with brownies, beings that had
declined in stature in the popular consciousness and physically resembled them. Thus,
brownies transformed into Santa’s helpers.
As Robert Kirk noted, fairies tend share contemporary human fashion sense. Nevertheless,
the Christmas-brownie’s pictorial origins froze him in time, and the brownie that Danes think
of today wears a red and white hat and other accoutrements of an early-19th Century Danish
farm labourer. By today’s standards, such clothing looks so ridiculous and so unlike what
even the least fashionable of country-folk might wear, that this outfit is seen as being peculiar
to brownies.
The result is a tendency on the part of some of today’s more-sophisticated Danes to
believe that the outfit is, in fact, a fairy tale invention and that traditional brownies wore
“normal” clothing.221 This is, perhaps, partially fuelled by the popular – though false –
notions that Coca-Cola invented Santa Clause by gathering up disparate strands of the St
Nicholas legend and that the beverage company was likewise the first to clothe the figure in
red and white. Neither of these claims is historically accurate, but they are both mentioned by
two Ærøese pastors who attack the brownie’s portrayal in what have come to be considered
“Christmas colours.” One of these pastors, Sophie Elisabeth Seidelin, denies brownies any
right to Danishness whatsoever:
The brownie is not typically Danish. The brownie is Norwegian-Swedish, and Coca-Cola has
invented the idea that it should have a red brownie-hat and a red brownie-suit. That, he’s never
had. They’ve always had grey clothes on. They sit in hollows [tomter], in a clearing where
there’s just a tree stump left. Brownies live in the tree stump. They hide themselves there, and
that’s their place.
It is true that brownies are found elsewhere in Scandinavia, just as they are found in the
British Isles. In Sweden, a brownie is most commonly called a tomte, short for tomtegubbe
[farm-fellow] or some variation on this theme, tomt having once meant living-area. That this
word has now disappeared from Danish leads Sophie and another sophisticated contributor222
into an elaborate exercise in false etymology in which tomte is interpreted according to its
meaning today, empty [Swedish “tomt” and Danish “tømme”]. At certain periods in time, we
do find grey-clothed brownies prevalent in Denmark though, as we have seen, naked
brownies were always more common. Intellectual curiosity is sometimes a disadvantage
when trying to liberate oneself from the media-driven images of folkloric beings.
As the Christmas-brownie image developed in the late-19th and 20th Centuries, Danish
brownies came to be thought of as active exclusively at Christmas-time, an attribute
incompatible with the idea of the traditional, working brownie. The Scandinavian Christmasbrownie conception not only leaves out legends’ more aggressive brownie actions; it also
undercuts the amount of good a brownie can do. If these beings exist only in order to provide
Christmas cheer and eat their annual bowl of porridge, they are no longer essential to the
proper operating of a farm. The actions in the following story, for example, would simply lie
outside such a being’s realm of influence:
There was a brownie who once haunted the old pool on the Nith, and worked for Maxwell, the
Laird of Dalswinton. Of all human creatures he loved best the Laird’s daughter, and she had a
great friendship for him and told him all her secrets. When she fell in love it was the brownie
who helped her and presided over the details of her wedding. And when the pains of
motherhood first came on her it was he who fetched the cannie wife [the midwife]. The stableboy had been ordered to ride at once; but the Nith was roaring in high spate, and the straightest
path had an ill name, for it went through the Auld Pool, so he loitered. The brownie flung his
mistress’s fur cloak over his shoulders, mounted the best horse while the servant was still
dressing and crossed the roaring waters. As they rode back the cannie wife hesitated at the road
they came.
“Dinna ride by the Auld Pool,” she said. “We mecht meet the brownie.”
“Hae nae fear, gudewife,” said he. “Ye’ve met a’ the brownies ye’re like to meet.”
With that he plunged into the water and carried her safely over to the other side.
After he had set her down at the Hall steps he went round to the stable, where he found the
servant, still putting on his boots. He took the bridle off the horse and thrashed the boy soundly.
This happened soon after the time of the Reformation; and Maxwell of Dalswinton told the
Minister the story. The Minister was anxious to baptize so affectionate and zealous a servant. So
he hid in the stable with a stoup of holy water; and, as the brownie was beginning the night’s
work, threw the water over him and began the form of baptism. But he never completed it, for
the brownie gave one yell of terror and disappeared. Nor was he seen in Nithsdale again.223
One of the difficulties inherent in viewing brownies as tied to Christmas is that it would seem
to make them Christians as well. As the above legend shows, however benevolent a brownie
may be, it – like other types of fairies – is rarely Christian. This kind of exorcism story may
be part of the reason why people today see fairy belief as inimical to Christian belief, but I
think it more likely that people simply view fairies too absurd to have ever been a part of
established Christianity. Since, however, fairies were generally considered to be members of
some fallen race of angels or man, they actually held a place within the religion to which they
were hostile. It is, incidentally, worth noting that since the midwife did not recognise the
above brownie, it must have been human sized.
One of the odder developments in the popular Scandinavian view of brownies is the
bringing them into the fold of social fairies by giving them spouses, children, and friends.
Here, tradition runs in the opposite direction. Brownies are not merely loners; they often have
a positive dislike for other brownies:
Nebbe Farm no longer lies where it lay before, and the reason for this is as follows: Nebbe Farm
and Ødsted Farm each had a brownie. These two were not on great terms owing to the fact that,
in order to enrich their masters, they stole each others’ grain. One evening, it so happens that,
for better or for worse, they meet each other, each bearing a good load of grain. Now, they fight,
and it goes on for quite some time, but in the end, the brownie from Nebbe is forced to yield,
and he was killed. Now, the brownie from Ødsted caused such chaos over at Nebbe that they
had to move the farm a bit away so that the brownie would no longer hold power over them. It
was done, and after that, there was peace.224
Again, the brownies of folk belief are seen to be both more useful and more destructive than
their popularised successors.
Hübertz records no clear-cut brownie stories from Ærø, a strange thing since Northern
European belief in these beings really does seem to have been universally present, except
possibly – depending on who you ask – in Ireland. Ærø’s local folklore expert, Dion
Abrahamsen, who passed away in 2006, has his own theory as to why this is the case, one that
he expounded on a radio programme:
We have no brownies on Ærø, which is peculiar. I’ve investigated legends on Ærø and
investigated them for various legendary figures, and the lack of brownies is conspicuous; we
have many on Als, many on Langeland in their legends, but here on Ærø, we have just a single,
weak trace of one that was supposed to have lived in Volderup Cliff, but otherwise not a single
legend with brownies.
That Ærø-brownies [A locally-produced doll.] are sold today is another matter completely. It
is a modern, snazzy brownie that is quite pretty but that does not have the least to do with our
legends. A brownie is, namely, a heathen figure that properly belongs on family farms. It is the
person who first establishes the farm, a farm that then goes back to the time prior to
Christianity; these farms have brownies as a rule.
Now, it’s such that with our change here on Ærø, our special history, we have no family
farms that are older than 1776, and thus, our heathen beings have been assigned to other places,
these being the dolmens and passage graves that have been here on the island.225
The idea that brownies are ancestral spirits is not unique to Dion226 although, as far as I am
aware, his application of this theory to explain an absence of brownies is quite original if
highly speculative. He explains the theory to me personally in greater depth, saying that, in
the past, people conceived of a brownie as:
someone in grey clothes and then with, maybe, a green or a red hat. According to what I’ve
been able to find out – because it’s, you know, something I’ve interested myself in –, a brownie
is that person who founds a family farm and who’s from pre-Christian times. I mean, family
farms that go back to before we seriously became Christian – and there, we really have to go far
up into the Middle Ages before we seriously become Christian –, the founder of a family will
automatically become a brownie and protect the farm against fire and so on. And is, as a rule, a
friendly person who takes care of the animals in any case.
The age-old association of brownies with lares, Classical household spirits, helps reinforce
this theory somewhat artificially. Already in the 2nd Century, Apuleius, the Greek
Neoplatonist, conceives of lares as ghostly spirits although it is worth noting that this opinion
was never unchallenged and others, depending on their religious outlooks, saw lares as either
deities or demons.227 Significantly, Northern European believers never seem to regard
brownies or spirits performing brownie duties as the founders of their particular farms even
when it is a ghost who takes on the brownie role. The whole debate, then, begins to look
rather academic, especially when one considers that, unlike the Church Fathers from whom
we have received the competing theories, few of today’s folklorists believe in the actual
existence of either brownies or lares, no matter whether they might be ghosts, gods, or
malignant demons. That lares, much less brownies, should only have been found on ancient
family farms is, furthermore, simply without evidence.
In any case, it would be unwise to posit the non-existence of Ærøese belief in brownies on
the basis of Hübertz. For one thing, Hübertz, who certainly would have been aware of
brownie tradition from elsewhere, never states that legends concerning them do not exist.
More importantly, Hübertz’s legendary corpus is but an incomplete catalogue of Ærøese
folklore. After all, probably due to Hübertz having lived in Ærøskøbing, he provides no
legends whatsoever from East Ærø. It would be foolhardy to deduce from this that legends
were confined to West Ærø rather than to accept that Hübertz simply did not have the
opportunity to collect all of the available folkloric material. It is, however, precisely this
conclusion to which Dion and the prolific writer and local historian, Tove Kjærboe, come.228
As we shall see later, this conclusion is almost certainly incorrect.
Chapter 9: Perceptions of Past Belief in Brownies
We have seen that most people know very little about traditional social fairies. When it comes
to brownies, knowledge is somewhat better, probably as a result of literary brownies being so
popular. It is impossible to speak with a Dane about brownies without Christmas entering the
conversation, either because the contributor sees traditional brownies as Christmas figures or
because she needs to differentiate between the traditional brownie and the popular conception.
In any case, whether or not they are correct, my contributors have little trouble telling me
what a brownie does with its life. This is in stark contrast to social fairies and trolls, which are
generally known by their occasional actions or appearances, by what they do in direct relation
to humans.229
The most fundamental measure of a Dane’s knowledge of past brownie belief is whether
or not she links traditional brownies with Christmas. Of the 45 contributors who tell me about
the traditional brownie’s relationship to Christmas, about 58% make it clear that traditional
brownies are not Christmas figures. Meanwhile, 18% of contributors hold that even if
brownies are not restricted to appearing during Christmas-time, they nonetheless either exist
for the sake of this festive season or are significantly engaged in its celebration; an example of
this latter opinion would be that brownies only require their bowl of porridge during the
holidays and spend the rest of the year lounging around, unworked and unfed. A further 24%
of contributors see brownies exclusively as Christmas creatures, and if the beings appear at
other times of year, they do so in relation to their Christmas activities. That at least a quarter
of the sample group explicitly connect brownies with Christmas is rather worrisome if not too
surprising considering the amount of Christmas-brownie input Danes receive from the media
and arts.
Many contributors who do not envision traditional brownies as Christmas-brownies draw
this conclusion logically and not by any special historical knowledge. As we have seen in
relation to brownies’ clothing, some people are so cynical about commercial representations
of brownies that they simply assume the worst and attempt to strip the figure down to its bare
bones. The results of this process are not always historically accurate. By the same token,
many people logically understand that, three centuries ago, adult Danes would not have
believed in toy-making, Greenland-inhabiting brownies, so they remove the Christmas
associations entirely. That this deduction happens to be correct is a triumph of intellect but
hardly a sign of deep understanding of the beings themselves.
In contrast to our experience with social fairies, some contributors’ professional and
personal interests show-up clearly in the results. Unremarkably, all six of Ærø’s pastors see
brownies as totally distinct from Christmas, probably due to their love for Christianity.
Similarly, none of the five spiritualists who give an opinion on the matter view brownies and
Christmas as linked, probably due to their love for brownies. The amateur and professional
historians are, however, divided: Four historians preserve the brownie/Christmas separation230
whereas three see the supernatural being and the holiday as at least somewhat connected. 231
Within the group holding that “brownies belong to Christmas” there are a variety of
distinct interpretations. Five adult contributors in this group see brownies as beings who show
up at Christmas-time and play various festive tricks. On the other hand, two adults (whose
particular case will be taken up later) and four youths assume that today’s conception of
brownies building toys under the auspices of Santa Claus is correct. It is interesting to see
how competing sources of information can do combat within a contributor’s conception, as is
the case in the testimony of Niels Condrup, one of the 14-year-olds we met earlier. For the
sake of clarity, we will break up his rather lengthy account into several parts:
Niels Condrup: One often set, you know, porridge up to the brownies during Christmas in order
to – I mean, the house-brownies – so that they looked out for you, so that nothing bad would
happen… No, it’s not a brownie, those guys who’re inside the pots. Those guys in the pot of
gold, have you heard of them too? Or is it fairies [alfer] or… There’s someone who hides…
They have this pot of gold, but they aren’t brownies. But brownies—. I’ve set out a big bowl of
rice porridge up in the attic myself.
Adam Grydehøj: Just during Christmas-time?
NC: Yes, that’s the only time I’ve done it. Maybe, in the old days, people did it year-round, I
don’t know about that, but we, in any case, only did it during Christmas.
AG: Of course it wasn’t because your parents believed in them, but it was for your sake. But
what was it that brownies did with their lives in the old days? Was it just to protect the house
or…?
NC: Yes… And they also played tricks. I mean, changed things around, moved things around,
and made all kinds of trouble.
Although it might not be immediately obvious from this excerpt, Niels is unusually wellinformed about past folk belief, far better informed than most adults. His interest in the
subject and attempt to recall what he knows results in a very mixed picture of brownie nature.
Niels begins with a description of the most common brownie association Danes have
today, the Christmas-time placement of porridge in the attic or barn. A few hundred years
ago, a meal of porridge would not have been as mean as it sounds today, but the brownies are
lucky that the eating of rice porridge – surely tastier than barley or oat porridge – has become
a Danish Christmas tradition. Niels merely describes his own experience of leaving rice
porridge for the brownie, but 22% of all contributors anachronistically assume without
prompting that this same dish was served to the beings in centuries past, despite the fact that,
back then, rice would have been a true luxury in Denmark. This anachronism is not terribly
significant since porridge is porridge, but it does point to people’s readiness to apply presentday conditions to the past. Niels, in any case, avoids popular sentimentality by noting that the
porridge is given so that the brownie will take care of the giver. The brownie’s love for
practical jokes has survived into the present-day thanks to countless children’s books and
television programmes. At this point in my conversation with Niels, all of the brownie’s tricks
are rather petty.
Niels also begins an abortive story about some kind of supernatural being with pots of
gold but is unable to decide whether or not these are brownies. Upon hearing him, my first
impression is that he is thinking of the leprechaun, an Irish solitary fairy who owns a hidden
pot of gold. Later, however, it becomes clear that Niels is talking about something else
entirely:
Niels Condrup: And—. No, I can’t quite remember it, but I once heard a story about a shipbrownie! And it was one or the other of them I heard from Erik Kromann about a brownie. […]
I can’t quite remember it completely otherwise. It’s something involving a brownie who leaves
on a ship and something about it having some gold with it or something like that. I can’t
remember it completely. […]
Adam Grydehøj: Did brownies have families?
NC: I mean, in Christmas stories, there they have big brownie-families, you know, but with old
brownies… I’m not quite sure… I think so. Yeah, they must have been those sorts of families.
The ship story to which Niels refers is found in Hübertz’s Description of Ærø and will be
considered in depth in the next chapter, but suffice it say, it involves social fairies, not
brownies. Even though a quantity of gold does play a part in this story, one has the suspicion
that leprechauns are still influencing Niels’ partial account to a degree; after all, when this
gold-possessing being is first mentioned, it is as “someone who hides” what is presumably a
pot of gold. We will do well to remember that Niels received this story from Erik Kromann,
director of Marstal’s Maritime Museum, and in the next chapter, we will have the opportunity
to hear how much of the confusion in Niels’ account is of his own devising and how much
can be said to belong to Erik. Niels retells this story in a fragmentary manner, yet he is
nonetheless one of only four contributors who mention it at all, and this despite the fact that it
is by far the longest and most entertaining supernatural story in Hübertz.232
That Niels brings up the story at all represents an attempt to reach back to tradition,
something that many contributors fail to do. Niels is also thinking back upon another
storyline, one involving ship-brownies [skibsnisse], Scandinavian folkloric beings who,
despite their name, are not all that similar to the brownies who lived on farms. Nevertheless,
Niels is willing – with some caution – to accept evidence from Christmas books as to how
brownies live. He is not alone in this even though he is unique in stating his sources. In any
case, of the 17 contributors who venture an opinion concerning brownie families, just four
believe that the beings lead solitary lives.
Not much later in the interview, I ask Niels what “bad” things brownies can do besides
playing practical jokes:
Niels Condrup: Sure, we’ve – as Christmas approaches – we’ve said, “You mustn’t make too
much trouble because Santa Claus’ brownies can see you,” and then you didn’t get any
Christmas gifts. It was also… […] But the worst they could do? That was that one’s harvest,
that the harvest failed. I mean, that the harvest failed because one didn’t give the brownie his
brownie-porridge.
Adam Grydehøj: In the old days, were they connected with Santa Claus?
NC: Yes. A lot of stories say so, that they’re Santa Claus’ helpers, help Santa Claus up in his
workshop [in Greenland].
AG: And when do you think that widespread belief in these brownies who helped Santa Claus
disappeared?
NC: There’s still a bit around Christmas with little kids, but with adults, I think it disappeared
during the 1800s, I’d say. People became too modernized to believe in brownies.
AG: And is it the same with fairies [elverfolk]?
NC: Yes, all of that stuff.
It is, frankly, amazing that Niels blends popular culture’s “Santa’s helpers” with the
altogether-serious notion of brownies causing crop failure. For Niels, an intelligent and
historically-aware young man, not to notice that the two ideas are mutually exclusive, we
must assume that the weight of years of exposure to sources of popular culture have overcome
all logical obstacles to producing this hodgepodge of a conception. Nor is it simply that the
kind of brownie who works for Santa Claus is unlikely to be the sort of fellow who can be
provoked into destroying a farmer’s livelihood: Niels and three other youths who I
interviewed see present-day Christmas practices as something ancient. We saw in the last
chapter that Santa Claus first came to Denmark in the late 1800s, but here, we have the idea
that he began declining in prominence in Denmark perhaps in the mid-1800s, suggesting that
he had been around long before. In Niels’ otherwise-nuanced historical worldview, adults
living 200 years ago believed in a Santa Claus who had a home in Greenland and made and
delivered Christmas gifts.
Niels’ theory on the history of Christmas is also present in the brownie account of another
young contributor, 15-year-old Thomas Eriksen:
Thomas Eriksen: They come out for Christmas. And they really like it when people place rice
porridge with cinnamon and sugar, and if people, they don’t do it, then they play tricks, I mean,
hide things and…
Adam Grydehøj: Do they only exist during Christmas-time?
TE: They sleep the rest of the time.
AG: Where do they sleep?
TE: No, they work the rest of the time. They work at making gifts and that kind of thing.
AG: Work at making gifts… Are they connected with Santa Claus?
TE: Yes.
AG: Did Santa Claus exist 300 years ago?
TE: Sure, I think he did. He exists. He lives on Greenland along with his brownies.
AG: But you believe in Santa Claus?
TE: Yes. I mean, half-and-half.
AG: Fine. And could you describe how brownies look?
TE: They aren’t bigger than from the table to up here [Thomas measures out the distance.],
maybe a half a meter.
AG: And the brownies live with Santa Claus in Greenland?
TE: They live together with Santa Claus. And they have a red hat, a brownie-hat. They love rice
porridge. And they get annoyed easily, in a bad mood, if they don’t get their rice porridge.
AG: Are they both men and women?
TE: Both men and women.
AG: Do they have families?
TE: Yes, they have families. Mostly, there’s a man, a woman, and two children. […]
AG: Do you think that your mother believes in Santa Claus?
TE: I don’t think she believes in it. She doesn’t believe in it, but she says it for us and other
kids, to make us happy and stuff like that.
AG: So why is it that you believe in Santa Claus?
TE: I mean, I just feel that… I believe in it. I don’t think that he lives on Greenland with… I’ve
heard that a lot of times. I think so. He lives some place or the other, U.S.A., Denmark, some
other places and [keeps a low profile] unless it’s Christmas Eve.
Thomas is my only contributor who believes in Santa Claus, and his related conception of the
brownie is, in contrast to that of Niels Condrup, entirely popular. The only place Thomas
diverges from Danish popular culture is in his disbelief that Santa Claus lives in Greenland;
otherwise, his description is that which could be gained from watching a televised Christmas
calendar.
The Christmas calendar is a Danish television tradition, begun in 1962, in which a single
episode of a Christmas-themed programme is aired each night from the 1st of January until
Christmas Eve. One of my contributors, the 59-year-old Mette Lage, produced two browniepopulated Christmas calendars for the television station DR in 1980s. These are The Brownie Gang
(Nissebanden, 1980) and The Brownie Gang in Greenland (Nissebanden i Grønland, 1989). My
initial interview with Mette revealed, to my surprise, that her knowledge of traditional brownie
folklore is extremely low, perhaps no lower than most people’s but more glaring due to the fact that
her experience with the Christmas calendars has given her so much to say about Christmasbrownies. Briefly stated, our first discussion yielded the following information that was not also
clearly stated in our second interview: Brownies live in Greenland – although some people say
Finland – and build toys with Santa Claus. Around Christmas-time, the brownies move into the
houses with which they’re connected, and during this season, they ensure that people, particularly
children, enjoy themselves and get along with one another. These beings are about 40 centimeters
tall. Different kinds of brownies live in different places; for example, some live in the forest, some
on farms, some in the mountains, some in towns, etc. Hundreds of years ago, belief in brownies was
more serious, and adults believed in them as well as children. Christmas [Jul] was a pre-Christian
holiday, and brownies originated in the pre-Christian age. Brownies like rice porridge, and they are
apt to punish with light teasing those people who do not believe in them. Nonetheless, brownies
never cause any trouble that is actually dangerous.
In light of the results of my initial interview, I went back to speak with Mette not long
afterward. Since our previous talk, Mette had spoken with a friend about brownies and had, without
truly realising it, changed her opinions on a number of points. In any case, what follows is the
discussion Mette and I have about the Christmas calendars she produced. The account is heavily
edited on account of its length:
Mette Lage: The starting point for both of the Christmas calendars is, of course, to entertain and
tell a good story about brownies but also to create a suspenseful story so that it becomes a
Christmas calendar that both children and adults can see together. […] And therefore, the first
one, it’s about how Santa Claus had lost his good humour, and he doesn’t want to make any
gifts, he doesn’t want to run around to all the children, nothing. […] And so, they set the
Brownie Gang, who were a special troop of specially-trained brownies, to find his good humour
again. […] And in the other one, […] it was built around an old Greenlandic legend about a
meteor that flies in the sky and shines, and if two of them fall down right in the vicinity of each
other, then you can gather them up, and then you can do magic in the sense that you can get
anything to happen.233 […] But you can say that the myth we’ve built on is that, above all,
brownies are a bunch of teases but also helpers, a combination of the two. They tease in order to
help, in order to open people’s eyes up to the good. And these brownies here in our programme,
they’d been equipped with a special magic permit. They have, actually, a special letter that
shows that they have the right to do magic. […]
Adam Grydehøj: What were the big differences between the brownies in the film and the “real”
brownies?
ML: You can say that the really big difference was that we decided that we didn’t care whether
they were big or little. That’s just how they are. So, these brownies here, they were just as big as
people. We say, “It doesn’t matter. Brownies can take on the size that brownies need when they
go out on missions.” […] I’ve discussed it, actually, with a friend of mine who was born in
southern Jutland who was here visiting last weekend, where she says that it’s a load of nonsense
that brownies are a Christmas concept. Brownies are something that are just there, and they’re
always there, and they live in our attics. But she feels that brownies are always up in our attics,
in a hollow space and that kind of thing. And just do what they have to do when they have to do
it. It isn’t any Christmas phenomenon. Santa Claus has taken them over as a phenomenon.
Yeah, she separates Santa Claus and brownies as two things that have nothing to do with one
another. Our thoughts in the background discussions we’ve had [for the Christmas calendars] is
that Santa Claus is the biggest brownie of all. He’s king of all the brownies in the entire world,
and he’s the one who decides.
AG: And do brownies live in Greenland?
ML: Not all of them. He [Santa Claus] lives in Greenland. But brownies live every country, but
he can communicate with them and set them to work if he senses that, in one place or another,
there’s something that isn’t going as it should, especially in relation to children. […]
AG: In old belief, how was it? You said before that they were pre-Christian beliefs, Santa Claus
and brownies.
ML: Not Santa Claus, but brownies. Santa Claus, I think, is a modern, capitalist idea. The
brownies, I think, have existed for a long time, and whether people called them brownies, I
don’t know, but I mean, that every house contained a small being who did things, teases and
fools around, I mean, I think that’s ancient. […]
AG: What else did brownies do?
ML: What else? Otherwise, I think that they keep to themselves up in the attic and live their own
lives. I think that brownies have just been little, invisible helpers and teases who people have
then decided to set in that frame so that the whole thing makes sense. […] In reality, I think
more and more that the whole thing is a question of people needing an explanation. And then,
it’s like there are two types, right? There are ghosts, who are creepy and dangerous, and then
there are brownies, who are good and helpful. It was nice to have both in order to explain
things, right? The less you believe in the divine or religion or that there’s a higher power who
controls things, the more you need to believe in some other thing when things happen that you
can’t explain, right? You give it a new name, right?
AG: Last time we talked, you said you learned about brownies from your family. Was there any
special research you did for this programme on DR?
ML: No. There wasn’t properly… We didn’t do it terribly scientifically or systematically. [...]
We sat there – those two who were going to write the story and Per who was going to direct it
and me who was going to produce it –, and we had a few evenings where we just brainstormed
about what we each remembered about what sizes brownies could be and how we could create
some figures who could interact with one another, where they didn’t necessarily have the same
methods of reaching the same goal. It’s this that allowed the story to be fun. We didn’t go
through it scientifically. We didn’t sit and read all of the old books about brownies and that sort
of thing.
AG: Anyway, if I sat there and listened to all of you, and I said, “I know that this is for
entertainment, but your ideas of brownies are wrong,” would that have bothered you?
ML: No. The starting point we took, it was, “What’s the Danish child’s relationship to brownies
right now?” And it’s that brownies have to do with Christmas, and brownies are connected with
Santa Claus, and Santa Claus is connected with gifts. We didn’t try to make something
historical. I mean, there are others who’ve tried to do that and bring in more historical
correctness. That Christmas calendar that was sent out on TV2, I think that they’ve made three
editions of it, that one with Pyrus with the old Royal Archives [“Alletiders Jul”, around which
four series have been made between 1994 and 2000.]. There, they reach back to all sorts of old
myths and stories that don’t necessarily have much to do with brownies, but it’s the brownies’
power that can take them back in time to experience different things. […] I don’t think that you
can make – not as a Christmas calendar – something for children that’s thoroughly scientific.
You could do it at another time of year, but a TV Christmas calendar is focused on
entertainment.
AG: Don’t you think that these things are decontextualized if even those people who write the
programme don’t have a really concrete idea about what the original was? I mean, I’ve just
spoken with a boy who believes in Santa Claus and his brownies.
ML: Yes, it’s clear that when we make something and air it again and again, we have a
tremendous effect, and we also destroy understanding of old folk belief because we begin to
introduce new rules about what brownies are and what they can do. It’s clear that they’ve had an
enormous effect on children who are about 15- to 20-years-old today, they have a picture of it
because they’re bombarded with stories about brownies during Christmas-time on multiple TV
channels.
Mette is correct, of course, that the role of a TV Christmas programme is to entertain, and it
would be pretentious as well as futile to maintain that Christmas calendars ought to be history
lessons. After all, there is cultural and artistic value in the Christmas-brownie, just as there is
cultural and artistic value in the traditional brownie.
As Mette admits at the end of the interview, The Brownie Gang has had a particular
influence on the public, especially that portion of the public that was young and
impressionable at the time the programmes first aired. Although non-traditional beings like
mountain-brownies and forest-brownies were invented long before The Brownie Gang, they
have been perpetuated by it. Following a discussion with a friend, Mette’s conception of
traditional brownies has changed subtly since our first interview, and she no longer links the
beings with Christmas. Nevertheless, when I ask her about how the Christmas calendars’
brownies differ from traditional brownies, she still answers from the point of view of neartotal folkloric ignorance. The Brownie Gang’s major innovation, in her eyes, is that the
brownies are human-sized, yet we saw earlier that, prior to the introduction of the Christmasbrownie, many – possibly most – brownies were human-sized. The Christmas calendar’s size
change as well as its other alterations are not, despite Mette’s suggestion, innovations upon
the traditional being but, rather, upon the literary one.
It is not necessary for art to be historically true, but perhaps it ought to be created with a
sense of historical awareness. Mette and her colleagues did not just fail to “read all of the old
books about brownies;” they failed to read any of them. Mette need not, as it turns out, have
worried so much about the brownies’ sizes since, had the brownies been placed in an even
somewhat historically-accurate context, not only would their human-sizes have been
acceptable to the folklorists, but their quirks would have seemed all the more inspired to the
general public. The machinery of popular culture – and popular culture is not necessarily a
bad thing – builds upon itself, travelling ever-farther from its base in tradition. The
generations of Christmas-brownies who have followed The Brownie Gang have had this
programme’s conceptions of brownies as an archetype, and if today’s Christmas-brownies are
scarcely recognizable as the beings that we looked at in the last chapter, just imagine how
even less recognizable they will be in a half a century.
When Mette points out that another TV channel has produced a historical Christmas
calendar with brownies, she merely exposes the current, popular attitude. This Christmas
calendar may teach about historical events and personages, yet its framework for achieving
this – involving teensy-weensy, time-travelling brownies living in the Danish Royal Archives
– only serves to highlight how much folklore has been cut away from “real” history.
Naturally, no one watching this Christmas calendar is expected to take the entirety at face
value. This is, however, precisely the point: Brownies, social fairies, and other beings of past
folklore are hardly ever taken seriously, even when it would be easy to do so, even when the
surrounding plot focuses on teaching history. It would be foolish to decry artistic creativity.
Not everything has to be educational. We will only note that when the people who educate the
public about folklore know very little about folklore, it is no wonder that the public has not
the faintest idea either. It is effectively irrelevant whether a TV producer’s aim is to entertain
or to teach history: The results, as far as public knowledge of folklore is concerned, are the
same.
Despite what we have looked at so far in this chapter, the situation is not all doom and
gloom. We may be concerned that so many people imagine that their ancestors believed in
brownies who revelled in Christmas, but we cannot really be surprised by it. I was, on the
other hand, surprised to find that, even among many of the people for whom brownies are just
Christmas figures, some level of knowledge about traditional brownies persists. About 24% of
contributors at least imply that brownies can help with farm work or other practical matters
while a further 24% limit a brownie’s good deeds to exercising some vague protective
influence over the farm and family. Finally, 12% of contributors, presumably over-reacting to
what they see as a patently-unhistorical Christmas-brownie concept, go so far as to say that
traditional brownies do very little or no good at all. The idea that brownies help with the farm
work is not a part of the Christmas-brownie concept although the idea of a vaguely-protective
brownie can be deduced from the popular, literary being. It is a relief that at least a quarter of
my contributors have a fairly good – if not too detailed – idea of the traditional brownie.
Nonetheless, the most commonly-cited brownie attribute is its propensity to tease, with 51%
of contributors noting this without prompting, an exceptionally high figure when one
remembers that this includes those contributors who say very little else about brownies. We
saw earlier that traditional brownies are famous for teasing as well, but we can permit a bit of
cynicism in wondering if knowledge of this trait today is perhaps linked to Christmasbrownies who, as Mette Lage points out, make teasing their primary job.
We have considered brownies in relation to social fairies because it is possible that
people’s tendency to envision small social fairies is a result of their imagining small
brownies. Since brownies have not always been uniformly small, the reason why causality
might work in this direction – that brownies affect social fairies and not the other way around
– is that, unlike social fairies, brownies are a major element of Danish popular culture. Of the
35 contributors who give me an opinion on brownies’ statures, five believe the beings to be
just a few centimetres tall, five between 15 and 30 centimetres, 11 about half a meter, eight
about one meter, and two each for one and a half meters, human-sized, and variably sized.
While we cannot prove that notions of brownies act upon those of social fairies, these results
give us pause for thought. One can say, of course, that there is a big difference between a
brownie no larger than one’s thumb and a brownie who comes up to one’s hip, yet this is,
nevertheless, a small spectrum. In comparison with social fairies and trolls, there is general
agreement as to a brownie’s size.
A report like the following shows how brownies and social fairies can be amalgamated. As this
educated contributor in his 30s wishes to remain anonymous, we will call him Lauritz:234
Lauritz: When I was young, I really wanted to believe in brownies. So, of course, I saw
something. There were a few times when, out in the garden or the fields, I glimpsed something
that I thought was a brownie. I must’ve been about 12-years-old. I never saw anything definite,
but judging by the height of the grass it was around this tall [Lauritz measures out about 60 cm
with his hands.]. I was very interested in nature back then, and I was sad that the island was all
farmland. I guess, I wanted Ærø’s nature to be richer than it was.
Adam Grydehøj: Why a brownie?
L: Well, brownie or the subterraneans.
AG: When you say subterraneans, what do you mean?
L: Small fellows, like the ones in Grydehøj. There’s also a story about them coming to Rise
Church.
AG: Are all subterraneans small?
L: Yes, they’re all small. When I was little, I wanted so much to see all of the burial mounds
where the subterraneans were supposed to live. I wanted to see as many as possible. It was said
that, some nights, these burial mounds would rise up on flaming pillars, and the subterraneans
would dance in a circle around them. Anyway, one night, I was walking in Gråsten Nor. It was
very misty. Suddenly, I saw a lot lights. For about a minute, I was sure that the lights were a
burial mound’s flaming pillars. I’d wanted to see this for so long. Then, I realised that, since the
last time I’d been out walking there, street lamps had been set up, and because of the mist, the
lights looked like pillars.
Lauritz learned about social fairies/brownies from Tove Kjærboe’s books. Subterraneans and
brownies are not separate beings in his mind, notwithstanding his general interest in history.
In addition to good-looking social fairies, flower-fairies, trolls, and brownies, five
contributors bring up gnomes as a type of supernatural being.235 It is surely not coincidental
that two of these contributors grew up in Germany, yet gnome-lore is not traditional anywhere
in the world. Gnomes were first popularized in something approaching their current form by
Germany’s 16th-Century scientist and physician, Paracelsus, now known by some in the
spiritualist community for his astrological and mystical theories. Even Paracelsus’ gnomes are
not synonymous with any type of social fairy. For him, they are simply soulless, moderatelysentient nature spirits who can move through the earth as birds fly through the air. This was
also the sense in which the spiritualists of the late 19th Century used the name, but as
spiritualism and flower-fairy belief began to coalesce in the early-20th Century, gnome
became a catch-all term for trolls, brownies, leprechauns, and small, earthy beings in general.
Even though my contributors are able, on average, to tell me much more about brownies
than about social fairies, there is a far greater redundancy in the descriptions of the former,
almost certainly due to the popularity of the Christmas-brownie. Only spiritualists, historians,
and pastors can be counted on to tell me something unexpected, and where people deviate
from the Christmas-brownie stereotype, the literary being is nevertheless constantly held up
for contrast.
Chapter 10: The Fairy Chalice of Rise Church
We have already looked at all but two of the social fairy stories appearing in J.R. Hübertz’s
Description of Ærø. These two stories – which happen to be the two longest and most complex fairy
stories in Hübertz’s volume – will be the focus of this chapter.
We have seen that most of the common 19th-Century fairy stories have Medieval analogues, and
this is also the case for Hübertz’s legend of the stolen fairy chalice. Gervase of Tilbury presents us
with a stolen fairy cup story,236 but this is merely the second extant Northern European instance of a
widespread legend, which is first recorded by William of Newburgh in the 1190s:
In the province of the Deiri, not far from my birthplace, a remarkable thing happened of which I
have known from my boyhood. There is a village, a few miles from the North Sea […]. A
countryman from this hamlet had gone to greet a friend staying in the next village. He was
returning late at night a little drunk, when suddenly from a hillock close by (I have quite often
seen this; it lies two or three furlongs from the village) he heard voices singing, as though
people were feasting in celebration. He wondered who were breaking the silence in this spot at
dead of night with festive rejoicing, so he sought to investigate the matter more carefully. In the
side of the hill he saw an open door; he approached and looked inside. Before his eyes was a
large, well-lit dwelling crowded with men and women reclining at table as at a formal feast.
One of the servants noticed him standing at the door, and offered him a cup. He took it, but
deliberately refused to drink it; he poured out the contents, but kept the container, and left with
all speed. The removal of the vessel caused a disturbance at the feast, and the diners pursued
him. But the speed of his mount enabled him to escape, and he retired to the village with his
notable prize. Eventually this cup of unknown material, unusual colour, and strange shape was
offered as a splendid gift to the elder Henry, king of England [ruled 1100-1135]. Subsequently
it was passed on to the queen’s brother, David king of Scots [ruled 1124-1153], and kept for
very many years among the treasure of Scotland. Some years ago, as I learned from a reliable
account, Henry II wished to see it, and it was surrendered to him by William king of Scots.237
Due to the fact that King Henry’s queen, Matilda, died in 1118, and Henry remarried in 1121, the
cup was presumably given to David prior to his becoming king. Thus, this event can be dated fairly
precisely, having occurred between 1100 (when Henry married Edith/Matilda) and 1118.
Hübertz offers a similar tale from Ærø in 1834:
The chalice in Rise Church came from that hill [Elverhøj] in the following way. One evening, a
young farmhand came riding past Dunkær Mill when he saw Elverhøj standing on four pillars,
prettily lit up and with the fairies dancing beneath. Surprised, he halted a moment. Then, a
beautiful fairy woman came with a silver chalice and asked him to drink. He took the chalice
but threw the drink over his shoulder and galloped off. A few drops that fell on the horse burned
the hair off. He rode the best that he could now, and all of the fairies gave chase. When he rode
alongside the ploughed field, they were often so close to him that they got a hold of the horse’s
tail, but when he turned course and rode across the field, they fell behind. Because they only
had one leg that they hopped on, they frequently fell in the furrows. Finally though, they
struggled up so close behind him that he could no longer avoid them, so when he reached the
wall of Rise Church, he threw the chalice over it. Then, they had no power over him since the
chalice lay on hallowed ground.238
In light of our previous assertion that fairies rarely show unmotivated malice, it may appear strange
that the drink that these fairies offer the Ærøese farmhand is capable of burning the hair off of a
horse. However, I have never come across a story in which someone who partakes of a fairy drink is
literally poisoned. Neither is this due to a lack of stories in which a visitor to a fairy mound
foolishly drinks what he is offered. The result of drinking or eating with the fairies is usually the
imprisonment of the guest, sometimes implying the human’s transformation into a fairy. There are
exceptions however. Gervase of Tilbury’s stolen fairy cup story, for example, concerns a drinking
horn filled with revitalizing nectar. Its theft is utterly base, leading the Earl of Gloucester to punish
the guilty knight. While it is usually a good idea to reject fairy food and drink, folklore is not
consistent as to whether it is best to accept or reject fairy gifts in general. Accepting gifts can lead to
extreme luck (as in the above example of the Ærøese boy who eats fairy bread239) or loss of
humanity. As a rule of thumb, if a gift is given in return for work, it is safe to accept and, indeed,
dangerous to reject.
The work of many non-professional folklorists is difficult to judge, yet Hübertz is even more
problematic than most. Such is the conformity of past international fairy belief that, after skimming
the first few lines of a written narrative, it is usually possible to predict the basic plot of a migratory
fairy legend. There may be minor variations from the standard, but these variants will be familiar in
themselves. Sure enough, none of the legends told by Hübertz are without precedent, but some
contain unusual deviations that point to the legends being in the process of transforming into
folktales at the time of their recording. For instance, take the stolen fairy cup story. There is some
slight confusion in the narrative since not only does the cast-away drink fall on the horse, but the
fairies also manage to grab the horse’s tail. Both of these occurrences are usually a means of
accounting for the typical loss of the horse’s hair.240 What concerns us here though is the race
across the field. Although a ploughed field motif is present in many Nordic versions of the stolen
fairy cup legend, we might still ask why Hübertz’s fairies have trouble with furrows.
In order to explain the origins of this passage, we must first determine the size of the fairies in
question, something about which Hübertz is not explicit. It is also necessary to devote some
attention to the most unusual element in Hübertz’s folklore, namely, his assertion that Ærøese
fairies possess only one leg. When I ask Palle Abramsson, the Skovby historian, about the size of
fairies, he responds:
I think it’s a relative concept, right? Because if they weren’t bigger than this bottle here, then
they couldn’t run over the furrows, and then it wouldn’t matter if they had one leg or two legs.
If we read in Hübertz about the lady who looks in the oven [and watches a fairy wedding], 241
then one imagines extremely tiny people. But if you hear the story about the girl who gave the
farmhand in Dunkær the chalice, right? Well, then you can’t imagine a little one like that.
Although much of Palle’s knowledge of folklore comes from Hübertz, he has identified a key
confusion in Hübertz’s description of Ærøese belief. The problematic point is not the size of
Hübertz’s fairies since folk tradition also often describes variously-sized fairies within a single
community
I have not encountered a race of one-legged social fairies elsewhere, but as noted above, it is
dangerous to sub-categorize social fairies physiologically. One of the most distinctivelyScandinavian strains in supernatural folklore is that human-sized fairies are sometimes hampered by
a physical defect. The folkloric purpose of this deformity is almost always so that the hero of a
legend can identify the beings as fairies and not mistake them for humans.242 To this end, it is
necessary that the deformity be subtle enough for the hero to mistake the fairies’ identity at first
sight. For example, many Danish fairies have hollow backs, which is not apparent when the oftenbeautiful beings are viewed from the front. Similarly, some Norwegian fairies have easilyconcealed cow’s tails or hooves. Diminutive fairies, on the other hand, almost never have this kind
of deformity because, as tiny beings, they will never be mistaken for humans anyway.
Even though Hübertz mentions the fairies’ one-leggedness a number of times, the fairy cup
story is the only legend in his book in which the disability performs a narrative function. In another
of Hübertz’s stories, a milk maid is lured away by a male fairy,243 something that tiny or terriblydeformed fairies can only succeed in by the use of magic. Perhaps, the fairies who chase the
farmhand in Hübertz only have one leg because this disability is necessitated by the plot, and
Hübertz applied the disability across the board. There is some proof for this: Even though entire
races of one-legged fairies do not seem to exist outside of Hübertz, individual one-legged fairies do
crop up occasionally, and they only do so in stories about stolen chalices.
Let us look at one of Evald Tang Kristensen’s legends involving a one-legged fairy:
On Næsby Mark, there are two hills with fairies [troldfolk] in them. One evening, when the fairy
in one of the hills had a party, and it stood on fire-pillars, a farmhand came riding by, and when
he saw that the fairies were dancing, he went in and danced as well until long into the night. The
next evening, he came riding by again, and as they were sitting and drinking inside, they asked
if he would like to have a drink with them. Soon, a fairy who was named One-Leg [Enben]
came out and offered him a gold cup with drink in it. This, the farmhand threw out over the
horse’s back, and then he rode as hard as he could with the gold cup, and One-Leg after him.
But when the farmhand came by the other hill, Hyrebel’s wife stood outside, and because she
was insulted that she had not been invited to the other fairies’ party, she shouted to the
farmhand:
“Follow with the ice; then, you’ll win the chalice
Over ploughed ground
Then, he [One-Leg.] must run the furrows up and down
To the holy place.”
He followed that advice and rode over ploughed ground right until he came to the churchyard,
where he had the horse spring over the wall with the cup, which has been used in the church
ever since.244
It is vital to note that, here, the pursuing fairy must run up and down alongside the plough
furrows. It is also clear that only a single fairy is missing a leg; after all, it would otherwise be
strange for the pursuing fairy to be named One-Leg.
I have spoken with Gorm Benzon, the Danish folklorist, about one-legged fairies, and he is
of the impression that they have lost their legs due to “some kind of accident.” This is
guesswork to be sure, but unless we make the unlikely assumption that there has been some
kind of accident that has caused an entire community of fairies to lose a leg simultaneously, it
is a sign of the exceptional nature of this deformity. We can confidently state, in fact, that a
race of one-legged fairies would be out of place in Northern European folk belief, for
European fairies are by no means stuff of light and mist. For corporeal beings with lifestyles
that are roughly parallel to those of humans, one-leggedness would be a mortal condition. I
am not trying to suggest that fairies actually exist and that they have two legs, only that, in the
“traditional” mindset, a race of one-legged fairies would be an absurdity in which no rightthinking adult would believe.
Despite the relative rarity of legends concerning a one-legged fairy, there are many Danish
legends concerning stolen fairy cups and resultant races across ploughed fields. In the majority of
these legends, the fairies must, as in the above text, run back and forth across the field245 or run
around the perimeter of the field246. That is to say, Hübertz is definitely unusual, though by no
means unique, in having his fairies simply stumble over the furrows. But why do two-legged
Scandinavian fairies ever have difficulty crossing furrows? It is not because the fairies being small;
while this would impede the fairies’ running, it would also limit the size of their drinking vessels.247
The extant legends themselves typically lack an explanation for the fairies’ inability to cross
furrows, but one such explanation can be found in part of an incomplete story collected by
Kristensen that states that “The fairies [“dværgene”; literally, “dwarves”] cannot walk over
furrows but must stumble over them because the sign of the cross results from the step over
them.”248 The heathen or demonic nature of the fairies is, then, the limiting factor, not the beings’
number of legs or size. Interestingly, the above excerpt suggests that fairies can cross but only with
difficulty, which is also the case in Hübertz.
Besides Hübertz, this migratory legend – as localized on Ærø – is recounted in only three
printed sources: It is retold in two books by the amateur folklorist, Tove Kjærboe, and in a national
legend collection by Gorm Benzon.
In 1977, Tove Kjærboe, the folklorist most likely to be read on Ærø, wrote Church Silver on
Ærø, and in this slim book, she tells the story of the stolen chalice without mentioning the ploughed
field at all.249 However, her 1974 Legends and Visions from Ærø has a supernatural focus and
contains a more complete account. She begins her discussion of fairies with some poorlyresearched, over-generalised folklore250, and her detailed physical description is a cringe-worthy
blend of different traditions that she assumes to be universally applicable:
But no matter what one now says about fairies [ellefolk] or hill-folk [højfolk], they all look the
same. The men are dressed in a kind of uniform, grey and boring like that of the Chinese. They
have an old, high-peaked hat on, and as a rule, they possess only one leg, so there’s not really
much to them. The women, on the other hand, are pretty and graceful. They dance charmingly
and wear veil-like clothing while dancing, which they raise up over their heads with flexible
movements. There is supposed to be something rousing about their dance.251
Nowhere does Kjærboe mention that the one-legged men have difficulties with furrows.
When she tells the stolen chalice story, we are left to guess at her meaning, and it is uncertain
whether or not her narrative refers to fairies’ problems with furrows:
One evening, a young farmhand from Rise came riding through Dunkær, and when he passed
Elverhøj, he saw that it “stood on glowing pillars.” That is, it had lifted itself and was lit-up, and
you saw the folk dancing and having fun. The farmhand kept still to watch, and soon, a
beautiful fairy girl [ellepige] came out to him with a silver cup and asked him to drink, but he
didn’t dare, took the cup anyway, and threw the contents over his shoulder […] and galloped
off. A pair of drops of the fluid fell on the horse and singed the hair off.
Now, he had not only insulted the girl but the whole collective, and all of the lads
[knægtene] gave chase. Up and down the fields went the wild hunt, and the little ones followed
well despite their handicap. When the farmhand reached Rise Church, he threw the cup over the
churchyard’s wall, and as it fell on hallowed ground, the pursuers no longer had power over
him.252
Is Kjærboe saying that the fairies are unable to cross furrows? If so, why does she simply state that
the chase went “up and down the fields,” suggesting that the man is riding along the furrows too? It
looks as though here, as in her book on church silver, she is leaving out the ploughed field motif in
all but spirit. All things considered, it is highly unlikely that someone whose only source for this
story were Kjærboe and/or Hübertz would interpret the author as stating that the fairies are running
alongside rather than over the furrows.
The other non-Hübertz printed source for the legend is Gorm Benzon, one of Denmark’s preeminent folklorists. Benzon has written extensively on both material and cultural history, and his
five-volume set of The Denmark of Legends is a collection of popularly-written retellings of
legends from precise places – often castles and manor houses – throughout the country. As in many
books of this sort, the sources of stories are not cited. There is no overt theorizing in Benzon’s
writing; he presents a variety of entertaining stories, seemingly with the hope that even the most
inattentive readers will have obtained some folkloric knowledge after having finished the books. As
it is Benzon’s aim to cover the whole of Denmark geographically, he makes a stop on Ærø, and
there is no doubt that the stolen fairy cup legend is just the sort of legend that Benzon’s book wants.
The trouble is, Benzon would probably prefer that the story not come from Hübertz. Here is
Benzon’s retelling:
The people of Rise Church have the most wonderful Gothic altar chalice, which still has a good
deal of the original gold-plating intact. This chalice has not ended up here in the normal manner.
It is taken from the trolls in one of the hills by Dunkær.
Legend relates that, one summer night, a farmhand came riding by the hills when one of
them suddenly opened up, and the most beautiful maiden came out. She walked toward him,
offered him the chalice, which was full of a reddish liquid, and requested he drink to the hillking’s health.
The farmhand sniffed at the drink, and it definitely did not smell good. Therefore, he instead
slung the chalice’s contents away over his shoulder, gave the horse the spurs, and burst off with
the treasure in his hand.
Suddenly, the fairies [de underjordiske] swarmed out of the hill. They set after the
farmhand, who only saved himself with an established tactic that consists of riding over a
ploughed field, across the furrows. In so doing, one makes the sign of the cross, and the fairies
cannot do this, so they are forced to run up the furrows and down the furrows instead until they
come to the end of the field.
Despite this, they were just about to catch the farmhand, and it certainly would have gone ill
for him if he did not, just then, come alongside Rise Church, where he threw the chalice in over
the churchyard wall.
The fairies, who were right on his tail, stopped now for a moment in order to see if they
could save the chalice, but it was not to be since it lay on hallowed ground. Therefore, they
resumed the chase, and they were just about to grab after the horse when the farmhand rode into
the courtyard of the farm where he worked. He even pushed the gate right in the faces of the
subterranean folk, who got themselves some sore foreheads, and when they could not get into
the farm, they slunk back to their hill.
The next morning, the farmhand found the chalice in the churchyard, but he did not dare
keep it and gave it, instead, to the church, where it is, indeed, still in use.253
Upon reading Hübertz, or possibly Kjærboe, Benzon seems to have come to the same conclusion as
we have, namely, that the chase across the ploughed field makes very little sense as it stands. Were
Benzon to present the legend according to Hübertz’s plot, he would be acting with greater academic
honesty, but then, his is not an academic book. By following Hübertz to the letter, Benzon would
seriously mislead his non-specialist readers. Most of the supernatural narratives in The Denmark of
Legends deal with ghosts, not fairies, and an engaged reader of the book, if coming across a
description of a race of one-legged fairies, could hardly be blamed for assuming that all fairies have
just one leg.
In light of this, Benzon has standardised the story with tradition by giving the fairies a folkloric
reason for not running perpendicularly in relation to furrows: They are subject to a taboo and cannot
form the sign of the cross.
I spoke with Benzon in 2006, 21 years after he had written this book. He is now unable to recall
where, precisely, he read this legend nor that his legend is altered from its source. Nonetheless,
Benzon is definite in his opinion that the fairies here are inhibited by the sign of the cross. There is
a possibility – and I think that Benzon would agree with me – that the whole “one-legged fairy”
idea is just a narrative means of rationalizing the results of a forgotten fairy taboo: Once people
forget the “real” reason why fairies cannot run over furrows, they must come up with another
reason in order for the story to work, and one-leggedness is just a particularly ingenious solution. 254
There is, however, a problem with this kind of reasoning: The fairies in Hübertz are not, after
all, prevented from running across furrows. Their one-leggedness simply slows them down,
something that Benzon and I cannot accept as fully traditional assuming that a taboo is involved.
Irritatingly, the only definite indication I have found of the taboo comes from a text that, as in
Hübertz, simply makes the fairies stumble over the furrows.255 It is necessary to note that, however
this may be, none of my contributors have read Benzon’s book, and its existence cannot plausibly
have had any measurable effect on local folkloric knowledge.
Lest all of this build up appear pointless, it must be noted that the stolen fairy cup story is the
local legend that I heard most often on Ærø, with six of my contributors giving me at least a rough
sketch of its plot and five others mentioning the plough furrow motif without mentioning the legend
itself. We will note from the outset that all eleven contributors have the fairies run alongside rather
than stumble over the furrows. These eleven accounts will be given below, and for the remainder of
this chapter, all reference to contributors assumes this sample group.
One of my six contributors who places the furrow motif in the context of the fairy chalice
legend is 59-year-old Jesper Groth, currently a farmer at his family home in Lille Rise but formerly
a maker of historical programmes for Danish radio. Jesper – a serious, intelligent man – is unsure
whether or not he heard the story as a child. He has, at any rate, certainly read about it in Hübertz,
who he mentions himself. He tells me the story of the fairy cup in this form:
There was an exceptionally-tall hill in Rise Parish that was noted for being the highest on the
island, and this is the hill that lies up beside Dunkær Mill. This is where the church chalice
comes from. There was a party in that hill once, and then a farmhand came by and saw that the
hill stood open. That’s what it did when there was a party. And then, he saw that it was filled
with treasures inside. Gold and silver. And so, he took a big drinking chalice from inside the
hill, jumped up onto the horse, and rode off. And the little hill-folk, the fairies, they weren’t
very big. They were so small that they went along the furrows… Or they could run along the
furrows, and then they could catch the horse. And one of them touched the horse, and burned it
there. It made a burn mark on it. Then, the farmhand found out that he should ride across the
furrows. So, he rode across the furrows because then the fairies, they had to go up and down.
They got a route that was three times as long. They couldn’t just run over it. They had to run up
and down, up and down. But they must have been extremely fast, you can imagine, to be able to
run after a horse. Right beside Rise Church, they were about to catch it, and then he took that
chalice and threw it over the church wall. And there, they couldn’t get hold of it because it was
on Christian ground, hallowed ground. So, since then, they’ve kept the chalice at Rise Church.
It’s used today. But we don’t drink out of it, right? We pour into small cups, you know?
This diverges most obviously from Hübertz in the sense that, here, the fairies are tiny instead of
being one-legged. Of all contributors who mention the furrow motif, it is only Jesper who neglects
to mention that the fairies in question have only one leg. There are many traditions of small fairies,
so Jesper’s variation is, on the face of it, a logical means of removing the absurdity of oneleggedness while retaining the legend’s furrow motif. Of course, once the fairies become small, it is
no longer practical for them to hold normal-sized chalices, so the chalice becomes one of many
treasures lying inside the hill. This, in turn, means that the horse can no longer be burnt by fairy
drink, so the hint given in Hübertz is taken to its logical conclusion, and the horse is burnt when the
fairies touch it. Quite reasonably, given the size of the fairies, Jesper does not state that the horse is
burnt on its tail. Needless to say, Jesper believes that his version of the legend is the same as that
found in Hübertz.
Jesper is a historian, and he assumes this role when speaking with me. Not everyone takes this
historical stance however. I also hear the legend from the thin, bespectacled, 40-year-old Jan
Pedersen of Leby, a village near Skovby. Jan was educated in agriculture, but after a debilitating
injury, he took up a rather different profession and now gives guided tours around Ærøskøbing.
Although Jan proudly tells me that he is the only independent town guide in all of Denmark, he is
depressed about the death of the art of storytelling. He feels that people have forgotten how to listen
to stories. On his tours, he teaches visitors about history, but his primary aim is to tell a good yarn,
and that is how he approaches our private conversion. Some historically-interested individuals with
whom I have spoken cast doubt over the authenticity of Jan’s stories and express something
approaching disgust for his inventiveness. To them, he is little more than a liar.256 For Jan, however,
tales – whether old or new – are valuable because they are entertaining. Even as he speaks with me,
Jan toys with the concept of authenticity: He talks about how a ghost once punished him for telling
untrue tales about her even though his story of being punished by the ghost is itself viewed
distrustfully by some fellow believers in the same ghost. Trouble arises when two people come into
a conversation with different aims, as when I question Jan about what I see as Ærøese history, and
he responds with stories that he views as Ærøese entertainment.
Jan has read Hübertz, but his recollection of Hübertz is limited to those legends best suited for
storytelling. Whereas Jesper tells the story of the fairy cup in skeletal form, Jan is freed from the
constraints of history and fills the story with detail:
There’s a story that’s very special. It’s about Rise Church. The chalice, it’s the finest, finest
silver, but there’s no stamp [designating its maker] on it. Just pure silver. A very large, pretty,
beautiful chalice that comes down in two arches and ends in a single base. But it has no stamp.
We don’t know who the silversmith was. It was, actually, found inside the wall encircling the
church. It lay there one morning and had been thrown over the wall. Then, it was taken into the
church and used as the chalice. Now, we’re back in the end of the 1700s, about 1790, 1795. The
way people got it is an old legend that tells about a farmhand who’d been in the public house in
the evening. And he’d ridden up to the pub on an old horse, and he’d sat there and had a good
time and had become quite drunk. And when he had to go home, well, he couldn’t mount the
horse. He was simply too drunk. So, he led the horse after him on foot. More or less, you could
say that the horse led him home because it knew the way. And at one point, he passes by Store
Rise’s burial mound. It lies up by Dunkær Mill up there. And there, he can see a party going on
in the burial mound. The burial mound stood on seven pillars of flame. He’s curious and goes
over to the hill and looks inside. And they notice that he’s standing there, the fairies do, and
invite him in. And [he’s] meant to go in and dance. And he gets to drink all the mead and beer
and eat everything, and he’s just loving it. It’s such a wonderful party. But he can see that the
hill’s exit, it’s getting smaller and smaller, and all of a sudden, he realizes that it’s almost dawn,
so now, he’d better get out of the hill before it closes. He sneaks out, and strangely enough, he
mounts the horse but notices to his fright that he still has the cup in his hand, and it’s this here
big, beautiful silver cup. And he rides off, but the fairies, they realize that he’s slipped off. He
rides as hard as he can to get away from them because if they catch him, then they’ll take him
back to the hill, and he’ll never, ever escape. The one way he can get most quickly away from
them – because they run like the wind –, that’s to ride across the plough furrows on the field.
The fairies, they have to follow the plough furrows because they have only one leg, so they
can’t hop over, people say. It’s a boundary they can’t cross; they need to run along the furrows
while he rides across the field. And he rides towards the church, because he knows that the only
place that’s safe from them, it’s in behind the church wall. On hallowed ground. There, they
can’t do a thing. He rides as hard as he can, but they come closer and closer. He manages to get
up to the church wall. There, they manage to catch hold of the horse’s tail and hold him back,
but he just manages to throw the chalice over the church wall, but then they manage to take him.
Neither he nor the horse were ever seen again, but people had the chalice. [...] The story was
used to scare young people. “If you go out at night, then the fairies will come and take you.”
It does not matter if Jan really did, as he says, receive this version of the legend from his family as a
child. The story gives so much detail that it is unbelievable as a piece of real history. In Jan’s
practised hands, it is just a good story. In his closing of the tale with a reference to the chalice that
got the tale started, in his giving the story an approximate date, in his suspense-building repetition,
in his scene-setting by mentioning something as archaic as mead, in his amiable and informal
delivery, Jan turns the previously-dry legend into a work of oral art.
Whether or not Jan realizes it himself, his story falls into the trap of many purportedly-true
contemporary legends that have their origins in the spirit of tale-spinning: The protagonist dies or
vanishes before he gets the chance to tell anyone else what happened. Simply put, the people of
Rise Church would have had no way of knowing how the chalice had gotten inside the churchyard.
Jan is almost certainly not conscious that, by making his protagonist eat and drink with the fairies,
he is, as far as tradition is concerned, virtually dooming the farmhand. The fact that Jan is the only
one of my contributors to either kill off the farmhand or make him drink from the chalice is
interesting, particularly in light of his also having the fairies run alongside the furrows.
However this may be, either unable or unwilling to switch out of his role as a storyteller and
into that of a historian, Jan engages me in a conversation that people like Palle or Jesper would not
think worth their while. He offers up historical theories that are clearly absurd,257 and when
presented with questions to which he does not know the answer, seeks prompting, prompting that
sometimes helps him “remember” an old story or family experience. This latter point may be unfair
of me to say since Jan is, indeed, such a fine orator that I can only guess, retrospectively, that this is
the case. During the interview itself, he had me captivated. It would be easy to disregard completely
the evidence Jan offers us, yet it is his sort of love for storytelling that keeps certain supernatural
traditions alive long after the disappearance of actual belief. In a community like that on Ærø in
which there is very little interest in supernatural folklore for its own sake, most people only
encounter past belief through entertaining storytellers.
Jan fictionalises history, yet in a sense, the same is true of historians like Palle Abramsson who
view legendary material as overtly fictional. Palle is also something of a Hübertz expert, having
transcribed Hübertz’s Gothic lettering and published a new edition of Description of Ærø in 2004.
When I spoke with Palle in 2005, I had no great interest in the stolen fairy chalice legend, so all
Palle told me about the story was that the fairies “couldn’t run over the furrows.” Since this
comment is so vague, I spoke with Palle by telephone in September 2007, asking him to tell me
about the legend’s race across the field:
Palle Abramsson: I mean, those, those fairies [elverfolk], they only have one leg, so they can only run
alongside, you know? Just as soon as you run across, you know, then they’re in trouble. […]
Adam Grydehøj: On this island, really, it’s pretty easy to trace where knowledge comes from since
there’s really only Hübertz.
PA: Yeah…
AG: But everyone, regardless, diverges from Hübertz in the same way by making the fairies run along
the furrows, which I find rather strange since, in Hübertz, they don’t run along the furrows. They run
over them.
PA: Ummm…. I can’t really remember that… I’ll just try here, Adam. [Palle looks up his
transcription of Hübertz on his computer. …] Look here, it says that, ummm… It says that… [Palle
reads aloud the relevant passage from Hübertz.]
AG: But if you read on, it never says that… It just says that they fell down, not that they ran alongside
the furrows.
PA: Yeah, I mean, it says… They could follow him when he ran along them, you know, but when he
ran across, then “they frequently fell in the furrows.” […]
AG: Yes. But what interests me is that it doesn’t say in there that the fairies themselves run along the
furrows, [just] that they’re not very good at running across them.
PA: Yes, yes, yes. That’s right, of course. Yes, yes.
AG: Yes, but I’m interested in the fact that all of these people say that they run along the furrows […].
PA: Yes, but the important thing is that, when you’ve read these lines [in Hübertz], then the thing that
you remember best is that they run along the furrows. And this stays in one’s consciousness.
AG: Even though the text itself doesn’t say that they run alongside?
PA: The text says that they run along—. No, it doesn’t say that they run alongside, but apparently, they
run more quickly when they, you know, run alongside than when they run across, you know.
Even though Palle has transcribed Hübertz’s text himself, his memory of the legend is faulty on this
one point. Such is Palle’s conviction that Hübertz has the fairies run alongside the furrows that,
even after re-reading the text with this question in mind, he still has trouble understanding that
Hübertz says nothing of the sort.
Palle makes another telling statement about the fairy chalice legend as well:
Kjærboe, she got it from Hübertz. I mean, all of these old legends, they haven’t existed for the past
160 years. They haven’t existed on the island here. It’s… Everyone, they all recite Hübertz and Tove
Kjærboe, the stuff she’s written. […] Now, listen up. You have this idea that these people who you’ve
spoken with, that their grandparents told them stories.
Palle goes on to say that my contributors’ grandparents did not tell them stories. While I doubt that
Ærøese storytelling died out 160 years ago, Palle is correct in highlighting the absence of a local
storytelling culture and the fact that all roads lead to Hübertz. The fact of consistent deviation from
Hübertz is made more surprising on account of this tradition’s non-existence.
I also hear the fairy cup legend from 47-year-old child care worker and amateur archaeologist,
Poul Edvard Andersen. Although Poul Edvard is normally an expert storyteller, his lack of faith in
his version of the legend impedes the narrative’s fluidity. He approaches me as a historian and does
not elaborate beyond the limits of his own knowledge:
Poul Edvard Andersen: Then, there’s also another story from Rise. And what is it now? I have it
somewhere or other in the back of my mind. It has something to do with a silver cup, an altar
chalice, it’s called. The fairies, they steal that, and they couldn’t come onto hallowed ground.
And it was… How was it? It was some verger or other […], but it was something about how
they chase him. They hunt. They have only one leg, the fairies, and they can’t run across the
furrows, the plough furrows in the field.
Adam Grydehøj: Why couldn’t they?
PEA: That, the story doesn’t tell. They have only one leg. They could only run along, back and
forth, so… But they can run quickly. So, the guy on the horse, he rides across the plough
furrows. They run back and forth behind. And he manages at the last moment to throw the altar
chalice over the cemetery’s wall. Then, they couldn’t get it because, then they’d be on hallowed
ground. And it’s supposed to be the same altar chalice that’s up there today, in the church. I
mean, I can’t remember the story so well now, right now on command.
Poul Edvard is right to doubt the authoritativeness of his story, in which the fairies, not the human,
are the thieves. Nevertheless, he includes the race back and forth across the ploughed field.
Palle Abramsson, Jesper Groth, and a few others have experienced Ærø’s past supernatural
folklore somewhat academically, through reading and asking questions. In this, they are unusual. If
others know anything about local fairies, they have learned it though casual reading or by speaking
with Dion Abrahamsen, the man who was, until his 2007 death, considered Ærø’s folklore expert. I
spoke with Dion when he was 52 years old, shortly before illness forced him to step down from his
municipal government post as the island’s nature guide. In the process of giving tours of scenic
attractions, Dion would inform people about past belief or, rather, what he believed past belief to
have been. Although Dion, unlike Jan, saw himself as a historian and not a storyteller, those who
mutter against Jan rarely approved of Dion either.
Below is an excerpt from Dion’s one-off radio programme:
It has to be said that our fairies are very special. There’s a big difference between girls and
boys. The girls are unbelievably pretty. Ærøese girls are very pretty, but the fairy girls are
particularly pretty and noteworthy for being very, very tiny, a couple of centimetres or, at most,
up to half a meter tall. And then, they have hollow backs, which is very impractical. On the
other hand, the men are unbelievably ugly. One leg have they only, a hunchback, and a long,
long nose. They can’t walk across a plough furrow with that one leg, so they fall, and every time
they fall, they hit their nose, and it gets bigger and bigger. That’s quite special, and then they
have just one little, withered arm. [...]
A young farmhand who lived in Store Rise had made a night of it down at The Golden
Swan, which was the first public house here on Ærø outside the towns. It lay down near Drejet
in connection with that which was called Gråsten, the place where the duke had his residence.
He’d made a public house out by the road so that people could wash their pallets during the long
trip from Marstal to Søby.
So, he’d been down there and made merry and left for home late that night. He goes past
Elverhøj, which stands on four pillars. The odd thing about the Ærøese hills is that – when they
lift themselves up on pillars – they aren’t glowing pillars they lift themselves on like in other
places in the country. Here, they’re much more refined. Here, they have ceiling lights in the hill
that light up the dance floor from above.
Now, it’s such that the one-legged men here, they don’t dance of course. They couldn’t
really do that with this one leg. They could, maybe, spin around a bit, but they can’t actually
dance. So, it’s the girls who dance, and the men lean up against the stones scattered around
Elverhøj. And so, this young man of ours goes by and sees the sight, and a young girl, a young
fairy elf-girl comes over to him with a large silver cup filled with a liquid – apparently wine –
that she reaches out to him. He’s going to drink it, but he looks in her eyes and thinks he can see
her shake her head, so he decides to throw the liquid away. He throws it over his shoulder. And
luckily he did that because two drops hit the horse and seared large holes in its fur. And it
wheels about, that poor horse, and streaks homewards towards Store Rise.
As our one-legged folk are handicapped and can’t run across the plough furrows without
falling and hitting their big noses, they have to run neatly up and down the plough furrows
because the horse rides across them. Then, obviously, up and down the furrows to follow the
poor young man who’s riding. And one can imagine how agile they truly are because they
actually manage – up, down, up, down, up, down – to catch up to the rider when he’s
approached Rise Church, get hold of the horse’s tail, and stop him.
He becomes panic-stricken. What should he do? He throws the cup away into the
churchyard in Rise. The fairies let go of the horse in order to discuss what they should do now,
and the young man slips home to where he lives and locks the gate. By now, they’ve set after
him again but can’t come inside because the old Ærøese fittings on gates were cross-shaped.
You can see that in a few places even today, and where there’s a cross like that – a holy symbol
– the fairies, the heathen beings, can’t come in.
So, he actually escapes into safety, and one or another silly rooster all of a sudden begins to
crow. The sun’s about to rise, and so they have to speed up and down the plough furrows again,
into Elverhøj, and get it closed.
Dion has the drink burn the horse and also includes the grasping of the creature’s tail. Like Jan
Pedersen, Dion improves the legend’s entertainment value. Dion’s narrative reveals knowledge of
off-island folklore, yet he plays fast and free with his source material, adding some elements (like
the fairy girls’ hollow backs and the warning not to accept the drink) from legends elsewhere in
Denmark and other elements (like the fairy men’s long noses and withered arms) from, as far as I
can tell, his own imagination. Rather absurdly, Dion’s fairy girls are extremely tiny.
This is creative storytelling, yet while Jan does not claim to be an expert in fairy folklore, Dion
did, and his broader theories on supernatural folklore are often more enthusiastic than they are
probable. For example, when I ask Dion what he makes of the fact that the story of the fairy cup is
an international, migratory legend, he dates the legend to around 1700 and responds, “All that about
the chalice in Rise Church is a migratory legend, but it originally comes from here, from Ærø.”
William of Newburgh would, perhaps, have said otherwise in the 1190s.
Possibly because he had Hübertz’s book on hand while writing his radio piece, Dion somewhat
tempers his relaying of the furrow motif by mentioning that, even though the fairies run alongside
the furrows in this case, they are capable of crossing the furrows slowly and painfully. It is telling
of Dion’s incomplete understanding of folklore that he never hit upon the idea that a taboo against
forming the cross might have been behind this disability: After all, he adds in a different cross taboo
at the close of the tale.
Dion does, however, tell me about the one-legged fairies’ place in history, saying that Ærø:
is the only place in Denmark where they’re one-legged. But in France, they’re also one-legged.
It’s originally a Celtic conception. The figure is Celtic. Given that we have Celtic words here on
the island. When people are sort of in a little community, those old expressions are preserved. If
you look at Celtic drinking vessels, for example, how they’re set up, then there’s always a onelegged person who resembles very accurately that description I gave you in the beginning [of
how Ærø’s male fairies look]. A word like Ommel, for example, that village is the oldest village
we have on the island. The word itself, Ommel, is Celtic and means the trickle in the distance
[rislen i det fjernet], I mean, a place where water splashes and can be heard. But instead of
saying the trickle in the distance, we still say Ommel. It also points to a Celtic connection.
These legends, some of these legends, are also recovered in the Celtic – I mean, especially in
southern France – stories.
It probably goes without saying, but absolutely none of this is historically true. When Dion says
Celtic does he, indeed, mean the ancient Celtic race that migrated from present-day France into the
British Isles and still resides in Brittany? Or does he simply – in a continuation of the ancient
Roman confusion258 – mean French? In either case, his etymology of Ommel has no basis of which
I am aware, and his interpretation of chalice design is, frankly, bizarre.
Again, it would be overly simplistic to put Dion’s stories and theories down as being mere lies.
Lying would, after all, have been professionally dangerous for Dion, whose reputation rested on his
knowledge of local history. Dion genuinely believed what he told me, and those who have listened
to him give guided tours have had no reason to doubt what they were told. It is evident that Dion’s
idea of the Ærøese fairies being unable to cross furrows does not come from Kjærboe. We might,
however, wonder if his grotesque male fairies are an inflation of Kjærboe’s imagery since nothing
in Hübertz suggests that female fairies possess two legs while males possess only one.
Dion’s position as the vocal, local folklore expert ensured that he influenced a number of my
contributors’ conceptions of Ærøese folklore. Indeed, two of those contributors who speak of the
plough furrow motif attribute their knowledge to Dion. One of these is Lars Ole Gjesing, the softspoken and altogether delightful 55-year-old Ærøskøbing pastor:
Lars Ole Gjesing: There is, of course, all that about the chalice in Rise Church, which you’ve
probably heard a few times. I mean, the altar chalice in Rise Church originates from a fairy hill
somewhere – I’m not completely sure which hill – and becomes – how was it now? – stolen by
a man who was out riding at night and found the hill open or something or other and was
offered a cup, I think, but knew well enough that he shouldn’t drink from it, threw the drink
backward, and singed—. The hindquarters of the horse became singed, right? And then, he
rides off with it but is followed by the fairies. I don’t know if they were the one-legged out here
[on Ærø], but in any case, some fairies. And then, he rides past Rise Church and throws the
chalice over the wall, and he thereby escapes his pursuers. This is a very commonly-known
story told over here.
Adam Grydehøj: And there are some of them with one leg?
LOG: Yes, I mean, I only really have that from Dion Abrahamsen. I’ve never heard of any
Ærøese talk about the ones with one leg. I don’t think so. But he has, you know, collected—.
You know Dion Abrahamsen? He’s collected quite a lot, and it’s from him—. And it’s from
him that I’ve heard the stories about the ones with one leg and their problems with running
across ploughed fields.
AG: Could you tell me about that?
LOG: Yes, but only what I’ve heard from him, I mean. Yes, but they have, you know, that
difficulty as one-legged fellows that they’re not very good at running, and they can’t come over
a furrow. They need to run along the furrows. If they’re after someone, then one can escape
from them by escaping perpendicular to the furrows. I mean, that’s what Dion says, in any case,
about the traditions on Ærø about the ones with one leg.
Dion is Lars Ole’s sole source for the legend, and the pastor has devoted little energy to studying
Dion’s story. He remembers a basic, unornamented version of it. Interestingly, and of importance
for understanding how knowledge of tradition can survive despite oratorical exuberance, Lars Ole’s
version differs only from that of Hübertz in its burning of the horse and lack of specificity regarding
location. Lars Ole has forgotten Dion’s emphasis on the fairies’ ugliness, recalling only their oneleggedness, which is fundamental to the story as it stands in Hübertz.
Lars Ole can recall the legend in its entirety, but the same cannot be said for Finn Møller
Madsen, the 50-year-old headmaster of Marstal School, who also learned about fairies from Dion:
Finn Møller Madsen: I can remember that he [Dion Abrahamsen.] has a story about the ones
with one leg and that they were fitted out in such a way that when they ran over a field, then
they had to run alongside the plough furrows. They couldn’t run across a plough furrow, and
that means that they, you know, had to run quite a stretch in order to get over the field.
Adam Grydehøj: Because they only had one leg?
FMM: No… That’s not how I remember it. I think that it was something or other sort of like
witchcraft. That they couldn’t hop over a plough furrow. They had to follow it.
Although Finn remembers only the plough furrow motif and not the legend itself, he posits a taboo
against crossing furrows, an element existing in neither Dion nor Hübertz, the latter of whom Finn
read many years ago.
I was interested in hearing what the present-day pastor of Rise Church, 38-year-old Janet
Cecilie Ligaard, would have to say about the legend. As it turns out, she knows very little about it:
Janet Cecilie Ligaard: There’s a legend over by the church about the altar chalice, and I’d think
that the fairies are also in that legend.
Adam Grydehøj: Can you tell me what you know about it?
JCL: Unfortunately, I can’t remember too many details, but it’s something or other with a sort
of… But I can investigate it and mail it to you if you’d like to know the story.
AG: Actually, I know the story already…
JCL: Yes. But it’s something or other with someone who becomes scared of something and then
throws the chalice into the church, and the chalice comes from the fairies or something or other,
I think.
Janet’s understanding of and interest in past folk belief in general is far less than that of the other
five pastors I interviewed. Her knowledge of Ærø’s best-known supernatural legend is very cursory,
despite its having taken place at her own church. It is impossible to know the source of her version,
but it is noteworthy that she has never heard of Hübertz. She does not assume that the man in the
story is scared by the fairies, only that the chalice belongs to the fairies.
Earlier, we saw that Niels Condrup, one of our young contributors, had heard a story about
fairies from Erik Kromann, director of Marstal’s Maritime Museum. As 59-year-old Erik is a
historian, it is not too surprising that he is familiar with some of the island’s folklore, yet most
fascinating are his descriptions of traditions not appearing in Hübertz. When I ask Erik about social
fairies, he says that they are a half-meter tall. Furthermore, “They’re actually […] normal people
who continued to live and have shrunken and become older and older. And then, they have clothes
that are characteristic of the time they come from, maybe from the 1600s or 1700s. They’re social
beings. They lived in sort of big family groups.” I have not before encountered this particular theory
of fairy origin although it might owe something to the traditional connection between fairies and the
dead. Erik mentions to me the Hübertz story that was also recalled by Niels Condrup, and he has an
excellent knowledge of brownies, but he says nothing about the stolen fairy cup. Later, however, as
we are speaking about other matters, he interrupts himself:
Erik Kromann: Wait just a moment… What’s he called, that guy who has a wheel for one leg
and runs there in the plough furrows? What’s his name?
Adam Grydehøj: Here on the island, there’s a very particular image of the fairies [de
underjordiske] where they only have one leg.
EK: Yes. And what was it now that he was called, that guy who was down in Græsvænge [A
little village not far from Marstal.], my grandmother told about? What is it he’s called, […] that
figure? He’s called the Hill-Lad [“Højskneigten”, one of Hübertz’s names for social fairies.].
AG: The Hill-Lad.
EK: The Hill-Lad. That’s right. He ran down there with one leg, and then he ran in the plough
furrows.
AG: And what was he?
EK: Yes, the Hill-Lad, it was sort of a little—. Again, a type of brownie.
AG: And was there only one of them?
EK: Yes, there was only one of them. But I knew that from or have found out about it from
people from Græsvænge and from Ommel. It wasn’t here in town. It was up—. I mean, out in
the country.
During my interview with Erik, I suspected that his Hill-Lad was merely a singular oddity, either
the result of a faulty memory or a creative grandmother. After all, I have never heard of one-legged,
one-wheeled fairies. As a wheel would both explain the Hill-Lad’s ability to move quickly and its
inability to cross furrows, the fact of the furrow motif itself is not as startling as the fact of a fairy
sporting a non-organic appendage. I did not think much over Erik’s Hill-Lad at the time, chalking it
up as yet another deviation from tradition.
Some time later though, I spoke with Sven Jørgen Karlsen, a 65-year-old retiree now living in
the minuscule fishing village of Strandby on the outskirts of Ommel. Like Erik, Sven Jørgen was
raised in Græsvænge. Sven Jørgen responds to my question about social fairies with the following:
Sven Jørgen Karlsen: Before, here on the island, we had, it’s true, fairies [ellefolk] in which
people believed. In Græsvænge, we had something called the hill-lads [højsknægte]. And then,
we had, of course, will-o’-the-wisps [lygtemænd]. They had one wheel and one leg, right? We
were, of course, a bit afraid of them. If we came out late at night, of course, or were a little ways
from home, then these will-o’-the-wisps here came after us. Then, we should… You know a
ploughed field? We should run across that field. Then, they couldn’t manage to catch up with us
because they had a wheel and couldn’t run across.
Adam Grydehøj: How big were they?
SJK: I don’t know. They were, I suppose, normal-sized.
AG: Where did you hear these stories?
SJK: I heard them from my parents.
AG: Did they believe in will-o’-the-wisps?
SJK: No.
AG: How long has it been since people believed in them?
SJK: I mean, I don’t really know. We have to go back a long time. Yes, we have to. My parents
didn’t believe in it. They didn’t. And their parents again didn’t either.
AG: So, there was more than one will-o’-the-wisp?
SJK: There was more than one. But there weren’t many. It wasn’t like there were will-o’-thewisps all over the place.
AG: Were these social beings?
SJK: No… But it was, I suppose, something that our parents said, sort of that we should be
home at a reasonable time, before the will-o’-the-wisps come. It was, maybe, more or less a
kind of worst-case-scenario with these will-o’-the-wisps. I can’t say if they were social beings. I
don’t think so. It was something that came after you if you came home too late, and it was dark.
[…]
AG: Were all of the fairies [de underjordiske] the same as the will-o’-the-wisps?
SJK: No, no. They weren’t the same. No, will-o’-the-wisps, they were their own race.
It is Sven Jørgen’s belief that will-o’-the-wisps are confined to Græsvænge, and he may well be
correct. Sven Jørgen Karlsen and Erik Kromann are the only two adults from Græsvænge who I
interviewed and are also my only contributors who recall tales of one-legged, one-wheeled fairies.
On the basis of this small sample size of Græsvænge residents, however, we can draw no firm
conclusions.
Although the one-legged, one-wheeled Græsvænge fairies had already become mere bogeymen,
a means of scaring children, by the time of Sven Jørgen’s youth, he does not seem to doubt that they
were once objects of genuine belief. It is interesting that, whereas Erik’s lone wheeled fairy has a
name that elsewhere belongs to workaday social fairies, Sven Jørgen’s wheeled fairy plurality has
overtaken the name of a completely unrelated and – significantly – today relatively-unknown type
of solitary fairy. Indeed, despite the fact that social fairies play will-o’-the-wisp roles often enough,
the will-o’-the-wisp role is, itself, quite different from that of Sven Jørgen’s will-o’-the-wisp. The
sole fundamental characteristic of will-o’-the-wisps in general is a propensity to lead people astray;
for Sven Jørgen, however, these are beings who chase people. Even though Sven Jørgen mentions
will-o’-the-wisps while speaking about social fairies (he sees, correctly, ellefolk and højsknægte as
synonymous), he considers them to be a sort of sub-class of social fairies and does not believe that
all local social fairies are will-o’-the-wisps. He knows no stories about “normal” social fairies and
takes a very mundane view of their lives.
We previously noted that Hübertz records no legends from East Ærø and wondered if he might
have given all of his fairies only one leg on account of the stolen chalice legend alone. The
memories of Erik and Sven Jørgen give us pause for thought. Erik, being a professional historian,
might have been confused and received his conception of furrow-troubled fairies from a mish-mash
of different sources. This is highly unlikely in the case of Sven Jørgen. Despite the difference in
name and number and greater detail of Sven Jørgen’s account, the one-wheeled, one-legged fairies
my two Græsvænge contributors describe are clearly the same beings. Sven Jørgen is, furthermore,
a retired mason who has no special interest in folklore and who mentions a few times during our
interview that he knows so little about the subject because he “never reads books.” We have little
choice other than to assume that one-wheeled, one-legged fairies were once spoken of in
Græsvænge although it would, at the moment, be a step too far to admit that these fairies were ever
objects of belief or that they were ever spoken of by more than few individuals.
Why a step too far? The fact that oral tradition concerning fairies who have trouble with furrows
once existed does nothing to combat the persistent sense that fairies on wheels would stretch the
credulity of even the most credulous farmhand. Absurd though traditional fairylore may seem to
some of us today, supernatural folklore always rests upon an internal logic, and unless we are to
deduce that the Græsvænge fairies were naturally wheel-less and merely donned wheels of their
own devising in order to reduce the handicap of having only one leg, logic is lacking in these
legends. We can assume that the people of Græsvænge once believed in more conventional fairies:
They were, after all, Northern European country-folk. They were not likely, however, to have
believed in fairies with wheels. For them, these wheeled fairies were fictional, perhaps entertaining
in the start, and at last, good only for scaring children into coming home before it gets dark. Neither
Erik nor Sven Jørgen mention the story of the stolen fairy chalice and did not inherit their wheeled
fairies from Hübertz. But from where did their grandparents’ generation inherit them? The dearth of
other primary sources contemporary to Hübertz makes answering this question impossible, and in
the case of Græsvænge’s wheeled fairies, we might assume that quite a bit of variation upon the
theme has taken place since 1834. We can make guesses, yet they will never cease to be mere
guesses.
It seems to me that Hübertz’s West Ærø fairy cup story is more likely to have influenced oral
narratives in East Ærø than that such an internally-inconsistent story could ever have been
sufficiently enduring to have spread to both sides of the island without Hübertz’s aid. Hübertz’s
one-legged fairies are not quite the same as Græsvænge’s one-wheeled, one-legged fairies, but these
two are nevertheless more closely related to one another than they are to any other fairies I have
encountered. Did some locally-interested Græsvænge farmer read Description of Ærø in 1834 and
pass down the story? Or was it first in the late 1800s or early 1900s that a historically-interested
inhabitant of Græsvænge introduced the story to the village?
The issue, however, becomes yet more complex, for besides Erik Kromann, Sven Jørgen
Karlsen, and Finn Møller Madsen, there are two other contributors who know about the fairies’
problems with plough furrows without knowing the story of the stolen fairy cup. One of these is
Lille Rise’s 77-year-old Klaus Jørgen Petersen. When I ask him about social fairies, he says:
There were some old fables. Well, but… Yes, I don’t know if people were dumb back then. No,
because they didn’t have so much knowledge, but in the sense that they had opinions about
certain things and connected them with eclipses and that sort of thing. Those things we call
omens and that sort of thing. We called them omens in the old days, you know. There was
something about fairies [ellefolk], that they had, well, two legs, but they were of uneven length.
And if you had to run from them, then you couldn’t run alongside a plough furrow. Because
there, then they stuck the long leg down, so the short leg stayed up. Run across, that they
couldn’t. So, you had to run across the furrows. It’s the only thing I know about it. It was my
old grandmother who told it to me, you know.
This same sort of description is given to me by 52-year-old Birthe Henriksen, who grew up in
Skovby and says that people came up with the uneven leg idea to explain why fairies “go in the
plough furrows.” Birthe, incidentally, has some interest in supernatural issues and has read Tove
Kjærboe. In any event, the uneven legs theory would make about as little sense to believers as
would the one-legged theory, and we are again forced to go through the whole process of asking
why two people – here, living on quite different parts of the island – should have the same,
seemingly-fictionalized ideas about local fairies. Moreover, why do they share with all of my other
contributors the belief that, traditionally, fairies simply could not cross furrows?
Logically, the folkloric knowledge possessed by any given population should never rise above
that of the community’s best-informed conveyors of folklore. On Ærø, there are people like Palle
Abramsson and Jesper Groth who have relatively-strong knowledge of history but do not make
public display of it. So, the burden of teaching the public falls upon the vociferous, whether or not
they are qualified. The role of educating about history falls upon Jan Pedersen even though Jan’s
audience may not be capable of understanding him as he is, as a member of the dying breed of
storytellers. The title of local folklore expert was handed to Dion Abrahamsen even though Dion
was, for various reasons, incapable of playing the part. This process is necessary for understanding
the genesis of today’s lack of folklore knowledge on Ærø.
If the example of the stolen chalice shows the way in which the origins of oral tradition and
written tradition can become confused, the next legend from Hübertz is even more illustrative:
These fairies [in Elverhøj] lived there a long time in peace and quiet until they finally broke into
a quarrel with the miller in Dunkær because he ploughed their hill and otherwise disturbed
them. This disagreement increased to such an extent that they, at last, decided to leave their
place of residence. Yes, that man had irritated them so much that they no longer wanted to live
on the island or in the country; but they reached the decision to set off for Norway. How long
ago it was, I do not know; but one day it happened that a little, old man on the street in
Ærøskøbing – others say Marstal – came to a poor skipper who had no job and asked him if he
wanted a ship to sail. “Yes, with pleasure.” Thereafter, the man led him down to the beach at
Gravendal where there lay an old wreck; “This is the ship you shall sail.” The skipper protested,
however, that it was impossible that this wreck could hold water. “No matter! You shall hire a
sailor and come again in three days. Then, the ship will be prepared and ready to sail.” The
skipper now asked many people if they wanted to sail with him on that wreck that lay by
Gravendal: “We won’t haggle about the salary.” But they all shrugged their shoulders or
laughed him out of the room: “He’s got bats in the belfry.” At long last, he found a poor boy
who was naked and starving and who set his lot with him: “If I get food, then I’ll sail to Norway
on the wreck by Gravendal.” “Yes, you’ll get plenty to eat,” and thus was the contract agreed
upon. On the third day, they made their way to Gravendal where they found the ship swaying at
anchor and hung with some ragged sails. They came on-board and got good weather, so three
days later, they were in Norway. During the trip, the skipper got the urge to see the contents of
his cargo and peeked down into the hold; it appeared to him that the hold teemed with rats and
mice. But now, the little man took his hat and set it on the skipper’s head: “Now, look again!”
Then, there were masses of small fairies dressed for travel and much gold and silver. When they
came to Norway, the old man said: “Now, you can go on land. Then, I’ll unload my wares.”
When the skipper came on-board again, he found the ship empty and the little man standing
there, who asked that he wait three days for his cargo: “Then, you’ll be rewarded for your
trouble.” When this time was up, the man came and told the skipper to accept two sacks. The
one was filled with something resembling wood chips, and the other with coal: “Don’t forget to
give the boy his share.”
Thereafter, the skipper sailed off, not terribly pleased with his cargo: “Yeah, we sure filled
our pockets!” When they had sailed for a while, the skipper said: “Go to the fire, boy, and boil
us water for a drop of tea!” “Yes, but I’ve nothing to burn.” “Take a handful of wood chips from
the sack.” “Skipper, it’s shining!” “What’s shining?” Then, the skipper saw that it was full of
gold coins. “Take the other sack!” “Skipper, it’s shining!” Then, the skipper ran over and saw
that it was full of silver coins. So, they eventually burned the entire stern of the ship.
Finally, they returned safely to Ærø, where they divided their treasure and became well-off
people. The skipper purchased a ship and, upon sailing to Norway the next year, the little man
met him and asked if he was doing well, if he had shared with the boy, and lastly, how the
miller in Dunkær was managing. “Ah, the poor man! He fell and broke his thigh the same day
that the little people left the place and will be a cripple for the rest of his life.” “That’s good
enough for him! Let him have it!”259
This is a blend of rather incompatible motifs. There exist numerous legends internationally of
fairies departing from a region because of persecution, of fairies being invisibly transported by boat,
of fairies or gifted men granting others the ability to see the invisible by means of clothing, of men
breaching fairy privacy, and of fairy money at first appearing to be worthless (as leaves, wood
chips, stones, etc.). The motif of fairies deserting an area is usually used as an explanation for their
no longer being seen, yet it is proof of the strength of faith in the supernatural that, in most places,
this story exists side-by-side with more recent legends regarding fairies.260 The above version,
however, is so clearly fictional and created for entertainment that it could never have been the
object of true belief.
First of all, the skipper, upon being discovered peeking at the fairies on the ship, is rewarded
with improved sight, not punished. Almost without exception, the punishment that follows this kind
of intrusive activity is blinding or, at least, bad luck. Indeed, Hübertz’s fairy midwife legend
includes just such an event.261 Secondly, from a narrative standpoint, the boy’s only purpose is to
act as a foil to the skipper. Whenever two people, one of whom is obliging and the other distrustful,
receive apparently-unacceptable payment or gifts from fairies, the distrustful one invariably throws
away his share, thinking it worthless. Thus, faith in the fairies’ trustworthiness is rewarded. Here,
however, the transformation of the coal and woodchips into silver and gold results merely in the
comic burning ship’s stern. Both the sweet boy and the unpleasant skipper become rich. At the time
that this story was current, only very young children could have believed in it. While the fairies in
the story are, perhaps, more believable than the flower-fairies of today, they nevertheless act in a
very contradictory manner: On the one hand, they cripple the miller at Dunkær for disrespecting
them and encroaching on their privacy, and on the other hand, they assist the thoroughly-dislikeable
skipper in discovering their secrets. As we have noted, fictional, jocular stories are part and parcel
of fairy folklore. Hübertz’s account of the departure of the fairies, however, is unlikely to be the
work of a believer because it is inconsistent with broader fairy tradition, that is, with the tradition
that grants the story comedy and meaning. In this case, the story becomes less believable as even a
traditional jocular narrative the more one knows about fairy folklore.
Today, of course, the story is mostly forgotten. As was the case with the fairy chalice legend
though, Jesper Groth is capable of re-telling it as he believes it stands in Hübertz:
But these fairies [in Elverhøj], these elves, they became tired of living here because the farmer
who owned the field ploughed too close to them. They had their hill there surrounded by grass,
and the man who owned the field, he constantly ploughed closer to it. And at last, they couldn’t
stay there. So, they went down to Drejet, and there lay a sunken ship. They saw it. Then, they
went down to Marstal and got hold of a skipper and asked him if he would sail them to Norway.
They would take care of getting a ship themselves, and he should just meet them at a certain
time down along Drejet. And that’s what he did. There lay the ship. It had holes, dilapidated
sails, and was old and in bad condition. But it floated. It could sail. He had taken a ship boy
with him from Marstal. He had been told that he mustn’t look down into the hold. He did that.
And down in the hold, it was swarming with these tiny, wrinkled elves. It was filled with gold
and silver and jewels. And it happened that just after he’d done what he wasn’t supposed to and
looked down into the hold, he went blind. And the ship’s boy sailed to Norway and was richly
rewarded by these fairies when they went on land. And their [The fairies’.] descendants still live
there today. And the ship’s boy became incredibly rich, and the miller in Dunkær who had the
field, who’d ploughed too close to them, he fell down and broke his back in the mill. So,
they’ve cast their curse on those who’ve disputed with them or those who’ve annoyed them.
As in the story of the fairy cup, Jesper views all of the fairies as tiny. Hübertz is less consistent on
this point since the fairy posing as an old man is obviously human sized, yet the fairies in the cargo
hold are rat-sized. Presumably for the sake of consistency, Jesper’s story has removed the pretence
of the old man seeking passage to Norway; such a pretence usually is present in legends of fairies
being transported by boat. Whereas Hübertz’s plot calls for the skipper to be punished twice yet
fails to deliver on these promises, Groth’s version blinds the skipper according to tradition and
cannot carry through with the second test (that of trusting the fairies’ payment) because the
protagonist has already been incapacitated. Even this version of the story looks too grandiose to be
a piece of genuine belief, but it has, nonetheless, been corrected back in the direction of traditional
belief, much like Jesper’s retelling of the stolen fairy cup legend.
Naturally, Palle Abramsson and Dion Abrahamsen are also familiar with this story, and when
Dion tells it in his radio programme he sticks extremely closely to Hübertz, possibly because, in this
case, no elaboration is necessary to make it a proper, full-length story. Previously, on the basis of
the young Niels Condrup’s testimony, we assumed that Erik Kromann knew of the trip to Norway
but that Niels had made some mistakes in his halting, partial retelling. Erik says little of the subject
to me, but what he does say is surprising and consists of “A little man […] wanted to sail some
things to Norway. And that was a fairy man [elverman].” Surely, had Erik known that the ship’s
freight was, in fact, a colony of fairies, he would not have called it “some things.” It seems that here
as well, the director of Marstal’s Maritime Museum has imperfect knowledge. But then, Erik has
only read Hübertz long ago.
Hübertz’s entertaining but atypical additions to the traditional departure of the fairies legend can
be interpreted in a number of not quite mutually-exclusive ways, pointing either to local variation or
to narratorial embellishment. The same is true for the one-leggedness of the fairies, so significant in
Hübertz’s stolen chalice legend, though we can wonder if Hübertz himself could be faulted for
mistakenly extending this trait to all of the island’s fairies. The simplest explanation for these
deviations from international folklore is that they are evidence of genuine, unusual localized belief,
an example of which would be the wheeled fairies of Græsvænge. In light of Hübertz’s assertion
that he was forced to “laboriously collect from around the island,”262 it seems unlikely that this is
the case. After all, even if it were conceivable that people believed in a race of one-legged fairies, it
would be a mockery of the intellectual capacities of the Ærøese of any century to think that
Hübertz’s story of the departure of the fairies to Norway would have been believed. This story
represents a clear genre shift from legend to folktale: It is meant to be entertainment, not a factual
account of past events. Furthermore, its non-traditional elements strongly suggest that it was not
intended as entertainment for people who believed in fairies. Even though Hübertz’s stolen cup
story is more traditional than his departure of the fairies story, the former’s willingness to unsubtly
hobble an entire race of supernatural beings despite contradictions both internally263 and
externally264 also points to this being a story told for entertainment to nonbelievers. These
transformations might support Hübertz’s conclusion that the stories he records are not generally
believed, and at the very least, the folktale-like changes to the legends partly explain why Hübertz is
so certain that they are not usually held to be true.
So, we are left with two possibilities: Either the stories were either embellished by Hübertz or
Hübertz’s contributors, or due to fairies no longer being objects of general belief, it became
acceptable to embellish traditions about them, and this was done on a broad scale. This latter theory
is not altogether unproblematic. Significantly, Hübertz implies that he heard the legends from
believers, saying, “I am convinced that the majority of the Ærøese possess too healthy an
intelligence and have too much peace of mind [...] to set the smallest amount of faith in stories
about fairies and the like. What, therefore, I am able to deliver, I have had to laboriously collect
from around the island.”265 This is difficult to imagine on account of some of the stories obviously
being folktales and not even jocular legends. It may well be that Hübertz collected his “authentic”
legends from one group of people and his folktale-influenced stories from another but failed to
make this distinction in his text. In any case, it seems as though Hübertz either did not really care
about the stories’ meanings or was unable to tell the difference between the three genres of belief
legend, jocular legend, and folktale.
This latter possibility holds true today. Because the majority of people feel that belief in fairies
in absurd, most people view all stories regarding fairies – whether legends or folktales – as fictions
or the progeny of weak minds. The logic boils down to this: Once fairies come into a story, it really
cannot get any sillier, and the kind of person who believes that fairies have parties is prone to
believe in anything at all. From this point of view, it is ridiculous to talk about whether or not fairies
would blind someone who spied on them since fairies do not exist anyway and are therefore liable
to do just about anything. For unbelievers like Hübertz, this is not all that significant: These stories
are “very pretty.”266 Whatever the motivations of the people who told the stories to Hübertz,
Hübertz presents them as pure entertainment to his readership.
To sum up the issues discussed in this chapter so far: The local storytelling tradition seems to
have died out too soon for the surviving generations to have benefited from it. We must note though
that, as is clear from my three contributors who make no mention of the fairy cup legend but claim
to have heard the plough furrow motif as children,267 fairies were sometimes discussed as bogeymen. It may not be a coincidence that these three contributors are the three oldest in this sample
group, with the youngest of them being 59. Besides these three, two of my contributors have heard
the fairy cup story or furrow motif from the local, self-styled folklore expert, Dion Abrahamsen.268
When one excludes these five contributors who attribute their stories to oral tradition – either from
hearing stories as children or from hearing them as adults –, we are left with five contributors who
have read either Hübertz or Kjærboe and have not heard the legend or furrow motif orally269 and
one contributor who has read these books but might have heard the legend as a child.270
Of these last six, Hübertz/Kjærboe-informed contributors, five of them re-tell the legend271 while
one of them mentions only the furrows272. The former are all either professional or amateur
historians, which is probably what prompted them to read these books in the first place. Proving
that at least five (and probably six) of my contributors have Hübertz or Kjærboe as their sole
sources for this legend and its accompanying furrow motif is significant because all eleven
contributors diverge from Hübertz’s account. What is more, they all diverge in precisely the same
way. Whereas Hübertz states that because the fairies who chased the farmhand hopped on a single
leg, “they frequently fell in the furrows,” every one of my contributors, whether or not he or she
mentions the legend itself, has the fairies run back and forth alongside the furrows – rather than
over them – in an effort to catch the thief. While we can all envisage fairies – whether in the
possession of one or two legs – stumbling over furrows, the idea of having them take such an outof-the-way route through the field appears to be a stroke of narrative genius. That is to say, it is
amazing that any of my contributors came up with this idea, much less all of them.
It would be sufficiently strange if all of my contributors were merely deviating from Hübertz’s
plot in a consistent manner and there were nothing more to it. The amazing thing is that this
consistent deviation points not only away from Hübertz but also in the direction of Danish tradition.
In the vast majority of Scandinavian legends about a stolen fairy cup that also involve a chase
across a ploughed field, the fairies either run around the perimeter of the field or run back and forth
along the furrows. This is the case even when the fairies in question are not missing any legs, and
although concrete proof is rare,273 there is evidence of a traditional taboo against fairies crossing
plough furrows. Perhaps, had more contributors had knowledge of the plot of the departure of the
fairies legend, we would have also found more people – not just Jesper Groth – consistently
deviating toward tradition in this case as well.
The lack of academic studies of Ærøese fairy folklore and the overall lack of interest in folklore
on the island makes it improbable that these stories were ever consciously corrected by locals unless
it was in Hübertz’s own time. If in all of my interviews, I have never met anyone on the island with
a near-scholarly knowledge of folklore, it is highly unlikely that someone, having access to legends
from other places, made the decision to rework Hübertz’s stories and re-introduce them into the oral
tradition. Jesper Groth says that the legend about the departure of the fairies is “common Ærøese
knowledge. At least, when I was a child, people knew it.” We can be fairly sure that, today, this
legend is no longer common knowledge: Just five of my contributors274 – four of whom are
historians of some sort – mention the trip to Norway when asked about local stories concerning
fairies although it is unclear how many people would be familiar with it if prompted. This, despite
the presence of Tove Kjærboe’s popularly-written retelling. Similarly, the Ærøskøbing pastor, Lars
Ole Gjesing, assures us that the stolen fairy cup legend is “a commonly-known story told over here”
although, as we have seen, Lars Ole is actually remarkably knowledgeable relative to our other
contributors.
So, how might my contributors have learned of the traditional plough furrows motif? It cannot,
we have seen, be due to Kjærboe’s popularity since Kjærboe’s accounts of this legend lack
information on the motif. Nor can it be Gorm Benzon’s influence since this folklorist’s works have
gone unread locally. Part of the explanation might be Dion Abrahamsen’s long reach, but only two
contributors275 mention Dion as a source. Even in these cases, we can wonder how Dion himself
happened upon the deviation. Two contributors who recount only the motif have their knowledge
primarily from their childhood,276 though one of these, Erik Kromann, has also read Hübertz. For
these two contributors, there are three possibilities: Either they were told a Hübertz-esque version as
children and “corrected” it themselves, they were told a pre-corrected version based on Hübertz that
had deviated from Hübertz at some point in the past, or the Græsvænge tradition they inherited had
never been affected by Hübertz in the first place. On the basis of how little orally-transmitted
folklore concerning the distant past we have found on Ærø, the last option here seems unlikely as it
presupposes an unbroken line of transmission since before Hübertz’s time; it is not, however, an
impossibility.
So, how do my contributors manage to transcend Hübertz? Even though six of these individuals
are either professional or amateur historians, only Dion Abrahamsen had the least academic interest
in supernatural folklore, and great though his interest may have been, his reading and learning were
scanty at best. Five of these historians are among the six contributors whose only sources for the
legend are Hübertz and Kjærboe. These six contributors have neither heard the story from relatives
or tour guides, read a book in which the deviation from Hübertz is present, nor discussed the story
with people in possession of oral tradition. Everyone who recounts the furrow motif makes the same
change, regardless of where they learned about it. Absurd though it might sound, the best
conclusion may be that the deviation from Hübertz has no cultural source and that the legend is, in a
sense, auto-correcting. It seems as though a quantity of traditional folkloric knowledge is present in
the population independently of cultural transmission. In other words, this knowledge appears to
develop spontaneously or, more accurately, to originate within the contributor.
Most of those I interviewed hold very little knowledge of folkloric social fairies and brownies,
and even the ability to tell stories about these beings is no guarantee of broad understanding.
Almost without exception,277 those contributors with the best grasp of this portion of folklore are
either historians (amateur or professional) or pastors, yet there are individuals in both of these
groups who have no more expertise than a complete stranger to historical inquiry, this despite the
fact that Hübertz’s Description of Ærø is the most important source for both local church history
and local history in general. Further into this book, we will consider present-day encounters with
these fairies, but for now, we will continue to focus on past belief and current interpretations of past
belief.
Chapter 11: The History of Merfolk
Although mermaids are by no means the most common supernatural beings in Northern European
folklore, I always began my interviews by asking about them. Unlike fairy and brownie, the word
mermaid provokes no confusion; everyone knows immediately what sort of being is under
consideration. This is not to say that people today have deep knowledge of past mermaid belief,
only that – in contrast to social fairies – the popular conception of mermaids is consistent, and in
contrast to brownies, mermaids have not yet been quite so thoroughly consumed by Danish popular
culture as to arouse suspicion of inauthenticity.
It is tempting to begin the history of the Northern European mermaid with an overview of
oceanic beings from Asiatic and Classical folklore and myth. This method is, indeed, far more
prevalent than comparable methods of prefacing discussions of social fairies with Classical nymphs
and brownies with Roman lares. While we have not, ourselves, devoted too much attention to nonNorthern European belief, the parallels between specific types of Northern European land-based
fairies and their Southern and Eastern forbearers and contemporaries are striking.
Whereas few folklorists today would dream of calling Zeus a social fairy, there is a tendency to
group together every Classical supernatural aquatic being under the merfolk label, with not even
Poseidon being spared278. It is easy to see a Northern European social fairy in the Classical story of
Hylas’ capture by a nymph, but it takes a greater stretch of the imagination to do as some have done
and make a mermaid out of Scylla, the six-headed, man-eating monster found in Homer’s
Odyssey279. This coupling of mermaids with all manner of beings presumably originates in
Medieval and Early Modern writers’ love for Classical comparisons, but since this trend once
extended across the folkloric board, including social fairies and so on, it is difficult to understand
why more recent scholars have alone retained the old analogies concerning mermaids. We dwell on
this point only because it has had an impact on popular conceptions of mermaids. The association
between Northern European mermaids and Classical sirens, for example, is now a commonplace
both within and without the scholarly realm, despite the two beings having very little in common.280
To begin with, we will make the generalisation that mermaids are usually seen as the female
members of the race of merfolk even though mermen play a much smaller role in tradition than do
their partners. In Northern Europe, merfolk are located somewhere between social and solitary
fairies. Only occasionally do they live either in large communities or single families like social
fairies, and they are most frequently seen alone, yet they are nonetheless sometimes encountered in
small groups. If nothing else, the very existence of both mermen and mermaids implies an aquatic
society of some kind whereas the various types of solitary fairies are usually made up of individuals
of a single gender who are, thus, presumably not concerned with sex and reproduction. It is
probably safest to say that the most common view would be that these beings are only loosely
social.281 Unlike most solitary fairies, they do not seem to mind each other’s company, but their
lives are not built upon familial or communal relationships.
The earliest lengthy Northern European description we have of what might be considered a
member of the merfolk race actually concerns a man from Southern Europe, from Sicily. In the
latter part of the 12th Century, Walter Map writes:
Many are alive who tell us that they have seen at sea that prodigy, great, nay, surpassing all
wonderment, I mean Nicholas Pipe, the Man of the Sea. For long periods, a month or a year, he
would frequent the depths of the sea with the fishes, without breathing the air, yet unharmed;
and when he was aware of a storm by foresight, he would forbid ships in harbour to go out, or
bid them return if they had gone out. A real man, he had nothing non-human in his form, nor
any defect to his five senses, but was gifted, over and above his humanity, with the aptitudes of
fish. When he was going down into the sea to make some stay there, he took with him pieces of
old iron torn from carts or horses’ feet, or worn-out utensils: I have never yet heard the reason
of this. In one respect only was he inferior to mankind and like fish, that he could not live away
from the smell or water of the sea; when he was taken some distance away from it he would run
back to it as if his breath failed him. William, king of Sicily [Probably the contemporary king,
William II, who reigned 1166-89.], heard of all this and was anxious to see him, and bade him
be brought to him, and while the men dragged him by force he died in their hands, owing to his
separation from the sea. Though I have read or heard things not less marvellous, I know of
nothing that resembles this prodigy.282
Walter Map makes it clear that Nicholas Pipe was human, “a real man,” but considering
Pipe’s abilities this sounds somewhat unconvincing. Perhaps most perplexing is his use of
scrap iron, a metal that tends to ward off supernatural beings. Gervase of Tilbury, writing
years later, in 1215, makes Pipe active during the reign of King Roger II, King William II’s
grandfather. Besides this earlier dating, Gervase does even more to humanize Pipe, which is
significant since Gervase was at the court of this same King William until the regent’s death
and thus probably received his account of the story at roughly the same time as Walter did,
only from a better source. Considering Gervase’s usually open manner concerning fairies, it is
interesting that his Pipe is no more than a very, very good diver, as this excerpt from
Gervase’s account shows:
He was a man of Apulian origin, who spent nearly all his time at the bottom of the sea. The seacreatures left him alone without bothering him, as being a well-known and friendly figure. He
was an assiduous explorer of the sea, and when ships were ploughing over the deep, he used to
give sailors warnings of approaching storms; when he suddenly emerged naked from the sea, he
would ask nothing from the people sailing past save only oil, which he used to enable him to
observe and investigate more closely the depths of the sea’s abyss.283
It should be noted that Pipe seems to smear himself with oil, an activity that may be
connected with the social fairies’ application of a magic ointment. Gervase certainly knows of
this tradition for he wrote something quite similar concerning the effects of grease on the
fairies of the Rhône.284 Also, both Walter and Gervase have Nicholas warn sailors of storms, a
common enough attribute of folkloric merfolk.
In 1200, Ralph of Coggeshall gives us the first uncontested Northern European merman:
In the time of King Henry II [Reigned 1154-89.], when Bartholomew de Glanville kept Orford
Castle, it happened that the sailors there, fishing in the sea, caught a wild man in their nets, who
they brought to the Castellan as a curiosity. He was completely naked, and had the appearance
of a man in all his parts. He had hair too; and though the hair of his head seemed torn and
rubbed, his beard was profuse and pointed, and he was exceedingly shaggy and hairy about the
breasts. The Castellan had him guarded for a long time, by day and night, lest he should escape
into the sea. What food was put before him he ate eagerly. He preferred raw fish to cooked; but
when they were raw he squeezed them tightly in his hands until all the moisture was pressed
out, and so he ate them. He would not utter any speech, or rather he could not, even when hung
up by his feet and cruelly tortured. When he was taken into the church he showed no sign of
reverence or even of belief, either by kneeling or bowing his head at the sight of anything
sacred. He always hastened to bed as soon as the sun sank, and stayed there until it rose again.
Once they took him to the sea-gate and let him go into the water, after placing a triple row of
very strong nets in front of him. He soon made for the deep sea, and, breaking through all their
nets, raised himself again and again from the depths, and showed himself to those watching on
the shore, often plunging into the sea, and a little after coming up, as if he were jeering at the
spectators because he had escaped their nets. When he had played there in the sea for a long
time, and they had lost all hope of his return, he came back to them of his own accord,
swimming to them through the waves, and remained with them for another two months. But
when after a time he was more negligently kept, and held in some distaste, he escaped secretly
to the sea, and never afterwards returned. But whether he was a mortal man, or a kind of fish
bearing a resemblance to humanity, or an evil spirit lurking in the body of a drowned man, such
as we read of in the life of the blessed Audon, it is difficult to decide, all the more because one
hears of so many remarkable things, and there is such a number of happenings like this.285
This account is detailed, sober, and like so many supernatural stories from Medieval chronicles,
concerns presumably-trustworthy men of power, wealth, and influence. How, we might wonder, did
belief in such a being arise? As the merman resided at Orford Castle over a period of months, we
can be sure that he was not a trick of the light, was not a fleetingly-glimpsed product of overworked
imaginations; the naturalistic theory cannot account for him. And what can the psychoanalysts say
of a story with so little point, completely lacking in moral and resilient to all but the most beggarly
sexual associations? There is, likewise, little here for the present-day spiritualists who see fairies as
representatives of a higher – or at least, nobler – order. Ralph of Coggeshall himself does not know
what to make of it and offers three distinct suggestions as to the being’s identity before noting that
the sheer bulk of similarly-fantastic occurrences makes it hard to draw conclusions.
It might appear surprising that both of these above mermen are fully human in form. Throughout
the recorded history of Northern European folklore, merfolk were seen variously as completely
human or half-human and half-fish/seal/dolphin/etc.; no one perception gained ascendancy over the
other until the beings entered the realm of fiction and art. Neither the story of Nicholas Pipe nor that
of the merman at Orford Castle really fit into common, later types of merfolk legends, folktales, and
fairy tales. Elsewhere, merfolk rarely undertake work for kings and are generally quite proficient in
the language of their captors.
Since belief in seal-folk does not seem to have been widespread in Denmark, we will devote no
great attention to them. It should, however, be noted that the common merfolk legends are also told
of the seal-folk even though there exist some essential difference between the two, primarily on
account of the latter being more socially oriented.
We have previously mentioned the lack of early, wide-ranging Nordic historical texts,
bypassing the regionally-concerned Icelandic sagas and the semi-mythological legends of Saxo
Grammaticus and placing the 16th Century Magnus brothers at the forefront of Scandinavian
historical writing. The King’s Mirror of mid-13th Century Norway is an exception, and although this
anonymous text cannot bear comparison to the sophisticated chronicles of men like Gervase of
Tilbury, it covers many of the same subjects as contemporary English histories. Among other
things, The King’s Mirror represents merfolk’s earliest historical appearance in the extant Nordic
literature:
It is reported that the monster called merman [hafstramba] is found in the seas of Greenland.
This monster is tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water. It appears to have
shoulders, neck and head, eyes and mouth, and nose and chin like those of a human being; but
above the eyes and the eyebrows it looks more like a man with a peaked helmet on his head. It
has shoulders like a man’s but no hands. Its body apparently grows narrower from the shoulders
down, so that the lower down it has been observed, the more slender it has seemed to be. But no
one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped, whether it terminates in a fin like a fish or is
pointed like a pole. The form of this prodigy has, therefore, looked much like an icicle. No one
has ever observed it closely enough to determine whether its body has scales like a fish or skin
like a man Whenever the monster has shown itself, men have always been sure that a storm
would follow. They have also noted how it has turned when about to plunge into the waves and
in what direction it has fallen; if it has turned toward the ship and has plunged in that direction,
the sailors have felt sure that lives would be lost on that ship; but whenever it has turned away
from the vessel and has plunged in that direction, they have felt confident that their lives would
be spared, even though they should encounter rough waters and severe storms.
Another prodigy called mermaid [margýgi] has also been seen there. This appears to have
the form of a woman from the waist upward, for it has large nipples on its breast like a woman,
long hands and heavy hair, and its neck and head are formed in every respect like those of a
human being. The monster is said to have large hands and its fingers are not parted but bound
together by a web like that which joins the toes of water fowls. Below the waist line it has the
shape of a fish with scales and tail and fins. It is said to have this in common with the one
mentioned before, that it rarely appears except before violent storms. Its behaviour is often
somewhat like this: it will plunge into the waves and will always re-appear with fish in its
hands; if it then turns toward the ship, playing with the fishes or throwing them at the ship, the
men have fears that they will suffer great loss of life. The monster is described as having a large
and terrifying face, a sloping forehead and wide brows, a large mouth and wrinkled cheeks. But
if it eats the fishes or throws them into the sea away from the ship, the crews have good hopes
that their lives will be spared, even though they should meet severe storms.286
Again, we find merfolk predicting storms. Unlike Nicholas Pipe, these merfolk do not give
sailors the chance to save themselves but merely tell them of their doom or survival. We will
focus more on this point later, but for now, suffice it to say that there is a world of difference
between the activities of merfolk and Classical sirens; the former prophesise death whereas
the latter cause death. Were the merfolk interested in killing sailors, there would be no point
in their telling seamen that they would survive a storm. Sailors may have dreaded seeing
merfolk, but at least at this point in history, if a storm was on the way regardless, it would
have been better to be forewarned than surprised.
Despite the assertions of some of the best minds in folklore, mermaids do not seem to be
generally malicious. We cannot but wonder at the power of past scholarship to influence even
the most adept researchers when Katherine Briggs – in possession of so much evidence to the
contrary – states, “The mermaid’s character in folk-lore is by no means invariable, […] but
the central strain is the ominous and evil mermaid of Clerk Covil, who fascinates men to their
death, or that which is a portent of shipwreck.”287 We have mentioned the Clerk Covill ballad
previously, in connection with the Danish Elf-Shot, a song with which Clerk Colvill has much
in common. Here, then, is the ballad that Briggs sees as the exemplar of malicious mermaidlore:
Clark Colven and his gay ladie,
As they walked to yon garden green,
A belt about her middle gimp,
Which cost Clark Colven crowns fifteen:
“O hearken weel now, my good lord,
O hearken weel to what I say;
When ye gang to the wall o Stream,
O gang nae neer the well-fared may.”
“O haud your tongue, my gay ladie,
Tak nae sic care o me;
For I nae saw a fair woman
I like so well as thee.”
He mounted on his berry-brown steed,
And merry, merry rade he on,
Till he came to the wall o Stream,
And there he saw the mermaiden.
“Ye wash, ye wash, ye bonny may,
And ay’s ye wash your sark o silk:”
“It’s a’ for you, ye gentle knight,
My skin is whiter than the milk.”
He’s taen her by the milk-white hand,
He’s taen her by the sleeve sae green,
And he’s forgotten his gay ladie,
And away with the fair maiden.
*
*
* * * * * * * * *
“Ohon, alas!” says Clark Colven,
“And aye sae sair’s I mean my head!”
And merrily leaugh the mermaiden,
“O win on till you be dead.
“But out ye tak your little pen-knife,
And frae my sark ye shear a gare;
Row that about your lovely head,
And the pain ye’ll never feel nae mair.”
“Ohon, alas!” says Clark Colven,
“An aye sae sair’s I mean my head!”
And merrily laughd the mermaiden,
“It will ay be war till ye be dead.”
Then out he drew his trusty blade,
And thought wi it to be her dead,
But she become a fish again,
And merrily sprang into the fleed.
He’s mounted on his berry-brown steed,
And dowy, dowy rade he home,
And heavily, heavily lighted down
When to his ladie’s bower-door he came.
“Oh, mither, mither, mak my bed,
And, gentle ladie, lay me down;
Oh, brither, brither, unbend my bow,
‘T will never be bent by me again.”
His mither she has made his bed,
His gentle ladie laid him down,
His brither he has unbent his bow,
288
’T was never bent by him again.
The mermaid here is unusual in that she has no difficulty lying to Clerk Colvill and saying
that the piece of silk will help rather than hurt him, but otherwise, she acts much as most
fairies – whether social or otherwise – do when spurned by a lover. Death is certainly a harsh
punishment for inconstancy, but a nuanced scholar like Briggs would never used Elf-Shot’s
similar death sentence as evidence for social fairies’ malice: Mermaids, like land-based social
fairies, react strongly and often violently to slights. That Clerk Colvill has had previous
intercourse with the mermaid is clear enough: The protagonist’s human lover finds it
worthwhile to warn him away from visiting this beautiful, otherworldly protagonist. The
mermaid is, furthermore, awaiting Clerk Colvill’s arrival. All supernatural beings are
dangerous and must be approached with caution if approached at all. The mermaid of the
ballad does not, then, stand out as particularly evil. It is interesting, however, that she escapes
Colvill’s blade by becoming “a fish again,” suggesting that she has shape-shifting capabilities.
Most mermaids are either part-human and part-animal or wholly human. Occasionally, like
the seal-folk, they have the ability to remove their “skins,” their fish or dolphin tails. Only
very infrequently can they, in the manner of this mermaid, actually transform from human to
sea creature.
Legends of mermaids with human lovers are not at all uncommon though most of them
work out quite differently than non-folklorists might expect. Only rarely are mermaids the
seducers, the ones to begin a relationship. Mermen, however, are rather more forward though
relatively more common in the Medieval sources than the Early Modern and later ones.
Agnete and the Merman is one of the best known ballads in Denmark and tells a common
enough tale with a decidedly unusual conclusion:
Agnete, on Højeland’s Bridge she walks.
Up from below, a merman comes and talks.
– ho ho ho –
Up from below, a merman comes and talks.
“And hear you, Agnete, what I will say:
And will you now be my beloved this day?”
“Oh, yes, really, that will I be,
When you take me to the bottom of the sea.”
He plugged her mouth, he plugged her ears,
Then, to the bottom of the sea, he led her.
There, they were together for eight years,
Seven of the merman’s sons she rears.
Agnete, she sat by the cradle and sang,
When she heard the English bell’s clang.
Agnete, she walks to the merman’s perch:
“And may I go out to church?”
“Oh, yes, really, that you may,
If from your children small you don’t stay away.
“But when you come to the church’s stairs,
Then, you mustn’t let down your golden hair.
“And when you come onto the church’s floor,
Then, you mustn’t go to your mother’s stool.
“When the priest will the Lord avow,
Then, you mustn’t yourself bow.”
He plugged her mouth, he plugged her ears,
Then, to the English ground, he led her.
When she came to the church’s stairs,
Then, she let down her golden hair.
That time she came onto the church’s floor,
Then, she went to her dear mother’s stool.
When the priest did the Lord avow,
She ever-so-deep did herself bow.
“And hear you, Agnete, what I will say:
Where have you from me been eight years away?”
“In the sea have I been for eight years,
Seven of the merman’s sons I rear.”
“And hear you, dear Agnete, my daughter:
What did he give you for your honour?”
“He gave me a red-gold band,
There are none better on the queen’s hand.
“He gave me a pair of gold-clasped shoes,
There are none better for the queen to use.
“And he gave me a harp of gold,
That I should play when sorrowful.”
That merman, he made a path so wide,
From the beach to the church-yard outside.
That merman, he from the church-door stepped down,
All of the icons turned themselves around.
His hair was as of the purest gold,
His eyes they were so sorrowful.
“And hear you, Agnete, what I will say:
And your small children— For you, long they.”
“Let them long, let them long, no matter the pain,
Never more will I go to them again.”
“Oh, think of the big, and think of the small,
And think of the tiny who cannot yet crawl.”
“Truly never do I think of the big or the small,
Least of all of the tiny who cannot yet crawl,
– ho ho ho –
Least of all of the tiny who cannot yet crawl.289
Only rarely do legends appear to ask us to side with the fairies and not the humans. Agnete’s
abandonment of her loving husband and children looks awful to readers today, but we must be
careful not to foist our own values on this old song. Although the merman loves Agnete, he is
clearly demonic, not merely pagan, as evidenced by the turning away of the holy images upon
his entering the church. Agnete is, in fact, extremely fortunate: Most women in her position
are killed, forced back to their fairy residence, or both. Indeed, other versions of this same
ballad provide for all possible results of Agnete’s taboo-breaking spree. Sometimes, the
merman simply kills Agnete; the merman strikes her, and she returns home; she willingly
goes back to the bottom of the sea; she is forced back to the sea and killed by her children;
and she stays on land and divides her children with the merman, leading to the odd-numbered
child being torn in half. This legend is not relegated to mermen and has also been collected as
a prose story concerning a mermaid and her human husband.290
As with Clerk Colvill, there are social fairy analogues to Agnete and the Merman. One of
these is the heart-rending Norwegian ballad, Little Kersti:
Little Kersti, she was so little a wife,
The brown horse runs light,
She could not govern her young life.
While it rains and the wind blows,
Northwards under the mountains,
There the Norsemen play.
Little Kersti, she was so little a may,
She could not open the lock with the key.
Little Kersti, she sat at the loom well blest:
[Her mother asks:] “Why runs there milk out of your breasts?”
“Oh, that’s not milk though it looks that way,
But it is the mead I drank yesterday.”
“The two things are not alike,
For mead is brown, and milk is white.”
“Oh, nought it avails to deceive thee,
The mount-king [bergekongin] north, he has lured me.”
“If the mount-king north has lured you,
With what gifts has he made you true?”
“Oh, he gave me a red-gold ring
That is too fine to be worn by the king.
“And he gave me a harp of gold,
That I should play when sorrowful.”
Little Kersti, she on the gold harp played forth,
The mount-king heard it in the mountains north.
[The mount-king comes and says:] “Oh, if I cannot have little Kersti’s hand,
Then I shall let fire ravage Beyerland [Bohemia.].”
“Oh, before you shall burn my land to the loam,
Then take away little Kersti, and move her home!”
The mount-king, he had a charger black,
He set Little Kersti up on his back.
The mount-king rode the mountain thrice around
And the mountain opened, and they went underground.
They set little Kersti on a silver stool,
They gave her drink from a silver bowl.
The first drink little Kersti, she drinks,
Of the Christian land, she still thinks.
“Where do you live, and where were you born?
And where were your maiden-clothes shorn?”
“In Beyerland, there I live and was born,
And there were my maiden-clothes shorn.”
The second drink little Kersti, she drinks,
Of the Christian land, she still thinks.
They gave her drink from the red-gold horn,
They dropped therein three delirium-corns.
The third drink little Kersti, she drinks,
Of the Christian land she [no longer] thinks.
“Where do you live, and where were you born?
And where were your maiden-clothes shorn?”
“In the mountains I live, and there I was born,
And there were my maiden-clothes shorn.
“In the mountains will I live, and there I will die,
The brown horse runs light,
And there, I am the king’s bride.”
While it rains and the wind blows,
Northwards under the mountains,
There the Norsemen play.291
Though the plot of Little Kersti is essentially the same as that of Agnete and the Merman, the
supernatural beings are different. In consequence of this change, some additional motifs are present
in Little Kersti, most notably the taboo against consuming fairy food or drink. While men who take
fairies – social or otherwise – as wives rarely prosper, many stories of humans seduced by fairies
end in total assimilation. While it is difficult to see this as a happy ending, there is no hint in the
above ballad that the brainwashed Kersti will live a life of sorrow even if she may someday live an
afterlife of torment. Both Little Kersti and Agnete and the Merman include a harp, and this
instrument makes more sense in the former, where it is actually played. The purpose of the harp is
uncertain, at least as far as the fairy husband is concerned. It would seem either to be a means of the
fairy knowing that the wife is revealing her secret and/or complaining about her husband or, more
benignly, a way of the fairy knowing when it is time to restore his wife’s happiness by fetching her
away. The former possibility suggests again the taboo of breaking fairy privacy: In Little Kersti the
protagonist is far into her pregnancy before her mother is aware that something is amiss, and other
variations of this ballad go so far as to let the girl have had “seven sons and a daughter” inside the
mountain without anyone noticing while the girl lived her daily life in the human world. 292
Unlike the merman of Orford Castle or the merfolk of The King’s Mirror, we can be sure that
the merman who takes Agnete as his bride is of at least human intelligence. We have noted that
seal-folk and merfolk share many types of stories, which is hardly surprising since even merfolk
and land-based social fairies share legends. Notwithstanding Katherine Briggs’ statements as to the
general maliciousness of merfolk, the majority of mermaid legends she gives in her mammoth
Dictionary of British Folk-Tales do not reflect badly on the aquatic fairies. One of these stories,
represented in the book in numerous variations, is that of the mermaid wife. Concisely put, the story
goes as follows: A man wandering along the beach sees a mermaid sitting on a rock or dancing with
other mermaids. She is often singing sweetly. The man creeps up on the mermaid and gets hold of
her mirror, comb, seal-skin, or the like, thus preventing her from returning to the sea. Since the man
refuses to return this item, the mermaid must agree to live her life on land and be the man’s wife.
The two marry and have children. One day, years later, one of their children finds the stolen item
hidden somewhere in the house or barn and shows it to his mother. Once again in possession of her
property, the mermaid runs off and returns to the sea, leaving behind her human husband and
children.293
While it is self-evident why some mermaids would be unable to live in the water without
their seal or fish tails, the attachment of other mermaids to their combs and mirrors has never
been adequately explained although I am sure that the psychoanalysts could come up with
something suitably titillating. Not all humans who gain an advantage over a mermaid are so
foolhardy as to make a mate of her: Some men who either steal a comb or help a stranded
mermaid back to the sea ask instead for a reward, which tends to be a better idea.
Merfolk, possibly uniquely among the ranks of fairies, occasionally stick around in one
place in full view of the public. Whereas the merman of Orford Castle was a prisoner,
Orkney’s Deerness Mermaid appeared on her own accord over a number of summers in the
1890s and was said to have been witnessed by hundreds of people.294 A contemporary
account says that “It is about six to seven feet in length, has a little black head, with neck, a
snow white body and two arms, and in swimming it just appears like a human being. At times
it will appear to be sitting on a sunken rock, and will wave and work its hands.”295 Once
again, assuming that merfolk have never existed, it is amazing that so many people, over such
a long period of time, could have come to believe in something that was not there.
Mermaids of the British Isles may be renowned for their fine combs, but Scandinavian
merfolk are somewhat humbler, often getting into scrapes on account of the poor-quality of
their clothing. Unlike brownies, however, merfolk are not averse to rectifying this
disadvantage with gifts, as a legend collected by the industrious Evald Tang Kristensen
illustrates:
It’s known that there’re merfolk around. 1826, when the sea broke through, there was fearfully
good weather the day before. It was the day they were supposed to have their Christmas Eve
nights, and the fishermen had gone out and had really gotten down to fishing. So, there was a
fisherman who was fishing a ways off from the others. Then, a mermaid comes up right beside
his boat, and she pulls a stocking from one foot and puts it on the other, and it looked quite sore,
she hadn’t more than one sock, and she exchanged it continually. But then, he [The fisherman.]
tears a sock off of his own leg – he had, of course, undersocks – and throws it out to the
mermaid. She snaps it up and sinks down again into the water. That time after she’d been down
about a quarter of an hour, she comes up right beside his boat again: “Hear you, man, who gave
me a sock, you must strive and hurry to land, or else you’re going to eat your Christmas Eve
nights here [Eat your fish in the sea.] this evening.” So, he and his mates rushed to get to land,
but they were never so much hardly landed before the mermaid brought up such a storm that
they who were on the sea were drowned to the last man. But that man and his people were
saved. That was the day the sea broke in.296
This type of legend is not quite dead even today. For example, after the World Trade Center
disaster on 11 September 2001 and the London underground bombings on 7 July 2005, stories
abounded of good Samaritans being warned by Asian, Pakistani, or Middle Eastern men not
to, say, go to Birmingham on a particular date (presumably, because of a planned bombing) or
consume a particular brand of bottled drink (presumably, because of a planned poisoning).297
In contrast to the other examples of mermaid lore we have looked at so far, this mermaid not
only warns of but also causes a storm. It must be noted though that this point is up to debate:
Unlike the other incidents in the legend, the origin of the storm is never witnessed by any
survivors since those in the position to see the mermaid raising the storm are “drowned to the
last man.” This might not appear significant, and I am not on some sort of quest to rehabilitate
the mermaid’s reputation, but as we shall see in our discussion of church grims later on, the
line between warning of ill-fortune and actually doing the deed is a very subtle one in
legendary material. In any case, stories of sailors being saved by either seeing or speaking to a
mermaid for whom they have not done any favour are at least as common as those of
mermaids actively sinking ships.298
There are, however, some mermaids whose characters cannot be reformed. These seducers
who attempt to lure men into their domain are the closest mermaids get to the Classical sirens.
But does the name siren suit even these beings? After all, the mermaid’s grounds for seducing
seem to be genuinely romantic: Since merfolk generally lack the impulse for communal living
held by social fairies, they are not even apt to steal away humans who are merely “favourites”
rather than objects of passion. Sirens, on the other hand, while sometimes driven by sexual
desire, are almost always subject to a different kind of carnal lust as well, cannibalism, or, at
the very least, joy in watching death being their primary motivation. In any case, contrary to
the siren-image we have from Homer’s Odyssey, most mermaid encounters – and certainly
most mermaid seductions – take place on the shore, not on the deck of a ship.
In distinguishing between mermaids and sirens, it is not enough to note that most folkloric
mermaids do not go out of their way to kill people. The sirens of the ancient Greeks are
individualized figures, just two or three in number, who dwell at a specific place and use their
enticing song to lure passing ships onto the rocks. Mermaids never – at least not in postMedieval sources, where the linguistic confusion between sirens and mermaids is less
prevalent – participate in this kind of mass-seduction, and if a mermaid drowns a particular
man it is usually implied that she has taken the man down to her underwater realm, not that
she has extinguished his life completely.
We conjectured previously that people see sirens and mermaids as analogous because they
look alike. Physical resemblance is not, of course, of primary folkloric importance; after all,
wherever traditions of water spirits exist, there will be a good chance of finding spirits with
fish/dolphin/seal-tails simply because it is logical that aquatic spirits will possess tails made
for swimming, no matter how human the rest of their bodies may be. That having an animal
tail is not a prerequisite for merfolk illustrates even more plainly the unimportance of form in
folklore. Just as Danish trolls act the same as other Danish social fairies despite looking quite
different, the legends of tailed and tailless mermaids are indistinguishable except for the fact
that, logically, mermaid wife stories are relegated to mermaids who lack tails, have the ability
to change form, or have removable tails. So, physiology is not terribly significant. Even if it
were, however, we must note that the sirens of Ancient Greece did not look like mermaids at
all.
In Homer’s Odyssey, the sirens encountered by Odysseus and his crew are not described, but
Euripides called them “winged maidens”,299 and Appolonius of Rhodes said that the Sirens “were
fashioned in part like birds and in part like maidens to behold. And ever on the watch from their
place of prospect with its fair haven, often from many had they taken away their sweet return,
consuming them with wasting desire.”300 Nor is Appolonius alone in making the sirens part-fowl
rather than part-fish: Even in the late-Classical period – for example, in the 1st Century CE Naturalis
Historia of Pliny the Elder301 – sirens rarely have fishy features, and in the 9th Century, we can find
a text that describes a half-bird siren yet is accompanied by a picture of a half-fish siren.302 Thus,
while the famous Classical sirens lived by the sea, they were not even vaguely aquatic, as evidenced
by the story of their deaths upon leaping into the water in anger at a hero’s escape from their
clutches. The comparison between mermaids and sirens is a strange one indeed.
As we have said though, the outright comparison is not a new one. Gervase of Tilbury
writes:
Sirens are seen in the sea off Britain, sitting on the rocks. They have a female head, long,
shining hair, a woman’s breasts, and all the limbs of the female form down to the navel; the rest
of their body tails off as a fish. With the immense sweetness of their singing these creatures so
penetrate the hearts of passing sailors that they succumb utterly to the sensuous enticement of
their ears; they become forgetful of their duty, and very often suffer shipwreck through
carelessness.303
These beings look like mermaids and are found near Britain, not the Mediterranean, but they
act like sirens. It is unfortunate that Gervase and most of his contemporaries and
predecessors304 write in Latin since this choice of language would make it difficult for them to
differentiate between mermaids and sirens even if they wanted to. There is a possibility, in
any case, that Medieval British siren scholarship was influenced by native water spirits with
tails,305 an interesting thought since the influence is usually believed to have worked in the
other direction, with sirens providing the basis for mermaids.
Merfolk do not support the bewildering range of legends as do social fairies, but they are,
nonetheless, deep folkloric characters. They can be sinister, friendly, grateful, or spiteful, all
according to their own personalities and whims. The same cannot be said of sirens. Sirens, to
the best of our knowledge only ever did one thing: They lure people, either to their deaths, to
sexual union, or to both. The sole compelling reason for seeing merfolk and sirens as
analogous is that they have been viewed this way for a long time though, as we have
mentioned, today’s folklorists rarely retain the Middle Ages’ Classical analogies of other
types of folkloric beings. We have already seen with social fairies that the Classicising
tendencies of the Medieval period can easily mislead us. Let us now look at what our earliest
Northern European sources tell us of the mermaid-siren distinction.
Guillaume de Lorris’ lengthy, mid-13th Century Roman de la rose, one of the most
influential Medieval French poems, was translated into English in the 14th Century, and at
least part of this translation seems to belong to Geoffrey Chaucer.306 Guillaume’s work is a
Classically-themed, visionary love poem. While the French, like the English, possess fairies
that correspond roughly to the Classical nymphs, any Medieval Central European poem that
makes much of the well of Narcissus and powers of Venus cannot be seen as strictly
traditional. Early on in the poem, as the hero enters the Garden of Love, he is captivated by
the singing of birds, singing so lovely that it sounds, not like bird-song:
But I thought [I was] hearing the sirens [Syrène.]
Seductive queens of the sea;
Serious and strong was their voice
Of which men formerly made sirens.307
This literal translation, out of context as it is, makes little sense in itself, but it looks as though
Guillaume is thinking of Classical and not contemporary folkloric beings, particularly as we
are told that, out of such otherworldly song, sirens were “formerly” made. We may wonder at
Chaucer’s depiction of an unbelieving world in the late 1300s, but in this case, we cannot
reasonably expect that only about fifteen years after Gervase of Tilbury completed his fairy-
haunted Otia Imperialia at Arles in southern France, a poet living in Central France would
relegate belief in fairies to the past. That Guillaume came from a land-locked district and was,
thus, probably not personally raised with tales of mermaids simply reinforces the suspicion
that his syrène are Classical sirens.
When Chaucer translates the above lines of Roman de la rose, something strange occurs:
But it was wondir lyk to be
Song of mermaydens of the see,
That, for her syngyng is so clere,
Though we mermaydens clepe [call] hem [them] here
In English, as is oure usaunce,
Men clepe hem sereyns in Fraunce.308
One can interpret Chaucer in a few different ways. Most simply, he could merely be
explaining that sirens – Classical or otherwise – are the same as the native English mermaids.
This would be a bit odd since his readers – at this point in history, educated people by
definition – would surely be aware of the Classical sirens. The only reasons to specify that
mermaids are sirens in France would either be to remind the audience that the original poem
is French or to complete the poetic meter. Neither of these options seems terribly convincing
however. Might not Chaucer instead be interpreting Guillaume folklorically rather than
mythologically? It is possible that, due to the not overtly-malicious nature of the bird-song in
question, Chaucer sees the passage as describing beings of uncertain morality, as describing
mermaids instead of sirens. In this case, we could deduce that English mermaids were, like
the sirens, known to be fine singers but were not, in the end, identical with sirens. Or, for all
we know, Chaucer’s noting that the French word for mermaid is siren might just be an excuse
for further Classicising the poem. We cannot, in any case, make solid conclusions. The
Chaucer example is not unique and is simply an illustration of our difficulties in separating
mermaids from sirens in early sources.
In Brittany and Wales, there was another name, besides siren, for mermaid in the Middle
Ages, this being morganes [Literally, “sea-born”.] or some variation along these lines.309 The
morganes appear in Celtic literature very early on. Today, the word is best known from the
Arthurian legend-making of Geoffrey of Monmouth (who was born either a Welshman or a
Breton), and multiple characters – including Morgan le Fay [Literally, “Mermaid the
Fairy/Enchantress”.] and the Lady of the Lake – in his work bear the name or a variant of the
name. It might seem obvious that Geoffrey’s Morgan – who he presents as Arthur’s saviour –
was inspired by the legendary morganes, but this is far from certain. Morrígan is the name of
a mythological Irish goddess, and while the Welsh Morgan and Irish Morrígan are not linked
etymologically, there is no reason to believe that Geoffrey was aware of this. 310 Geoffrey’s
fictional Morgan is probably, like his Merlin, a composite figure. However, Geoffrey’s
histories of Britain, though works of fiction, served as the basis for a hugely-influential corpus
of Arthurian and Carolingian Romance, the content of which became a sort of alternative
British mythology. The Romantic efforts to revitalize Celtic – and particularly Irish –
mythology drew heavily on the Romance tradition in spirit if not always in fact, so that today,
we might say that even if Geoffrey’s Morgan le Fay was not at all influenced by the earlier
Irish Morrígan, perceptions of Morrígan have been very much influenced by Morgan le Fay.
To further complicate matters, regardless of the relationship between Morrígan and
Morgan, Irish myth was by no means adverse to half-deified mermaids: Irish legend tells of Lí
Ban, a woman who is so thoroughly a mermaid that, upon her capture in a net – recorded in
the chronicles as occurring in 558311 – and subsequent conversion to Christianity, she is
baptised Muirghein, another variant of morganes. Her story is even more remarkable in that
she is eventually accepted as a saint.312 Today, of course, the origins of characters like
Morgan le Fay are so far forgotten that artistic treatment of them sometimes has
unintentionally-comic results. For example, the 1998 television miniseries, Merlin, has a
young girl – an ordinary child who later becomes a cruel sorceress – introduced to the king’s
court as Morgan le Fay, a name that would definitely have aroused suspicion in a room full of
Early Medieval Welshmen. As is often the case, the precise interchange between mythology,
legendary folklore, early fiction, early historical texts, and modern fiction is difficult to map
out.
Chapter 12: Perceptions of Past Belief in Merfolk
Classicisation of native folkloric beings in the Middle Ages is probably best attributed to the
fact that most authors wrote in Latin and had immense respect for ancient authorities, but
what of writers from later eras? Katherine Briggs, despite her opinion as to mermaids’ maneating tendencies, recognizes a confusion between sirens and mermaids and is probably right
when she explains the English mermaid’s Early Modern explosion in popularity:
Between nereides and sirens the Elizabethan interest in mermaids might well be accounted for;
but there is a full and widely diffused folk tradition in Britain, which seems independent of
classical sources. The pleasure the writers of that time [The Elizabethan period.] took in
mermaids may have been partly due to the satisfaction of combining a classical allusion with a
tradition in which they themselves had been brought up.313
Besides the by-now common image of sirens with fish-tails, Briggs notes that, traditionally, both
sirens and mermaids are excellent singers and that this might have suggested a closer relationship
between the beings than actually existed. The mermaid song, like the siren song, is said to be
irresistible, but unlike the siren song, it is usually sung for the mermaid’s pleasure, not that of men.
Many versions of the mermaid wife legend begin with a man hearing an unwitting mermaid singing
on the shore. Though space has presented us from noting it before, excellent musical ability and
appreciation is a common attribute of both water spirits and social fairies.
More recent scholars have also had a tendency to relate traditions of sirens to those of
mermaids. Surprisingly, the same is true for people with little knowledge of folklore. In order to
avoid confusion during interviews, I only asked contributors to tell me what they knew about
mermaids rather than merfolk in general. Of the 51 contributors who reply to this question, seven
make an explicit connection between mermaids and sirens, and a further 13 see the luring of sailors
to their deaths as mermaids’ primary activity. Considering that a full 22 people are unable to say
anything about mermaids’ lifestyles at all, this means that almost 70% of those who do have a
conception see the beings as primarily dangerous, as focused on drowning sailors. Only two of
those who cite the murderous tendencies of aquatic spirits suggest that there is another, friendlier
type of mermaid. Meanwhile, seven contributors see mermaids as wholly-friendly beings, almost as
beings whose purpose it is to help humans. This leaves just two contributors who omit the good/evil
dichotomy: One of them does so by telling the story of Agnete and the Merman314 and another by
mentioning the legend of a mermaid prophesying the birth of Denmark’s King Christian IV.315
Perhaps most surprisingly, there seems to be little pattern as to who believes what: Men, women,
and historians are spread across the spectrum. Only youths show any consistency, nearly all opting
for the idea that mermaids are dangerous, despite the fact that they might have been expected to
have been strongly influenced by Disney’s Little Mermaid film.
Why do people so consistently connect mermaids with sirens? It is no surprise that the outline
of the siren story is known to most people raised in a world full of Classical references, but whereas
poets and scholars of the Middle Ages – many of whom believed in the truth of the Classical
accounts – had some decent grounds for making the two types of beings analogous, today’s average
Dane does not. Most of my contributors neither know that mermaids sing and might thereby be
related to sirens nor are driven by the desire to give everything a Classical basis, as is evidenced by
the lack of people who mention nymphs as precursors to social fairies.
One possibility is that we are seeing the results of the same reactionary phenomenon we noticed
in some of accounts of brownies. People realize that the current, popular, Little Mermaid-type
conception of mermaids must be untrue, so they head too far in the opposite direction. In the case of
brownies, only a few contributors – all of them very sophisticated – took the bait and devolved
brownies a step too far into malicious beings. This might be because of the lack of a suitable
alternative. People might imagine that brownies were not always jolly Christmas spirits, but if they
know of no other supernatural being that even vaguely resembles a Christmas-brownie, there is a
limit to how many assumptions they can make about the past. The same is not the case with
mermaids. Once one has decided that mermaids do not fit the popular mould, one quickly finds an
alternative personality in sirens, which having been given fish-tails in the post-Classical popular
consciousness, are now the only non-mermaid aquatic spirits most people know. This is merely a
piece of guesswork, but it is the only explanation I have for the continued association between
mermaids and sirens on a non-academic level.
Outside of Denmark, we can safely say that, for most young people in the West today, the
popular image of mermaids stems from Disney’s 1989 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The
Little Mermaid. In Denmark, the situation is rather more complex since children both watch the
movie and read the original short story. Great though the differences between Andersen’s story and
Disney’s film may be, they are not terribly significant from our point of view since neither work
reflects folkloric tradition. It is, nonetheless, interesting that in Andersen’s original, the mermaid
chooses to become a human because she longs for a human soul – a longing that she shares with
many folkloric fairies – while in the Disney movie, precisely the opposite occurs, and the mermaid
sacrifices her soul in order to become a human.
Simple ignorance of traditional merfolk belief is, perhaps, no great loss. For some people,
however, this ignorance has serious implications. A vortex of mytho-psychological studies – both
academic and otherwise – has formed around the mermaid tradition, and due to a dependence on
historical hearsay and a resultant underestimation of the value of primary sources, nearly all of it is
fundamentally flawed. Interest in the theoretical implications of mermaid belief is often linked to
support for the movement within comparative religion studies that places the so-called mother
goddess or earth mother at the forefront of mythology and seeks evidence for the previously
preeminent or equal status of female in relation to male deities. By simply typing mermaids and
history into an internet search engine, I found that nearly all of the theoretical and most of the
folkloric websites relating to the subject were at least partially based on the erroneous correlation of
mermaids to sirens.
As an example of faulty but considerable amateur scholarship, we will look at just one website
out of many, Dennis W. Felty’s The History of Mermaids and Sirens: Symbols of
Transformation.316 This lengthy article (approaching 16,000 words) begins by asking why mermaid
imagery still plays such a powerful role in Western culture and vows to “look at the historical myths
and legends that tell the stories of mermaids, Sirens and other goddesses.” Not only are mermaids
and sirens thrown together here, they are also labelled goddesses, a proposition that the article more
or less takes for granted. Regardless, Felty is upfront with his thesis:
Beatrice Phillpotts, in her book Mermaids suggests that: Supremely beautiful, forever combing
her hair, just beyond reach of men, mermaids have beckoned the adventurous to the unknown
and the promise of forbidden fruits. However behind this seductive image of the Siren lurks the
a metaphor of death, for enticed by her promise and allure, generations have been lured to their
certain doom in a thousand different stories that form the bases of powerful and enduring myths
and legends that continue today.317
It is worrisome that Felty chooses Beatrice Phillpotts – an art critic – as an eminentlyquotable source on the folkloric appeal of mermaids, for though Phillpotts may know about
fairy and mermaid art, she has no clue about traditional fairies and mermaids. As the
numerous mermaid wife-type legends show, mermaids can scarcely be considered “forbidden
fruits” and “just beyond the reach of men,” and even if sirens are now often pictured
seductively, Ancient Greek sources hardly suggest that this is an “enduring myth.”
Felty goes on to link mermaids with aquatic gods and spirits from non-European cultures
on a solely physiological basis and then states that “The sea, as womb of creation and the
source of unfathomable wisdom has always played an important role in world beliefs.”
Interestingly, Felty continues by going to some trouble to explain that Greek sirens were once
half-bird and half-human before saying that “The Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey are often
depicted as mermaids in contemporary art.” Hereafter, Felty uses the names mermaid and
siren interchangeably. By continually presenting 19th and 20th Century mermaid art as
evidence for folkloric and mythological sirens and mermaids, Felty and Phillpotts succeed in
proving that, recently, mermaids have become “the perfect symbol of the attractions of
doomed passion.”318 Interesting though this may be, it is largely irrelevant to Felty’s
investigation of human psychology over the millennia.
Nonetheless, Felty continues:
The song of the Sirens call men to abandon themselves, to hurl into the deep, to sprout wings, to
transform, to die to self and emerge into a new form with new knowledge and understanding. It
is significant that Sirens are creatures of water for water has powerful symbolic value. Water is
also a duality, it can sustain life, give comfort and it is a source of life and abundance. Water is
the symbol we use for baptism and spiritual rebirth and renewal. […] Water however can also
be destructive, causing inundation, drowning, annihilation and death. Sirens and mermaids
embody all of these qualities and meanings and are thus symbols of both death and immortality.
They call men to the unknown, to change and transformation the essential passage from one
space to another, from one condition to another. […] Fear of Sirens is the fear of upsetting the
established equilibrium, fear of the unknown, fear of transformation, fear of learning, fear of
losing oneself, fear of being out of control and fear of descending into the deep (the
unconscious).
This theoretical exercise has nothing to do with folkloric mermaids, despite Felty’s intentions.
Some mermaids are seductive, and it is undeniable that the Romantics (W.B. Yeats’
Mermaid,319 for example, is quoted in the article) latched on to this aspect of mermaid lore.
However, Felty’s interest is not in the Romantic movement per se but in the mermaid’s
placement within the collective unconscious. Special attention is paid to Lilith, an ancient
folkloric figure we considered earlier. This mention is useful since, in reading comparative
religion texts, Lilith serves as a sort of canary in the mine: If Lilith is presented as a symbol of
the oppression of femininity, we can be fairly sure that the writer is aiming at something other
than fact-based mythological research. The fact that ancient sources often picture both Lilith
and sirens with wings brings Lilith into the fold, but Felty is being somewhat disingenuous
here since his primary concern has been establishing a connection between later, fish-tailed
sirens and mermaids.
Later in the article come sections on The Universal Mother and Woman as Temptress, the
inevitable pay-off to psychoanalytic texts discussing Lilith. Again, Felty quotes Phillpotts,
here saying that “In the twentieth century Post-Freudian thought had exposed the legendary
fish-tailed seductress as the personification of the hidden desires of the sexual subconscious,
symbolizing primitive castration anxieties and the urge to return to the amniotic waters of the
womb.”320 Felty does not make this thought as explicit as do most writers on the subject, but
the idea of the fish-tailed mermaid is essential to his thesis. Mermaids without tails simply
will not do since these beings are accessible objects of desire, can be captured and married. At
the core of Felty’s and Phillpott’s theories is the idea of lust for something with which sex is
impossible (or at least, improbable), a conundrum that has attracted sufficient attention to
warrant its own page on Wikipedia321. Imagine all the trouble that theorists – from
professionals like Phillpotts to semi-scholars like Felty to happy-go-lucky fantasy enthusiasts
– would save themselves if only they read folkloric primary sources rather than works by
other psychoanalysts and discovered that, in tradition, mermaids are found both with and
without tails. Ultimately, the question (How do we interpret desire for the unattainable?) that
underlies essays like Felty’s is, in the case of mermaids, irrelevant. We do not need to ask the
question at all.
It might appear needlessly cruel to pick on a non-academic’s website, but Felty is not
unique, is just a drop in the bucket of mermaid symbolism research. Nor is Felty just going
about mermaid work as a hobby. The rousing conclusion to the essay links the apparently-true
nature of mermaids to the search for wisdom and oneness with ourselves. Here, too, Felty
resembles other writers: Mermaids are used as a springboard onto a higher level of
understanding about the universe. The binding agent in all this is the collective unconscious
theory, for it is only by accepting that the collective unconscious exists that all of world
history’s female deities and spirits can be united into the earth mother. This sort of theorizing
is foisted upon other kinds of fairies as well, but possibly due to the general knowledge most
people have about sirens, mermaid symbolism has become uniquely popular. In fact, I have
found that – unwilling to accept supernatural beings as having once been objects of belief – a
great many contributors insist on viewing them as nothing more than symbols. That these
symbols are usually sexual says more about the extent to which some basic psychoanalytic
tenets have infiltrated popular culture than to the general public’s genuine understanding of
psychoanalysis.
It is not that the average person ruminates over these deep issues; it is simply that, once
the mermaid-siren analogy is established, it takes only a cursory reading of an essay like
Felty’s for all of the theoretical pieces to fall into place. One could argue that, even if
mermaids do not act like sirens, the theory is of some importance since sirens always act like
sirens, yet this is forgetting that although the Classical sirens may be seductive killers, they
are not sexually seductive. For the theory to work, sirens and mermaids must be combined.
The thing about Felty’s variety of theorizing is that it is exceedingly common.
Both Hans Christian Andersen’s and Disney’s The Little Mermaid feature mermaids with
tails, which is perfectly fine because, otherwise, the plots would not work at all. We might
expect that, due to the popularity of these fish-tailed mermaids, most Danes would view
folkloric mermaids as having tails, and this is, indeed, the case. Of the 39 contributors who
tell me about mermaid physiology, 37 describe tailed beings, with only a pair of these tailsupporters322 displaying any uncertainty. The two odd cases are Palle Abramsson, who has
read enough folklore to know that mermaids can occur in a variety of forms, and 14-year-old
Karoline Strand, who remembers The Little Mermaid as featuring a mermaid with both a tail
and legs simultaneously. In marked contrast to brownies and social fairies, my contributors’
descriptions of mermaids are physiologically consistent, even to the extent that most people
believe that the human portion of a mermaid is beautiful. This last point is generally true in
folklore though, as we saw in the description of Orkney’s Deerness Mermaid, the rule is not
absolute.
The odd thing about all this is that, in the popular realm, there is an exception to the tailed
mermaid, this being Edvard Eriksen’s 1913 The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen’s
harbour. Both nationally and internationally, Eriksen’s sculpture is considered Denmark’s
national symbol, and reproductions of it – as statuettes, images on t-shirts, pictures on
postcards, or what have you – are rampant throughout the country. This bronze statue is small,
merely 1.25 meters tall, and contrary to Andersen’s text, depicts the mermaid with a human
buttocks and two legs that taper off into fins at the feet. Incidentally, I have not encountered
this conception in tradition, and it seems to have been of Eriksen’s own invention. While
conducting interviews on Ærø, I began noticing how frequently people described to me fishtailed mermaids and then attributed this image to Eriksen’s statue. It was not long before I
began going out of my way to ask people how the statue looked. In all, I received 32
descriptions of the statue. A striking 30 contributors see the statue as having a tail, and as his
habit, the story-telling teacher, Michael Banke, is the only of these contributors to voice
uncertainty. Finally, two remaining contributors, wisely hedging their bets, say that they
cannot say what the statue looks like.323 No one believes that the statue is tailless or features
finned feet.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of this. Without exaggeration, this is the
equivalent to Americans thinking that the Statue of Liberty is holding up both of her arms.
Many contributors have seen the statue in person, and even those who have not probably see
pictures of it on a weekly basis. The fact that people nevertheless believe it to feature a tailed
mermaid is a sign of how deeply the fish-tailed mermaid idea is entrenched in the popular
consciousness. People are unwilling to trust the mermaid personalities set forth by Hans
Christian Andersen and Disney, but these sources’ mermaid physiology goes unquestioned.
There was, we must reiterate, widespread belief in mermaids with tails; it is simply that this
was not the only belief. Despite this, people are so apt to think of mermaids with tails that,
even when looking directly at a statue of a tailless mermaid, they still imagine that they are
seeing a tailed one.
What makes all of this particularly surprising is that most of my contributors have no
reservations whatsoever about attributing a tail to the statue. When I interviewed contributors
who did not mention the statue or who only gave a vague description, it was necessary to ask
whether or not that statue has a tail. Considering that the popular mermaid image undeniably
involves tails, the very fact that I asked the question should have suggested a negative
response. Still, only two people replied cautiously. The great irony here is that Eriksen’s
statue is seemed to be so incredibly influential. As the historian, Jesper Groth, says, “I think
that the image of The Little Mermaid [statue], it’s so firmly established in the consciousness
that you can’t really get anyone to say anything else. That’s how a mermaid looks.” Some
people, even when told the truth about the statue, are unwilling to accept it. For example, I
had to show my father-in-law, Peter Grydehøj, photographs on the internet before he was
convinced. The head of Ærøskøbing’s Ærø Museum, Karen Margrethe Fabricius, rationalizes
her mistake, saying that, now that I had mentioned it, the statue is tailless, bur “very often,
when you see reproductions and small statues that you can buy, then it’s with a fish-tail.”
People need not, however, feel ashamed, for this is a common, culturally-motivated piece of
ignorance.
Unlike social fairies and brownies, merfolk do not provoke stories from contributors. This
could, in part, be because there were always fewer types of stories told about folkloric
merfolk than about social fairies and brownies, yet we might then suspect that this limited
fund of merfolk stories would stick in the memory and not cause confusion. For one thing,
merfolk are not as common in balladry as social fairies, and with so few Medieval texts being
read in school, chances are the ballads like Fairy Hill and Elf-Shot take precedence among
teachers. Also, merfolk have not become as vast a media phenomenon in Denmark as
brownies have. Children, of course, still watch the Disney film and read picture books about
mermaids, but they are not pummelled with merfolk material every December.
On account of my research’s small sample size, it is not truly possible to interpret minor strands
in my contributors’ testimonies. For example, two adult contributors link mermaids with “King
Neptune.” One contributor merely mentions the association324 while another states that mermaids
are Neptune’s daughters.325 This idea might come from the popular connection between mermaids
and sirens, but it is also likely that it has been influenced by Disney’s The Little Mermaid in which
the title character is, in fact, King Neptune’s daughter. Anyone who takes the time to think about it
will realise that, however close to Classical beings Danish mermaids may be, the Danish common
folk of three hundred years ago would have been unlikely to have made such an association
themselves.
Other figures from Classical myth and legend also crop up occasionally in my interviews as
objects of Danish belief, including the Phoenix, griffins, and Pegasus. Other semi-foreign
supernatural beings like unicorns, werewolves, and vampires are often mentioned. Werewolves and
vampires are certainly native to the British Isles and Scandinavia, but they do not play a great role
in Northern European folklore, and there is no doubt that contributors are thinking of Southern and
Eastern European editions of these beings, those that have been popularised by films. Unicorns,
meanwhile, have in common with griffins and the Phoenix the fact that, in the Middle Ages, many
educated Northern Europeans believed in their existence but also believed that they only existed in
far-off lands, in places like India and Africa. By this point in history, these legendary beings
belonged to the learned alone.
Another and more significant minor strand in my interviews involves the origin of Danish
mermaid belief. Sophie Elisabeth Seidelin, a Marstal pastor and one of the most folkloricallyknowledgeable of my contributors, holds that “Mermaids have not played so big a role in
Danish folklore. But what I know about comes from folktales, and I’ve read a lot of those.
[…] I don’t know Danish folktales about mermaids, but there are a good number in Ireland,
Irish folktales.” Sophie is correct that one can find Irish folktales about mermaids, but her
belief that they are rare in Denmark is false. Her insistence on non-Danishness is not isolated
to mermaids. She also applies this to brownies and kelpies, the latter of which we will
consider later. Sophie is not alone in this.
Dion Abrahamsen, who was, until his 2007 death, Ærø’s sole resident folklorist, not only
agrees with Sophie that kelpies are un-Danish but goes even further in distancing mermaids
from belief:
Dion Abrahamsen: I don’t think that Danes believed in mermaids. They believed in beings that
lived in the water and were noteworthy figures. […] There was a sea monster that much
resembles the Loch Ness monster, and people have believed in that here on the island. But… I
mean, mermaids—. Mermaids, I don’t think they believed in that.
Adam Grydehøj: Where did people believe in them?
DA: Well, I think it first came with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales.
AG: But were there other countries where people believed in them?
DA: I mean, dolphins were often confused with humanoid beings because they sometimes help
seamen to shore, when they’ve fallen overboard, I mean. It may well be that it’s there that the
myth of mermaids arose. I mean, dolphins have always been nice. […] We know that dolphins
have taken people who’ve fallen overboard and have taken them all the way into land. It’s wellknown, right?
There is some confusion in Dion’s account. On the one hand, he attributes mermaids to
Andersen, but on the other hand, he says that they might have been inspired by friendly dolphins.
He may be suggesting that dolphins provided the basis for occasional stories about helpful sea
beings and that Andersen, building on this foundation, created a standardized image. It should by
now be clear enough that Andersen was not the first to speak of mermaids. The discussion about
dolphins, however, deserves some deeper analysis. Gervase of Tilbury has a legend in which
dolphins are supernatural beings, very much akin to the seal-folk.326 Dion’s mention of the “wellknown” fact that dolphins help drowning sailors to shore is, as far as I have been able to establish,
an untrue legend of its own. Besides Dion, two further contributors327 believe that Hans Christian
Andersen invented mermaids.
Agnes Haugaard, the 52-year-old pastor in the West Ærø village of Bregninge, has a
Faroese mother and links mermaids with the Faroese seal-folk, briefly recounting a seal wife
story, which is the seal-folk equivalent to the mermaid wife story. She then proceeds to
describe the Danes’ associations with their national symbol, peppering her commentary with
English words (here italicized) for the sake of ironic emphasis:
The mermaid is a symbol. It’s almost symbolically synonymous with Denmark as something
pretty and appealing and good and almost laughable. We think of the same thing. […] I think,
you know, of The Little Mermaid [statue] in Copenhagen. It’s in one way or another a laughable
sight when you first see her, right? Because you expect some wonderful thing or other, but she’s
almost as synonymous as “God, king and fatherland and Danish Flag and mermaid,” right? It’s
really… But in one way or another, she fits very well to the Danish mentality, right? Because
when one first sees her, then she’s so tiny, so all of the foreigners from the great abroad, they
can’t do anything besides say, “Oh, god, she’s tiny” or “beautiful” or something or other, but
anyway, I mean, then, she’s quite symbolic of some positive thing or other. She definitely is, in
our thoughts at least: Far and away the majority of Danes see her as something positive.
Agnes is right: The statue of The Little Mermaid symbolizes what Danes hold dear. It is small and
beautiful, and its surprising lack of grandeur encapsulates the Danish ideal. Still, the statue that
Agnes sees in her mind’s eye has a tail. Is this the true Danish enigma, that everyone is proud of
their roots but no one knows what these roots are?
Chapter 13: The Fairy Horse
We have noted the tendency of scholars to group together all manner of aquatic fairies on the basis
of their being aquatic. This applies not only to mermaids but to their freshwater cousins as well. In
Denmark, a supernatural being who inhabits a river or lake is called either the åmand [river-man]
or, more frequently, the nøk [Swedish “näk”, “strömkarl”, or “bækhest”; German “nixe”;
Norwegian “fossegrim”; Icelandic “vatnhest”; and just about every variation of “nøk”
imaginable.]. It is no coincidence that most of these names are found almost exclusively with the
definite article [-en] appended; the nøk is typically seen as a solitary fairy. In the British Isles, this
being can be referred to by many names that are – as in Scandinavia – usually interrelated. The
most common name in English is the Scots kelpie. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to this
being as the kelpie in the future, except for when its precise designation is significant for our
discussion.
We have already seen Gervase of Tilbury’s 1215 description of aquatic social fairies – or dracs
– in France. Gervase gives provides another legend about them, which shows that these social
fairies are not only unusual for living in the water but are also unusual in performing one of the
most-prevalent kelpie functions:
Again on the bank of the Rhône, in the vicinity of the knights’ palace near the north gate of the
city of Arles, there is a very deep stretch of the river, just as there is underneath the precipice of
the town of Tarascon, where, in the time of the blessed Martha (who gave hospitality to Christ,
the sister of Lazarus and the Magdalene), “la Tarsque”, a monster of the breed of the evil seaserpent Leviathan, hid itself in order to fill its stomach with human beings passing by the
Rhône. Well, they claim that on a clear night dracs are often seen in human form in these deep
places. What is more, a few years ago for three days in a row a voice crying: “The hour has
passed and the man has not come!” was heard by many people, issuing from the very depths of
the Rhône, in the place outside the city-gate which we have described, while what looked like a
human figure was seen running to and fro on the bank. Then on the third day, when at about
three o’clock that human figure was screaming the same words with even greater urgency, a
young man came running hotfoot to the bank and was completely swallowed up; and so that cry
was heard no more.328
Oddly, even though this passage follows Gervase’s version of the nurse to the fairies legend, he
breaks up the discussion of dracs with mentions of honest-to-goodness monsters, perhaps a sign of
his own unwillingness to see kelpies as analogous to social fairies, even when the people of Arles
make no so distinction. In any case, compare this account with that recorded by Evald Tang
Kristensen nearly 700 years later:
Ry River in Vendsyssel [in northern Jutland] takes a person each year, and when it desires it, it
shouts: “The time and hour have come, but the man has not yet come.” When people hear this
voice from the river, they must take care not to come too near it because if they do, then they
get an irresistible urge to jump in it, and they never come up again. There are meant to be many
people who have heard it shout those words. Among others, there was a girl who walked
alongside it and had a dog at her side. When she heard the shout, she shouted: “Not me, but the
dog!” And instantly, that dog jumped out and drowned. She also saw an itsy-bitsy man with a
large beard run in the river. It was the Nøk and, presumably, the thing that had shouted.
The idea that the river by this means takes a person each year is widely known and is
believed in by many today. Mothers often warn their children against getting too close to that
bad river and not just to prevent their children from falling in but also because they themselves
believe that it has the power to give people the urge to jump into it.329
Kristensen collected many other versions of this legend, all more or less the same. The fact that
Kristensen’s above contributor emphasises the strength of contemporary belief is exceedingly
useful since kelpie narratives are often interpreted so as to discounts belief and are usually viewed
as stories told only to frighten children.330 A number of Kristensen’s contributors note that if the
river in question fails to take a victim at the appointed time, it will balance the books in the
following year.331
In the previous example, a girl is able to avoid her fate by substituting a dog, and while this is a
common enough motif in folklore in general, kelpies are particularly resistant to being tricked or
cheated. Illustrative of this point is the widespread legend of a number of men who are standing by
a river and hear the kelpie call out something along the lines of “The hour has come but not the
man!” When these men later see a stranger approaching the river, they attempt to prevent him from
crossing it, sometimes going so far as to as to forcibly detain him and lock him up in a room. In
spite of their efforts, the stranger is later found dead, usually drowned, with his face submerged in a
trough, bowl, or bedpan.332 Not all legends of this type make the kelpie a concrete entity, and the
river itself is often said to be the killer. The curious nature of these legends led Katherine Briggs to
suggest in 1959 that they hint at ritualistic death and might be remnants of a now-lost tradition of
making human sacrifices to a river spirit. Briggs also notes that some murderous river spirits – like
Jenny Greenteeth of Lancashire and Peg Prowler of the Tees – are quite personalized and could
represent the transference of the active role in the spirit-sacrifice relationship to the offering itself,
333
a line of thought reminiscent of that of James Frazer.334 It is worth noting that kelpies are not
merely confined to rivers, and all of the common kelpie legends can be found attached to lakes as
well.
The Hour Has Come but Not the Man legend represents just a single strand of kelpie belief.
Usually, though not always, the kelpie is regarded as male. Kelpies are often encountered in the
form of horses though it is not immediately evident whether this means that kelpies are shapeshifters or that some kelpies come in human-form and others in horse-form. The etymologies of the
words for this type of being are helpful here. Kelpie itself possibly stems from the Gaelic cailpeach,
meaning bullock, heifer, or colt. Since kelpie – if it is, indeed, based on cailpeach – would not seem
to be a sufficiently-detailed word to designate one of these folkloric beings, we might wonder
whether kelpie gained its current supernatural association that became contextually entrenched once
Gaelic died out locally. In any case, it is surprising that kelpie is not attested to prior to 1747.
Throughout the Celtic language region – and overlapping kelpie’s territory – are found various
Gaelic constructs, for example, the Scottish Each Uisge, the Irish Aughisky or Each Uisce, and the
Manx Cabyll-Ushtey.335 All of these mean water-horse.
What about the Germanic names? The Swedish strömkarl [river-farmhand] and Norwegian
fossegrim [waterfall-spirit] are pretty straightforward, and by now, the Swedish bækhest [streamhorse] and Icelandic vatnhest [water-horse] should hardly come as a surprise. Throughout
Scandinavia and Germany, however, the nøk-form is the most common. Old High German had the
word nihhus, used as a gloss for crocodile in Latin texts, which is either a sign that the older
conception of the kelpie is significantly different than the younger one or, more likely, that
Medieval Germans were ignorant of the true nature of crocodiles. Despite the prevalence of Gaelic
names in the British Isles today, the nøk-form has had a long history in Britain as well and was,
presumably, brought to the islands by the Anglo-Saxons, hence the appearance of the water-demons
called nicor in Beowulf.336 Furthermore, nyk is elsewhere used as a gloss for the Latin
hippopotamus, which might seem even more ridiculous than using it for crocodile until one recalls
that hippopotamus means river-horse.337 This point is not lost in modern-day Scandinavia: The
Danish hippopotamus is still a flodhest [river-horse].
The question remains as to the origins of nyk itself. In 1894, Eugene Anichkof rather brazenly
argued for nyk, nicor, and the related names stemming from Germanic interpretation of the St
Nicolas legend. As Anichkof notes, St Nicolas is patron saint sailors338, and in the Germanic realm,
his feast day was traditionally linked to offerings made to a water spirit known as Neck.339 The
primary purpose, however, of Anichkof’s essay is to link St Nicolas with the Greek goddess,
Artemis, and it is with this in mind that he mentions Artemis’ association with horses and the fact
that Nicolas is patron saint of horses.340 How thoroughly the Christian saint can be linked with the
Greek goddess, I cannot say, but what is surprising here is that Anichkof makes his statement about
horses without, it seems, realising that the nyk is most commonly encountered as a horse.341 For
what it is worth, acceptance of Anichkof’s theory would also solve another problem: As the
Grimms noted, the Danish name for the brownie, nisse, is derived from the personal name Niels,
which is itself a Danish variation of the personal name, Nicolas.342 Previously, we suggested that
nisse is a simple noa-name, a means of avoiding saying the brownie’s real name, and while this is
probably still the case, it may be that the choice of this noa-name is not entirely coincidental. On
balance, Anichkof’s theory is probably a bit over-bold, yet it is nonetheless likely that St Nicolas
traditions and the various names for supernatural beings resembling nøk were mutually reinforcing
in Medieval Northern Europe.
Beowulf is not the only place in the British Isles where we find a Germanic rather than Celtic
name for the kelpie. A few hundred years after the Anglo-Saxon immigration, a second wave of
Continental folklore influence on Britain came with the Viking raids and settlements of the final
centuries of the first millennium, and the Northern Isles – which left the Danish kingdom and joined
the Scottish one only in the 1400s – retain the unmistakably Nordic Nuckelavee – a half-horse, halfman monster – of Orkney343 and njuggle – a true kelpie – of Shetland.344 We also find a well named
Nykerpole [Kelpie-Pool] near Marlborough, England in 1272. Later English placenames include
Nicapooles Croft and Nickamoor Field, also likely allusions to a local kelpie,345 and there is a
Knucker Hole at Lyminster.346 Viking influence in southern England seems unlikely to have been
significant enough to produce this sort of placename, so it is probable that the appearance of nyk in
this region originated from either the long-distant Anglo-Saxon invasion or the language of those
Germanic peoples who took part in the much more recent Norman Conquest. This English branch
of the nøk-form family would eventually be devalued as – in a process we have already noted –
names for particular types of supernatural beings came to be used for devils in general.
Unbeknownst to most of us though, the complex etymology of nøk still haunts our English.
Every time an American pays for his groceries with a five-cent coin, he is doing homage to it:
Nickel is an 18th Century abbreviation of the German kupfernickel and Swedish kopparnickel, both
of which translate as Nick’s copper. Why Nick’s copper? Northern European miners had learned to
disdain nickel because, although the humble metal resembled valuable copper, it contained none.347
Much as iron pyrite is sometimes called fool’s gold, kupfernickel was granted to the Devil, nick
being both a name for water-spirits and a noa-name for Satan. Of course, the personal name, Nick,
is short for Nicolas. Hence, Old Nick still crops up occasionally in English as a nickname for
Satan.348
Nickname itself might be etymologically linked to the nøk. Nickname was originally ekename,
meaning additional name in Old English, but evolved over time into its present form due to
“improper division in English involving a definite article,”349 turning an ekename into a neke name
and a nykename. This improper division is a known phenomenon, but there is nothing to say that it
could have been helped along in this case by the fact that nykename possessed a contextual meaning
that ekename lacked. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary gives a usage example from
about 1560 that is suggestive of taboo-preserving purposes: “A proclamacion, in the whyche was
commandement geven thatt we shulde geve no necname wntoo the sacrament, as rownd Robin, or
Jack in the box.”350 Sacrament here refers to the Eucharistic bread, and Jack-in-the-Box was not
only a popular name for the sacrament, it was also, once again, a contemporary noa-name for
Satan.351 We have already, of course, seen that Robin, like the Danish Niels, was a common given
name that was transferred as a noa-name for supernatural beings, for example, Robin Goodfellow.
This is to say that while nickname might have evolved from ekename regardless, it was, in fact, a
particularly-good candidate for being affected by improper division.
The importance of the above etymological discussion is that we have connected our earliest
references to kelpies to the myriad of reports from the 19th Century. We have seen that the nøk-form
of the being’s name has been used to describe aquatic horses from the earliest of times, and the
various other forms of the name usually mean water-horse or river-horse, even when – as in the
cases of kelpie, Each Uisce, vatnhest, and bækhest – the names are not linked etymologically.
So, even though the The Hour Has Come but Not the Man legend does not involve necessarily
involve a horse, kelpies seem to usually be regarded as supernatural, shapeshifting horses anyway.
One common type of horse-kelpie legend involves a horse offering a ride to either a traveller or a
group of children. Often, the kelpie will grow steadily in length in order to accommodate more and
more people on its back. Upon being mounted, the horse tends to bolt for the nearest water. In the
British Isles, such stories usually end with the implication that the victim is either drowned or eaten,
but in Scandinavia, the foolish humans sometimes escape by accidentally saying the name of Christ
or some other taboo word. Often, in this latter variant, it even appears as though the kelpie is
friendly and means no harm. It is, however, unclear whether Nordic kelpies are really more
benevolent than British ones or whether they are merely less successful in capturing prey.
Iceland’s early-12th Century Landnámabók offers what is probably the earliest extant detailed
description of a kelpie:
One autumn, Audun saw a dapple-grey horse come racing down from Hjardarwater, make
straight for his herd of horses and floor the stallion. Audun went and caught the grey horse,
hitched him to a two-ox sledge and hauled home all the hay from his home-meadow. The horse
was quite manageable till noon, but later in the day he began stamping the ground right up to the
fetlocks. After sunsets he tore the harness apart, galloped back to the lake, and that was the last
anyone ever saw of him.352
Although the being here is simply called a horse, a marginal note in one of the Landnámabók
manuscripts explains “Waterhorse, which some now call Nikur-horse.”353
Some folklorists have difficulty viewing the nøk in human form and the river-horse as the same
class of beings. Holbek and Piø even going so far as to posit that the Nordic river-horse traditions
are “Celtic inspired.”354 After all, the horse that Audun Stoti captures does not seem to have much
in common with the beings from the The Hour has Come but Not the Man legends. The riverhorses we have seen so far resemble beasts or monsters more than they do fairies. Still, as Holbek
and Piø themselves mention, Eggert Olafsen, the Danish scientist who visited Iceland in 1753,
explicitly connects the horse from Landnámabók with more recent Nordic tradition, noting that the
Icelanders call these beings nik, nenn, or vatnhest.355 It is also in keeping with later tradition that the
vicious aquatic horse Audun found can, when properly-harnessed, be forced into doing excellent
farmwork but can rarely be kept in thrall for long.
Whatever distinction might have existed between aquatic horses and freshwater humanoids in
pre-history, we see them consistently called by the same names in the vast majority of our
vernacular texts. This seems all the more strange when we consider that, in Scandinavia at least, the
kelpie was often possessed of a great skill, was a brilliant musician. Olaus Magnus records this
already in 1555. Referring to a woodcut in his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus that depicts a
man falling from a castle into a river in which a fiddler is playing, Olaus writes:
The figure seen above, who looks like a fiddler playing in the middle of the stream, constitutes
an omen that the governor or commandant of the fortress will fall suddenly to his death, or that
a careless and sleepy sentinel, sentenced to death according to the regulations of the castle, will
be pitched over the high battlements. However, this stretch of water is incessantly haunted by
phantoms and monstrous apparitions.356
Olaus proceeds to give Classical analogues. It is odd here that he should see the kelpie – not named
in this source – as a mere death omen rather than a cause of death, but this might be a the result of
his analysis of the Classical sources he quotes, which tend toward viewing the being as a portent.
In any case, the music seems to be part of the killing device here, particularly since Olaus compares
the “phantom” to sirens. More often though kelpies, like social fairies, engage in music for its own
sake. This, if nothing else, raises them above mere monsters. In the same way that many tunes are
said to have been taught to men by social fairies, kelpies can take on the instruction of human
musicians, whether trained or untrained. It is even possible to learn to play too well, as we learn in
the following Swedish legend, collected in 1911:
When I was young, I heard about a fiddler named Pelle who learned to play from a näk. Damn
but it was easy for him!
Once, he was playing at a dance on a farm. Later that night all the folks became so crazy
from his playing that each and every one of them, young and old, had to get up and dance,
whether they wanted to or not. And in the end, even the furniture in the house began dancing.
That’s what really happened! There was no end to the dancing, until they took Pelle’s fiddle and
cut the strings. If they had not done this, they would all have danced themselves to death.357
Dancing oneself to death is a relatively-common punishment meted out by social fairies. Here, the
manic dancing and playing do not seem to be anyone’s fault although the whole story might be
taken as a warning against associating with supernatural beings or, more mundanely, of the spiritual
dangers of dancing.
Music could be used against the kelpie as well, a point expressed in The Power of the Harp
[Harpens Kraft], one of a number of pan-Nordic Medieval ballads concerning the kelpie358, here
translated from Danish:
Herr Vellemand and his pretty maid
The string is of gold
In their chamber, chess they played.
He played so lively to his maid.
Every time that a piece died
So many tears the maid did cry.
“Why do you cry for gold so red?
Why do you cry over your bridal bed?
“Why do you cry because I have no wealth?
Why do you think me unequal to yourself?”
“I do not cry for gold so red,
My will it is to share your bed.
“I do not cry, for well have you wealth,
Truly, you are the equal of myself.
“I cry more for the Blide [A river.],
Over which I must ride.
“There sank my two sisters down,
When they took their wedding vows.”
“You need not cry for the Blide,
My servants shall with you ride.
“A bridge so broad shall I build,
Thousand gold scarce will pay the bill.
“With you shall my servants ride,
Hundreds on each of your sides.
“This, I shall do for your honour:
Twelve knights shall lead the way before.”
He set under her charger red-gold shoes,
And so, she Blide Bridge rides to.
On the bridge, she reached the mid,
When lurch, the gold-shoed charger did.
Her charger with fifteen nails careened [The shoes were not properly affixed.],
Down sank the maid in the churning stream.
All the knights reached for the saddle-straps,
But none could the pretty maiden grasp.
The maiden upraised her white hand:
“My noble Lord, help me to land.”
“Help you then true God and Holy Ghost,
As help you now, I noways can!”
Herr Vellemand to his squire speaks:
“After the gold harp you shall seek.”
Herr Vellemand took harp in hand,
He goes before the flow to stand.
He played in such a soft hush,
There moved no bird in the brush.
He struck the harp so awful hard,
They heard it on all the farmyards.
The bark broke off of the oak tree,
And the horn from cattle roaring free.
The bark broke off of the birch,
And the steeple off of Mary’s Church.
Then, he struck the harp with harm,
His bride out of the troll’s arms.
Then, he struck the harp to the base,
From below must that troll come in haste.
Up came the troll from below,
With Herr Vellemand’s bride in his maw.
But not alone his lovely bride,
He had her pretty sisters besides.
“Herr Vellemand, Vellemand, take your bride!
You let me rule my water wide.”
“So gladly will I then have my bride,
But never shall you rule the water wide.”
Herr Vellemand his sword stoutly drew,
With God’s help, he hewed the troll in two.
He threw over his bride the cape small and gay,
Self lifted he her onto the charger grey.
He lifted her self onto the charger white:
“You ride now, dear, without any fright.”
Herr Vellemand rode under water wide,
The string is of gold
Then, he drank wedding vows with his bride.
He played so lively for his maid.359
Some versions of The Power of the Harp do, indeed, substitute näk for troll, so it is really no stretch
to link this ballad with the kelpie. In this light, we can also more easily understand the Grimms’
famous folktale, Three Billy Goats Gruff. The destruction of Herr Oluf in Elf-Shot suggested that
almost-weds and newly-weds are in particular danger from fairies, and this is the case here as well,
where the kelpie has the propensity to go after brides on their wedding days. Similarly, the capture
of Herr Vellemand’s bride, in spite of his precautions, serves as another example of how difficult it
is to cheat the kelpie.
This element of inexorable fate contrasts, of course, with the easily-foiled Scandinavian kelpies
that offer people rides. Add to this the idea that some kelpies are charmed by music whereas others
charm with music, that some are beautiful and others monstrous, and that some are intelligent while
others are not all that different from peculiarly feisty horses, and it is clear that the corpus of kelpie
legends is diverse, hard to generalise about, and, perhaps, highly-localised.
Chapter 14: Perceptions of Past Belief in Kelpies
In my interviews on Ærø, I began by asking about mermaids, social fairies, and brownies. These
are, today, the three best-remembered types of supernatural beings from past folklore, and every
Dane with whom I spoke has heard of them. Three hundred years ago, social fairies and brownies
would have been at the tops of people’s lists as well. In an attempt to best gauge the public’s
knowledge of past folk belief, I followed up my questions about mermaids, social fairies, and
brownies by asking contributors if they could think of any other types of supernatural beings in
which Danes once believed. Of the 49 contributors who respond to this question, 30 are able to at
least name another class of supernatural being, and 19 either say that they cannot name any other
beings or give answers that are not relevant to Danish tradition. Excluded from the “correct”
category are all answers that deal solely with: 1) witches, which are humans as opposed to
supernatural beings; 2) beings from Classical or learned folklore, like griffins, unicorns, and the
Sphinx; 3) folkloric beings that – as conceived of by the contributor – played no significant role in
Danish folklore in the Medieval or Early Modern periods, such as winged dragons and vampires.
This last exclusion is somewhat difficult. For example, although belief in blood-sucking spirits
certainly existed in Denmark, these beings would have been categorized as ghosts or fairies or what
have you, not vampires. I have, however, erred on the side of acceptance and taken werewolves as a
correct response even though I am certain that my contributors have Hollywood-style, possibly
Eastern European, werewolves and not Northern European werewolves in mind. Similarly, I have
accepted responses that give an already discussed being a new name – such as troll for social fairy
– or that name an undiscussed being but give incorrect information about it.
The aim of asking contributors to name other types of beings was to see if they could, without
prompting, name any of the further four beings on my questionnaire. These further four were willo’-the-wisps [lygtemænd], the kelpie [nøkken], the church grim [kirkegrim or kirkevare], and the
black dog [den sorte hund]. Whereas my decision to ask about mermaids, social fairies, and
brownies in the first instance was based on these being well-known figures, the additional beings
were chosen because belief in them was widespread in the Northern European countryside from the
Middle Ages until the 1800s. It is, in fact, likely that most of these beings were objects of broader
belief than were mermaids, but mermaids have been very well publicized, in part, perhaps, on
account of their unusualness.
Those 30 out of 49 contributors who successfully name a lesser-known supernatural being do
not, unfortunately, often name one of the beings we are fishing for. Trolls [trolde] are far and away
the most common named being in this context, followed by giants. A number of contributors
mention the Klabauterman, a mysterious figure that we shall consider later. The kelpie is named
without prompting by only one contributor, the Ærøskøbing pastor, Lars Ole Gjesing. Like many
contributors, Lars Ole is doubtful as to the kelpie’s Danishness, possibly because he has recently
read an allusion to the being by the Swedish-Finnish poet, Selma Lagerhöf. Besides Lars Ole, all of
the information I receive about the kelpie comes after some degree of prompting.
Many contributors who know about the kelpie believe that it was a part of Norwegian or
Swedish – rather than Danish or pan-Northern European – tradition, with five contributors opting
for a Norwegian origin and five for a Swedish one. In this case, the interviews inform us as to the
sources of people’s knowledge. Three of Sweden’s supporters mention books by the children’s
writer, Astrid Lindgren, as their sources; one mentions a statue seen in Sweden; and Lars Ole, as we
have seen, is reminded of Lagerhöf. One of Norway’s partisans knows a kelpie illustration by the
19th Century Norwegian master of fairy art, Theodor Kittlesen, and while the other four do not give
a reason for their association with Norway, it is sometimes hinted at in their testimonies. One
associates the kelpie with waterfalls360 and two others with violent rivers361, both of which are much
more common in mountainous Norway than in flat Denmark. Nevertheless, the final supporter of
the Norwegian theory associates the kelpie with still water, so – as in traditional kelpie belief itself
– it is impossible to paint today’s knowledge in broad strokes.
We can separate responses to questions about the kelpie into four broad categories: There are
those who have no recollection of ever having heard the word nøk before; those who believe that
they recognize the word but can say nothing about its nature; those who know the word but give
information that is either wholly or largely historically incorrect; and those who have generallycorrect ideas about past nøk belief. Of the 49 contributors who answer the kelpie question, 33% of
them know nothing, 22% have heard the name before, 16% give incorrect answers, and 29% give
correct answers. It should be kept in mind that, using an analysis that does not set parameters for
correctness (for example, a correct response need not tell much about the kelpie; it need only be
basically factual), the figures easily become distorted. Some of those who give correct responses
merely say that the kelpie was a being that lived in the water, the kind of answer we would never
see as sufficient in the case of, say, mermaids. The Danish language also gives some contributors a
helping hand since the Danish word for water lily is nøkrose [kelpie rose], a point that some
contributors make explicit. It can also be said with some certainty that, in the majority of cases
where a contributor claims to simply recognize the name of an obscure supernatural being or
person, this is just a delusion. I have come across many instances of contributors believing that they
recognize a name that they would have very little reason to recognize, and those who truly
recognize a name would be expected to be able to say something about it.
The most common piece of incorrect information I receive is that the kelpie is another name for
a brownie, and this mistake alone accounts for half of the incorrect reports. As we have seen, if
nisse and nøk both evolved from Nicolas, this may not be entirely incorrect after all. The correct
reports I receive are, however, somewhat more varied. Three contributors say only that the kelpie
lives underwater or is a kind of underwater fairy. Niels Condrup, the 14-year-old who we have
already met, is in this latter category:
Adam Grydehøj: Can you tell me anything about the kelpie?
Niels Condrup: Is that the one who lives down in the water, sort of a merman [havmand]?
AG: Yes.
NC: Those, I’ve never really heard so much about. I just know that they were the sort who… It
wasn’t beneath them to take people down into the water either. And so, they were a bit like
fairies [elvere]. They took them with them down in the water.
AG: Are they also social beings?
NC: Yes, they go about in groups.
On the basis of the vastness of past kelpie belief, this might not appear all that impressive, but
again, Niels shows himself to be far more knowledgeable about folklore than most of his peers and,
indeed, most adults. Even though the kelpie cannot be classified as a social fairy, Niels’ association
of the kelpie with the merman is correct enough in the sense that he almost surely meant to say
åmand [river-man], a synonym for kelpie, instead of havmand on the logic that, had he intended to
speak about mermen, he would have referred back to the mermaids we had already talked about,
and his idea of mermaids does not quite fit with his idea of the kelpie.
Sophie Elisabeth Seidelin, the Marstal pastor, mentions that the kelpie played the fiddle with
such vigour that people danced themselves to death. Three other contributors also see the kelpie as
musical.362 Particularly in Scandinavia, skill at the fiddle is one of the kelpie’s most common
attributes, so it is interesting that knowledge of this is not more widespread, but such is the
inconsistency of kelpie stories that this is not so surprising.
My more knowledgeable contributors are in general agreement that the kelpie is dangerous.
Even the little-read 83-year-old Esther Clausen can say that “It was, actually, something like the
sirens, really. It was someone who lured someone, the kelpie.” Esther is unsure of whether the
kelpie is a freshwater or salt water being, and perhaps because of the siren association, she thinks of
the kelpie as female. In all, 10 of the 14 contributors who give some correct information about the
kelpie mention without prompting that the being is dangerous.363 This indicates a far more useful
knowledge than people have concerning, say, mermaids or social fairies, and it is likely aided by the
fact that most kelpie legends involve a kelpie trying to drown someone, so if you have heard
anything at all about the kelpie from a folkloric source, you should have a good idea of its
personality. The best description I receive of the kelpie is from Michael Banke, the school teacher
who we tapped for his knowledge on social fairies. It may be that Michael simply knows more than
anyone else, but it is surely also significant that he enjoys telling stories and speaking about the
subject:
Michael Banke: I think that it’s a male being who can be compared with the åmand [river-man],
who’s also a supernatural being.
Adam Grydehøj: What’s the åmand?
MB: The åmand, he lives in the river. He’s dangerous because he takes people so that they’re
never seen again. You don’t even find their corpses. He takes them down to his realm, which is
down in the river.
AG: Do you know any stories about the åmand or kelpie [nøkken]?
MB: Yeah... I think that there’s a story about Agnete and the Åmand. Or Agnete and the
Merman [Havmand]? Is it the Merman?
AG: Yes.
MB: [Laughing.] OK, then I don’t. But I think that Agnete and the Merman is very much
parallel to the åmand. It’s the same thing that happens, that you become snatched while
attempting to come over the river, and then you become married with him and are forced to
have children with him, and never come back again to your own reality. But the kelpie, I think,
is something more... It has something to do with lust. He’s sort of a horny guy [This is said in
English.] who goes after the young girls. But he, I think, also has something to do with water,
that he lives in a lake or a river. But I believe—. I’m not all that sure about that kelpie fellow. I
haven’t heard all that much about the kelpie. But my understanding of it is that you don’t die
from it, that you come back when you’ve been together with the kelpie, but when you’re
together with the kelpie, then you’ve been fucked and have been in a lecherous relationship with
a man who’s the kelpie, right? And that’s not good. So, the kelpie was dangerous too. Young
girls especially have to watch out for the kelpie. That’s how I experience it.
Michael’s account is slightly confused, partially because he differentiates between two names for
the same being, partially because he confuses this being with the merman, and partially because –
even when we clarify things – he is confused. A good deal of this apparently-irreconcilable
confusions stems from tradition itself, and the fact that Michael knows two names for the same
being permits him to sub-categorize the various kelpie personalities.
In tradition from Scandinavia and the British Isles, we never find legends attributed to kelpies
that exactly follow the pattern of Agnete and the Merman, the main problem being that Agnete
marries the merman willingly. The Germans, French, Finns, and others have given the kelpie a
more complex character than is often present in Scandinavian, English, and Celtic stories. A kelpie
in Britain never leads the complex social life of the dracs described to Gervase of Tilbury, and
similarly, a Danish kelpie is not the sort of being who treats his wife as an equal in the way that the
merman from Agnete and the Merman does. Usually, when a kelpie captures a person, there is the
intimation that the person is eaten or, at the very least, killed. Nonetheless, The Power of the Harp
suggests something along Michael’s line of thinking. The kelpie in that ballad has kept the
heroine’s sisters alive at the bottom of the river and would presumably have done the same with the
heroine herself. Still, when Michael says that one never even discovers the corpses of the åmand’s
victims, he is definitely producing an alternative explanation of what can happen to those kidnapped
by the being. While there is certainly a sexual element in The Power of the Harp and many other
kelpie legends (most commonly – and this may be significant – in legends outside of Scandinavia
and the British Isles)364, the The Hour Has Come but Not the Man and The Long Horse legends are
free from this sexuality. Here, after all, even though the kelpie tends to be male, its victims can
either be male or female. Despite all this, Michael’s account is better thought-out and more detailed
than any other I receive.
Some contributors give the kelpie a mythological aspect, saying it is “something prehistoric”;365
it is a singular entity and connected with the oceans and the movements of the tides;366 or “a preChristian fertility god.”367 This is not too surprising since most of my contributors fail to
differentiate between legend and mythology and give folkloric beings in general a religious
importance that they probably never had. It may be that the kelpie garners relatively-more
mythological descriptions of this type because, unlike social fairies and brownies, there is very little
else that people have to say about it. A related point is that we see for the first time in the discussion
of the kelpie an absolutely-clear relationship between education and historical interest on the one
hand and knowledge of this folkloric being on the other. It is not that all educated and historicallyinterested contributors know much about the kelpie; for example, two historians, an amateur
historian, a museum director, and three pastors cannot say anything correct about kelpie tradition.
When, however, we look at who can give information about the kelpie, we find that the list consists
of one youth, one elderly woman, one museum director, one spiritualist, two school teachers, two
historians, one amateur historian, two administrators in the education sector, and three pastors. Out
of these fourteen contributors, only two – the elderly woman and the youth – are not
“professionally” inclined to cultural knowledge. The lesson, then, seems to be that whereas it is
possible to pick up knowledge of social fairies, mermaids, and brownies accidentally, while going
about your life, most people only learn about the kelpie by reading about it in a book. Whether this
is a book of ballads perused by culturally-inclined pastors, a children’s book by Astrid Lindgren, or
an actual collection of legends, the printed word is central to the communication of past kelpie
belief in today’s Denmark.
Because Hübertz does not tell any kelpie legends, people who are solely interested in local
history do not come across the being in their reading. While we can wonder at there being no
brownie stories in Hübertz, the lack of a kelpie seems straightforward. The kelpie – whether living
in a river, a lake, or a bog – usually needs fresh water, and all of Ærø’s bodies of water are quite
tiny. Still, it is interesting that two relatively-young contributors, neither of whom have any clear
idea about the kelpie, mention that, within their own times, there lived a man in Marstal whose
nickname was The Kelpie [Nøkken]. This suggests that, in the recent past, there was general
knowledge on Ærø concerning the kelpie. Today, that knowledge is gone.
Chapter 15: Spectres of Death
If kelpie belief was once widespread, belief in spiritual animals was greater still. Spiritual animals
may appear to be a broad category, and while it is true that probably every type of animal has had a
ghostly legend attached to it in one place or another, there is a small set of beastly apparitions that
appear consistently in Northern European folklore, usually playing the same roles. Although there is
a need for greater research into legends regarding animals belonging to social fairies (such as fairybulls, fairy-horses, and fairy-dogs), we will now restrict ourselves to discussing self-sufficient
supernatural beings. The most common legends about spiritual animals can be split into two
categories: Those spirits who haunt churchyards and their environs and those spirits who, despite
typically being tied to a particular location, are not bound to churches in any way. The spiritual
animals connected with churches are, when taken as a group, usually called church grims in English
[The Swedish and regional Danish “kirkegrim” and the more general Danish “kirkevare”.], and
this is the name we shall use here.
Church grims are often believed to be ghosts. Even when they are not obviously ghosts but
supernatural in another way, it is necessary to understand that, despite the fact that these animals
often display greater intelligence than their mortal relatives, they are still animals. So, while a ghost
horse and a kelpie might sometimes look the same, in the mind of the believer, they are completely
different beings since a kelpie is a kelpie, regardless of whether it resembles a horse, whereas a
ghost horse might simply act like an exceptionally-clever horse. Still, it must be said that, in many
legends, especially those concerning church grims in dog form, church grims display a degree of
self-awareness absent from normal animals. Should we, then, classify church grims as solitary
fairies? As monsters? Is it really appropriate to call them ghosts? The best we can say is that the
church grim falls somewhere between a solitary fairy, a ghost, and a monster.
In tradition, the most common types of church grims are dogs (usually black), horses, and lambs
although, as we shall see, other domesticated creatures make frequent appearances as well. Since,
despite widespread belief, the church grim has not attracted the kind of scholarly attention devoted
to more romantic fairies, we will have to lean on Evald Tang Kristensen’s late-19th Century work in
Denmark. We will begin by looking at the most common type of church grim story from a few
different angles, initially by means of a first-hand account:
One night, at around midnight, while I went along Verger’s Lane, something chalk-white that
looked like a bundle of wool walked by me backwards down the road. It was about a meter and
a half tall, had neither head nor feet, was the same at both ends, and came along at a fast pace. I
took a step to the side and lifted my arms so as not to touch it, and then it brushed up against my
thigh. Had I not stepped to the side, it would have probably tumbled over. That wool bundle
was, I suppose, a corpse-lamb [liglam]. It hurried northward to the parish clerk’s, and then
farther to that farm to the north. In that farm, a pair of old folks died not long afterwards. I got
so very intensely scared by the sight.368
Our earliest extant Danish mention of the church grim in lamb form is from 1734,369 and as this
would be a remarkably late date for the emergence of a supernatural tradition of this sort, it is likely
that earlier legends regarding it either have not survived or simply went undocumented. The same
cannot be said of the grave-sow [gravso] or grey sow [grå so], a church grim that appears as a pig;
Hans Lauritsen, a pastor, writes of this being already in 1587 as “a ghost who lets itself be seen
when people shall die, like St Clemen’s Church’s grey pig, which people speak of here in
Copenhagen.”370 Grave-sow belief, simple as it is, does not seem to have changed much over the
centuries:
Between Bukkerup and Soderup in Holbæk County [on Zealand], many have met a black sow
when they have come to that road at about midnight. It never does anyone harm and runs with
its snout to the earth, as if it followed the track of someone. It’s supposed to be certain that
someone dies in the parish when the sow has been seen.371
Even though neither this pig nor the corpse-lamb are pleasant beings to meet, there is some
ambiguity here since it is stated that the black sow never hurts anyone itself. Some church grims,
however, take a more direct role:
Two girls went late one night from Salby to Mesinge [on Fyn]. When they had gone a ways,
they noticed that there was something behind them, and they saw that it was a blackened calf.
This came ever closer, more and more, so that, when they came up to the square before the
church, it went close by the one of them and touched her apron, after which it disappeared into
the graveyard. But the girl died before the year was out.372
Cows, bulls, and calves often appear church grims.
Although less prevalent in Denmark, in the British Isles, black dogs are far and away the most
common type of church grim. One Lancashire legend, for example, tells of a man, named Adam,
who is followed by a huge black dog, called the Shriker [Shrieker]. In an effort to escape the spirit,
Adam heads toward a river, knowing that evil spirits cannot cross running water. However:
As he drew near to the bridge spanning the Hodder, there he saw the monster shuffling its hairy
feet through the snow, till it reached the middle of the bridge. Again, as Adam approached, it
glided before him, and stopped at the door of his own cottage. Adam banged wildly on the door,
and as he did so the spectre splashed away through the snow. Adam fell to the ground in a dead
swoon, and it was long before his wife could revive him; and when he had told her his story, she
was no less troubled than he was. A few days later their eldest child was drowned, and Adam’s
wife, returning from his funeral, caught a fever, from which she too shortly afterwards died.
Adam himself was driven mad by his terror.373
One can understand how a phantom black dog can be more terrifying even than a phantom pig. This
black dog seems so frightening that we would be sorely tempted to consider it wholly demonic if
not for the fact that – unlike the local evil spirits – it is capable of crossing running water, a taboo
for many devils. Considering the emphasis placed here on the encounter on the bridge, it may be
significant that Adam’s child dies by drowning, reminiscent of kelpie-lore. This sort of legend was
once sufficiently well known to achieve metaphorical status, and it came to mean depression in the
early-19th Century. Indeed, even Winston Churchill, in his more tumultuous moods, said he suffered
from the black dog.
Legends about the church grim as a death omen are also found in Hübertz’s Description of Ærø:
The old legend about the Death-horse [helhest] is found on Ærø as well and particularly in
Ærøskøbing. It is a death omen and heard only where someone will die. It hobbles on three legs
and plods through the streets with a sound like a horse whose shoes are loose. People meet it
sometimes on the street, most often in the graveyard. Some maintain that it is headless. One
night, it so happened that the night watchman met it in Gyden [A street.] and came, I know not
how, to ride on it. The Death-horse ran around the town with him until it came to the town hall.
There, the night watchman got off and tied it to a tree. When he went to see after his horse in the
morning, it was a pile of wood shavings.
***
Another secretive being also operates on Ærøskøbing’s streets at night, [and] it is the gravesow. It is encountered most frequently in the alley and in Gyden and in Sluttergyden [Another
street.]; but it bodes death and many types of mishap when one meets it. One evening, it ran
between the legs of a farmhand, took him on its back, and carried him in through a doorway.
The small children are most frightened of this ghost.
Yet one more, a hen with a group of small chickens can be met by the church grate; but
what meaning these small beings have is unknown to me.
Our earliest extant Danish reference to the Death-horse is from 1673, when Jens Hansen Odense
mentions it alongside the kelpie, ghosts, and the brownie.374 It may be that Hübertz places the
mysterious hen together with the Death-horse and the grave-pig only because they are all spiritual
animals that haunt the church, but his instinct is correct, and we can safely say that the hen is a type
of church grim. Intriguingly, the local historian, Tove Kjærboe, mentions a legend not recorded in
Hübertz concerning “the dog with the rattling chains,”375 and while her brief back-story points to a
spiritual animal that is not linked to a church, it is evidence of ghostly dog lore nonetheless.
So, what are we to make of these supernatural beings? Generally, they are signs of death and
could, therefore, be considered malicious. There are, however, a number of problems with this
theory, and they are problems that Hübertz and Kjærboe do not recognize. First of all, it is difficult
to reconcile these beings’ apparent evilness with their connection to churches. Even where it is not
made explicit in the narratives, when spiritual animals act as death omens, a portion of the story
often takes place in the vicinity of a church. There is also ample evidence to suggest that not all
encounters with the church grim end in death, as the following first-hand account from Kristensen:
That time I worked in Starup [in southern Denmark], the old man said to me: “Watch out,
Vilhelm, that you don’t go too much on the streets and don’t meet the white lamb.” – “Oh,
that’s nothing but you trying to scare me.” But then, one night, the neighbours’ farmhand and I
stood outside when the lamb comes out from the direction of the church and along past Thomas
the Shoemaker’s house and looked at us. “What is it?” I say. “That’s a pig of course.” – “Sure, I
know that a pig isn’t as white as that.” When it went past us, I saw that it had long wool, almost
like a billy-goat, and then it slid along, without moving its legs, down over some fields we
called Rye Farm Acres, and after that, down toward Holkjær Forest. It was so close, it slid
around near people on the street but didn’t do any harm. One night, a little girl stood by the
gate, and when it wanted to go in there, she unlocked it, and then it went through there and
down their croft. But she didn’t watch it any longer. It’s walked as long as anyone can
remember. A smith’s apprentice who’s here, he was out one night in Starup and tarried too long,
chattering with the girls, so he met it at about 1:30 in the morning near Holkjær’s Farm and got
so really scared, thought it was dangerous.376
Here, the corpse-lamb is, despite its bizarre nature, a part of the community. Still, something about
the being seems sinister. It is all well and good that the narrator has learned not to be frightened of it
and that the little girl helps the lamb on its way, but strangers are not the only ones terrified by the
lamb. Even the teller’s employer warns him to keep away from it. If nothing else, there is some
ambiguity at work. It is the same with the following story, attested to, we are told, by “a strong and
undauntable man”:
A man has many times seen a black poodle sitting on an archway that stood over a path that led
to Sandby parsonage on [the island of] Lolland, and he has had to go around it. But when he
then got to the other side of the archway and wanted to look at the dog, it was always gone. It
could never have been any real dog because there was no one in the whole town who had a dog
like that.377
This “strong and undauntable” man is afraid of the dog and so walks around the archway
instead of under it. Why, however, does the dog only appear when the man approaches the
parsonage? Could the poodle be guarding the pastor? This might sound absurd, considering
the deadly church grim experiences we have just seen, but there is, actually, strong evidence
that the church grim is a basically-helpful spirit and is sometimes even instrumental in getting
its church built in the first place.378 This is an important point since disruption of construction
on a church is as a common activity of social fairies, giants, and other beings antagonistic to
Christianity. Therefore, a church grim that puts a stop to building disruption can properly be
said to be warding-off evil spirits.
Nor is guarding the church itself the church grim’s only good deed. Black dogs in
particular can – despite all of the fear they induce – be tireless protectors of parishioners. The
following English legend is of a widespread type:
Mr. Wharton […] said, “When I was at the little inn at Ayscliffe, I met a Mr. Bond, who told me
a story about my friend Johnnie Greenwood, of Swancliffe. Johnnie had to ride one night
through a wood a mile long to the place he was going to.
“At the entrance of the wood a large black dog joined him, and pattered along by his side.
He could not make out where it came from, but it never left him, and when the wood grew so
dark that he could not see it, he still heard it pattering beside him. When he emerged from the
wood, the dog had disappeared, and he could not tell where it had gone to. Well, Johnnie paid
his visit, and set out to return the same way. At the entrance to the wood, the dog joined him,
and pattered along beside him as before; but it never touched him, and he never spoke to it, and
again, as he emerged from the wood, it ceased to be there.
“Years after, two prisoners in York Gaol told the chaplain that they had intended to rob and
murder Johnnie that night in the wood, but that he had a large dog with him, and when they saw
that, they felt that Johnnie and the dog together would be too much for them.”379
In a similar vein, Ruth L. Tongue, writing about the Somerset church grim, records that “In the
1930’s there were cottage women living in one of the remote Quantock coombes, who used to allow
their tiny children to wander off and play on the hillsides alone. When they were rebuked they said,
‘They’ll be all right, the Gurt Dog up over, he’ll take care of they.’”380 Unusually for spectral
animals – which are, more often than not, hellish monsters –,Lincolnshire and Devon black dogs
have, like the Lancashire Shriker above, the ability to cross water. While this skill is not often
granted to demons, what is even stranger is that these same dogs are unable to cross parish
boundaries, something that would never bother a devil. 381
Already in 1215, Gervase of Tilbury writes about what we can now recognize as a Death-horse:
There is in England a certain kind of demon which they call grant in the native idiom. It is like a
yearling colt, prancing on its hind-legs, with sparkling eyes. This kind of demon very often
appears in the streets in the heat of the day or at about sunset, and whenever it is seen, it gives
warning of an imminent fire in that city or neighbourhood. When danger is looming on the
following day or night, it sets the dogs barking by running to and fro in the streets, and feigning
flight, lures the dogs on its tail to pursue it in the vain hope of catching it. An apparition of this
kind makes the townspeople take care to guard their fires, and thus, while this obliging variety
of demon frightens anyone who sees it, its coming regularly serves to protect people who would
otherwise have been unaware of their danger.382
Although this being is performing a protective duty, Gervase recognizes that its presence is often
misunderstood. Church grims are rarely as jolly and tricksy as this one, and it is probably not
coincidental that, in later tradition, the grant is seen as a type of playful goblin rather than a church
grim. Goblins, however, while not always dangerous, are rarely helpful. So, why are church grims
so inconsistent? Why do they act out the dual role of guardian and killer? And what is their
connection with churches?
If these questions are not insurmountable, it is only because we have many sources of folklore
that help explain them. Consider these two pieces from Kristensen:
The corpse-lamb is a normal lamb that, after the graveyard’s fencing, is the first to come on the
hallowed area. They got hold of it, chopped off one leg, and buried it in the earth alive. But it’s
not always a lamb that’s been the first animal to come into the graveyard everywhere, so there
are also, in their own places, a corpse-horse [lighest], a corpse-deer [lighjort], a corpse-cow
[ligko], etc.383
and
When you go up to the graveyard at night, you can sometimes manage to see the corpse-lamb. It
has three legs. When the church was built, the first thing that the master builder met when he
left from there had to be buried alive. In some places, they have a Death-horse that comes
hopping on three legs. Other places have a virgin, and she’s clothed in white. When they built
Vejlby Church [in mid-Jutland], the first thing the master builder met was a boy, namely, his
own son, and so he was buried.384
Both of these reports concern animals being buried alive in graveyards, but there is also a
strong tradition of animals being walled in or buried under a church’s foundation.385 Not all
church grims are missing a leg, but along with headlessness, this is a fairly common church
grim attribute in Denmark. The human sacrifices in the latter of the texts are quite odd and at
first appear to represent the use of the church grim tradition to explain normal, run-of-the-mill
ghosts. It is difficult, in any case, to believe that human sacrifices have been made in quite
some time. This story is not a mere aberration however. In 563, St Columba is said to have
buried alive one of his companions, Odhran (later, St. Odhran), in the foundation of the
monastery on Iona. This sacrifice was designed to deter the demons, which had hitherto, in
the manner of fairies, torn down at night all the construction work on the church that the
Christians had completed during the day.386 Although this legend may not be true, it illustrates
the depth of belief in the use of so-called foundation sacrifices.
There is even a suggestion of human foundation sacrifice in the Bible when the future
rebuilding of the toppled walls of Jericho is discussed: “And Joshua adjured them at that time,
saying, Cursed be the man before the LORD, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he
shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the
gates of it.”387 About half a millennium later, Joshua’s curse is fulfilled: In King Ahab’s “days
did Hiel the Bethelite build Jericho: he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and
set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the LORD, which
he spake by Joshua the son of Nun.”388 These passages are usually interpreted as stating that
reconstruction of the walls’ foundation and gates commenced upon the deaths of the
builder’s/ruler’s sons, in effect either that the sons would have to die before the walls could be
built or that the sons would die as a penalty for building. The Hebrew, however, seems to
rather concretely refer to the building of the walls on top of the two sons.389 Whether this
means that the sons were intentionally killed or simply that they died naturally and were
buried strategically is impossible to say.
Obviously, there is no reason to go around making people suffer if animals can do the trick, so
the church grim tradition can be seen as something of an advance. The use of animals as foundation
or graveyard sacrifices is not limited to Scandinavia. Speaking from personal experience in
Somerset, Ruth L. Tongue states:
As a child I was freely admitted to the confidence of a clan of sextons, and listened to many gruesome
and frankly heathen rites practised by various members of this far-flung family. I am certain such
things would never have been discussed so matter-of-factly before any one not regarded as an initiate.
One […] man had buried a notorious sinner who had died in a hastily acquired odour of sanctity “on
top of the Dog”. The belief that a black dog was buried in the churchyard “to keep the Old Un out”
was an article of faith with them all. “The church do want a cock” I was told, “to crow to the four
winds on tower to warn En off, and they liddle wicked faces all around the church in and out, to fright
He, and a girt old black dog to churchyard to take a good nip out of Old Nicky’s backside if He
venture where He idn’t wanted.” I was also told that the reason why no dog’s bones are ever
accidentally excavated in churchyards was because unpopular people were “laid atop, so’s they was
both kept awake”— the dog to do his duty, and the sinner to repent in endless wakefulness.
There was always difficulty when a new cemetery was opened, as no one wanted a kinsman to be
the first buried therein, and to become the Churchyard Walker. The sexton was often appealed to,
behind the parson’s back, so that this calamity might be avoided. I knew of a knowledgeable
clergyman who expected trouble of this kind on one occasion, and was correspondingly pleased to find
that the first funeral in the new ground went off decorously and smoothly. But I also knew that a large
black dog belonging to a local farmer had mysteriously disappeared shortly before the burial. “He
runned back to his old whoame out-over,” declared the villagers as one man. The sexton had known
what to do.390
There is the implication here that the future-church grim need not be buried alive, hence the
struggle to avoid having one’s relative be the first inhabitant of a graveyard.
As a guardian of the church and its parishioners, the church grim’s apparently-malevolent
actions need to be seen in a positive light. Social fairies, merfolk, brownies, and even kelpies are
capable of having nuanced relationships with humans, but church grims are, in one way or another,
bestial. They may – like the black dog that walks with Johnnie Greenwood through the forest –
possess some secret knowledge, but they do not talk or seem particularly thoughtful. Whereas it
may, at first sight, appear as though church grims are murderous, the mass of evidence shows that
they are merely acting as death omens, an act that, all things considered, is a sort of good deed. This
explanation has evidently been forgotten on Ærø in Hübertz’s time even though there is a world of
difference between killing someone and warning someone. What might be most surprising is that
the legend of burying an animal at a church is grounded in historical fact. A variation of this
tradition has even been found on Ærø: While work was being done on Tranderup Church, preserved
sheep bones, a horse penis, and a boiled egg were discovered in the attic.
Holbek and Piø, among the most influential of Danish folklorists since the Romantic
period, hold that we must differentiate between the regional Danish (the northern portion of
the island of Zealand) and Swedish kirkegrim and the Danish krikevare. The idea is that the
kirkegrim alone is equivalent to the English church grim and that these beings do not act as
death omens but simply as guards. The kirkevare, however, has no good qualities and is
merely an omen. Furthermore, despite evidence that Holbek and Piø find to the contrary,391
they posit that the kirkegrim is never a horse.392 Unfortunately, although Holbek and Piø are
invaluable assets to researchers of Danish folklore, their conclusions are often poorly thought
out and under-evidenced. The argument against seeing the kirkegrim and the kirkevare as
analogous comes down to Holbek and Piø not having found many Danish kirkegrim stories
and making judgements on the basis of this lack of evidence.
As we have seen in regards to deciding whether or not the people of Ærø ever believed in
brownies, lack of evidence is not proof of non-existence of belief. What truly cripples
Holbek’s and Piø’s argument is that the lack of Danish kirkegrim evidence makes them
depend on English church grim stories, and international folklore is not among these
researchers’ strong points. Bizarrely, the scholars hold that British church grim legends are
limited to Northern England393, that is, to the part of England under Danish control in the late
9th and early 10th Centuries, the Danelaw. In this, Holbek and Piø are absolutely incorrect. Not
only are traditions about ghost animals – most often black dogs – that act as church guardians
and death omens spread from the Scottish Highlands to the south of England394, but even
some legends of non-church grim, demonic spiritual animals hint at the church grim-related
practise of interring living animals.395
One of the small complexities in Northern European folklore of the supernatural involves
the fact that there are various common sorts of spiritual black dogs. On the one hand, we have
church grims that protect the parish and act as death omens. On the other hand, some black
dogs are cut-and-dry demonic and some are ghosts of people. We will not concern ourselves
with black dogs that are, in actuality, ghosts of humans except to say that, as with most other
ghosts, they often cannot find peace either because of the horrible manner of their lives or
deaths or because they had hidden wealth or treasure during their lifetimes.396
Some black dogs seem very much to be devils, and in the witch trials, Satan himself takes
the form of a black dog every so often.397 Such beast is described in a 1577 account from
Suffolk, a creature that wreaked havoc in a church during a violent thunderstorm. We
reproduce part of it here in much-condensed form:
There appeared in a most horrible similitude and likeness to the congregation then and there
present, a dog as they might discerne it, of a black colour [...].
This black dog, or the divel in such a likeness (God hee knoweth al who worketh all),
running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste
among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were
kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at
one instant clene backward [...].
There was at ye same time another wonder wrought: for the same black dog, stil continuing
and remaining in one and the self-same shape, passing by an other man of the congregation in
the church, gave him such a gripe on the back, that therewith all he was presently drawen
togither and shrunk up, as it were a piece of lether with a string.398
The correspondent, realising that “this report […] wil seem absurd,” goes about verifying it
by listing the physical proofs still evident in the church, stating that the dog was “sensibly
perceiued of the people then and there assembled,” and noting that, on the same day, the beast
attacked another congregation and “slew two men and a lad, and burned the hand of another
person that was there among the rest of the company, of whom divers were blasted.”399 We
can be fairly certain that this church-defiling monster is not a church grim and is, instead, a
demon.
With the church grim, we can see how easily the “mistakes” that result from forgetting a
portion of a legend multiply. Because the Ærøese with whom Hübertz spoke did not realise
that the church grim tradition originated from a kind of offering and was explicitly linked to
Christianity, they took the beings’ death omens to be acts of malice, and there is a suggestion
that the church grims are, themselves, the cause of death in the same manner as demonic
black dogs are killers. In the earlier tradition, in the folklore that recalled the church grims’
sacrificial origins, this was most definitely not the case. We have, it might be remembered,
encountered the folkloric blurring between omens and ill-deeds earlier, in the case of merfolk.
We saw that although many contributors today and some in the past consider mermaids to be
practised slaughterers of sailors, the evidence is generally to the contrary. More often than
not, merfolk warn sailors of storms rather than instigate storms themselves. The
Klabauterman, which we mentioned briefly before, seems to once have been considered a
ship-brownie, a being who lives on-board and protects a ship. Those contributors who tell me
about the Klabauterman though almost always describe it as a sinker of ships. This, I suspect,
is because the only story about the Klabauterman that they recall involves it appearing before
storms and acting as a death omen. As with the church grim, this is a precise role reversal.
However true it may be that church grim folklore began with benevolent beings and developed
into something malicious, we are still confronted with the problem of why people ever believed in
church grims to begin with. Assuming that church grims have never actually existed, it is, perhaps,
comprehensible that people who sacrificed an animal or people who knew that others had sacrificed
an animal would occasionally experience the spirit of this animal as a result of psychological
suggestion. How though do we explain the fact that people with no knowledge of the earlier,
benevolent church grim tradition seem to have experienced precisely the same things as their
ancestors? It is not that the church grims of Hübertz are any different than those said to be guardian
spirits; the difference lies only in how they are interpreted.
We know that Northern European traditions of other supernatural beings stretch back to the
beginning of the region’s historical record, and there is no reason to believe that church grim
folklore is any newer. In fact, most of my contributors – and devout Christians in particular – are
adamant that the bulk of fairy folklore existed prior to the introduction of Christianity to Northern
Europe. If this is the case with the church grim, then, we are dealing with a belief that pre-dates the
inauguration of its apparent material origins: We are accepting that people believed in the beings
before they started sacrificing animals at churches. The obvious resolution to this problem is to say
that the Northern European heathens sacrificed and/or offered animals at their pagan temples and
homes before they were converted. For example, an Old Norse short story revolves around preChristian household worship of a preserved horse penis400, numerous probable foundation offerings
of animals have been found in 2nd Century Roman London401, and the Roman fort of Portchester
Castle is the site of early 4th-Century mixed burial of animals and human infants402. Even though the
archaeological evidence for pre-Christian, Northern European human and animal foundation
sacrifices and offerings is undeniable, these rituals fails to explain not only the transference of the
tradition to Christianity but also the vexing question as to why belief continued once the material
origins were forgotten. Is the answer, perhaps, that the material tradition of sacrificing animals
came – against all rationalist logic – as a result of the folkloric tradition, as an explanation for the
experience? This is just guesswork, but as we shall see, church grim belief is definitely not
consigned to ages in which the material practice was remembered.
Chapter 16: Perceptions of Past Belief in Church Grims and Black Dogs
Church grims and demonic black dogs have little presence in current Danish popular culture. Part of
the reason is surely that these beings lack the romance of those fairies and monsters that normally
make their ways into fairy tales. Black dogs that are ghosts of humans, however, make one, grand
appearance in Danish literature: They are central to the plot of Hans Christian Andersen’s The
Tinder Box [Fyrtøjet], a short story more famous in Denmark than abroad. In the story, the hero
encounters three supernatural dogs, yet unlike the merfolk in The Little Mermaid, readers without
prior knowledge of folklore would not know that these dogs are, in fact, traditional since, in the
text, they are simply called dogs. Folklorists, on the other hand, will note that the dogs, like so
many human ghosts in dog form, are treasure guardians and that, like supernatural black dogs of
various sorts, they have enormous eyes. To today’s reader, the inclusion of the dogs in this story
must appear even more bizarre than it did in Andersen’s own time, and as a result, the tale loses
some of its internal logic.
Even disregarding Hans Christian Andersen, demonic black dogs are not wholly foreign to the
Danish consciousness. Of the 48 contributors who I asked about black dogs (from now on, unless
otherwise noted, black dog will refer to demonic black dogs), seven403 associate the being with
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, and although none of these contributors can recall
much about the story, their guess is correct: The titular hound is, indeed, a false black dog. It is
necessary to understand that those who mention the Sherlock Holmes story would never have
labelled the being within it as a black dog themselves; simply, this creature is the only spiritual
black dog they can recall. While The Hound of the Baskervilles is hardly high-brow reading, it is
seems to be the preserve of the educated class regardless since all of these contributors are
unusually culturally-aware in general. Two further contributors,404 meanwhile, associate the black
dog with the Sirius Black character in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. This character has the
ability to turn into a black dog, and in this form, he is sometimes called a barghest, this being a
regional English name for a sub-division of demonic black dogs. Furthermore, the character is
nicknamed Padfoot, a regional name for a church grim in dog form, and to ensure that folklorists
reading Harry Potter have no doubt, he has the epithet, the Grim. It would be going too far to say
that my contributors have gleaned from Harry Potter any substantial knowledge of either black dog
or church grim folklore, but this reading has made them aware, at least, of the black dog’s ominous
nature. After all, on the basis of these books, one contributor, Niels Condrup, is capable of saying,
“I know that the black dog, it means a bad omen. It means death or evil, that something bad will
happen.”
Yet again, young Niels surpasses most people in knowledge. Of the 48 respondents, 29 have
never heard of the black dog, five believe that they have heard the name before but can say nothing
else, nine associate black dogs with literary figures, one claims to know about black dogs but gives
an incorrect description, and four give a correct description. These statistics relate a far worse state
of black dog knowledge than of kelpie knowledge though, admittedly, this may partially be because
the name the black dog [den sorte hund] is itself so descriptive that any correct explanations as to
its nature must be relatively detailed. Regardless, the standard of correctness is still not set terribly
high. For example, one contributor deemed to be correct admits that her ideas about the black dog
are quite vague, but she thinks that the being is the ghost of a dog.405
Rather more interesting is the testimony of Jan Pedersen, the Ærøskøbing tour guide. It is
usually difficult to tell how much of what Jan says is traditional and how much he has hit upon on
the spot, particularly because his memory is so well encouraged by prompting. In this case though,
despite the need for prompting, Jan’s metaphorical description of the black dog seems to be
authentic:
It’s really when you’re far out there. As I understand the concept, then it was something my
grandmother told me, that “You mustn’t go out there… If you ever go so far out that you meet
the black dog, then you can’t get farther out.” That’s what I’ve heard about it. If there’s
anything else to it, that I can’t say, but she said the black dog if you were psychologically down.
If you get bad nerves, then people said in the old days, “Then, you might meet the black dog.”
For me, it’s a local concept, like the man with the scythe. Death, right? Or you risk dying of bad
nerves. You go so far out that you can’t find your way back if you keep following the black dog.
Then, you’re, as they say, in the death spiral, right? You can’t come out again, and so you go
crazy from it. It’s one of the old mythologies to watch out for, right? It’s just so much then, like
you should watch out for the fairies [de underjordiske]. Yeah, I’ve heard it, but I think that I’ve
only heard it from one person who used it, and that was my grandmother.
Use of the black dog to mean depression probably refers to church grims rather than to
demonic black dogs, simply because the church grim concept implies inexorable fate whereas
the demon’s attacks are random and/or quick and brutal. Of course, as we have seen, it is not
always clear whether one is dealing with a church grim or a demon, and after the material
tradition of sacrificing animals had been forgotten, we can see that people started seeing
church grims as active killers rather than mere death omens.
Jan might think of the black dog as symbolic evil, but the Ærøskøbing pastor, Lars Ole Gjesing,
sees it in its church grim role. When I ask Lars Ole about the black dog, he responds in this way:
Lars Ole Gjesing: Then, there’s the Death-horse too and the whole of that family of dangerous
animals bound up with death and burial and the graveyard’s surroundings and that kind of thing.
That’s what I think the black dog is too, that it crops up in connection with death in any case or
forebodes death. And the Death-horse does that too.
Adam Grydehøj: What kinds of things were they?
LOG: Yeah, they were a supernatural dog and a supernatural horse that crop up as omens of
evil.
Since I asked about the black dog [den sorte hund] before I asked about the church grim [kirkegrim
and kirkevare], and since after I asked about the church grim, I asked about the Death-horse
[helhest] and then the grave-sow [gravso], I had the opportunity to see how people in the know
conceive of the different beings. It will be noted that Lars Ole mentions the Death-horse on his own
accord, and he is the only of my contributors who does this. Interestingly, Lars Ole’s idea of the
black dog and the Death-horse is confined to ill omens, and when asked, he cannot offer any local
stories on the subject, nor has he heard of the church grim. Upon prompting, he has heard of the
grave-sow, and when I tell him a bit about the general church grim tradition, he connects this
himself with animal sacrifices in churches, a subject on which he has some knowledge but has only
thought of archaeologically, not folklorically.
Indeed, none of my contributors can recall having heard of the kirkegrim or kirkevare before.
When the local folklorist Dion Abrahamsen and the Marstal pastor Anders Hauge mention the
tradition of sacrificing animals in churches, they do so only because this is the sole contextuallyrelevant piece of folklore they can think of in regard to churches. Like Lars Ole, Dion is not aware
that spiritual animals have any connection with these sacrifices. Via a piece of false etymology,
Dion incorrectly links the Death-horse with another tradition, that of the nightmare [mareridt]. He
is not completely ignorant about the belief, however, for he says that the Death-horse’s appearance
(in the form of the nightmare) is a sign of death in one’s family. Dion himself mentions a pig –
clearly Hübertz’s grave-sow – that runs around Ærøskøbing and knocks people over. Anders
Hauge, despite his great knowledge of animal sacrifices, is completely ignorant of church grim
folklore: For example, he guesses that the Death-horse [helhest] is demonic since it has Hell [hel] in
its name. In fact, the hel in helhest is a name for personified Death and is linked, presumably, to the
Old Norse concept of Hel, which, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian Hell to which it is an
etymological forbearer, is an amoral home for the dead. A further two contributors, both pastors,
know something of the sacrifice tradition but do not connect it with the church grim until I describe
church grim folklore. One of these, the Søby pastor, Kathrine Østergaard, does not recognize any of
the names of particular types of church grims but has a small awareness of the sacrifice tradition.
The Bregninge pastor, Agnes Haugaard, however, brings up the topic of sacrifices herself already
while we are discussing social fairies, but she fails to mention the sacrifices later, in relation to
church grims. Nevertheless, her conception of the purpose of these sacrifices is very nearly correct
since she calls the slaughtered animal a corpse-lamb [liglam] and says, “The idea was that, if you
sacrificed the lamb, then you avoided there being evil in the parish, one can say. In that way, you
appeased the gods.”
Although only two out of 45 contributors have any associations with the Danish words for
church grim, the Death-horse is considerably better known. Of the 36 contributors who respond to a
question about the Death-horse, only 16 claim never to have heard of it, 11 have heard the name but
cannot say anything about the being, one person gives an incorrect answer, and a full eight people
answer with some degree of correctness. Three contributors see the Death-horse primarily as an
omen of death or misfortune,406 and nearly everyone emphasizes its dangerousness. Unfortunately,
these statistics are, as usual, somewhat opaque. When people are asked about the Death-horse in a
folkloric context, they are likely to guess at correct answers; after all, it is clear from the name alone
that the being is some kind of dangerous, supernatural horse. Intriguingly, a mother and her adult
daughter, although interviewed separately, both incorrectly connect the Death-horse with Nordic
myth,407 an association likely facilitated by the hel in helhest. Two contributors,408 meanwhile,
envision the Death-horse with three legs, a traditional attribute.
A sign of how trivial most people regard the subject of past folk belief is the propensity of
contributors to make uninformed guesses about the characteristics of supernatural beings of which
they have no real knowledge. Some contributors are particularly prone to this and answer many
questions with something to the extent of “Well, I’ve never heard of a kelpie, but I’d guess that it’s
something like…” This is the approach that 14-year-old Karoline Strand takes with the church grim
by saying, “I could imagine that it lived in the graveyard and took the dead up and made them into
ghosts.” This is an earnest response, but it reveals that, for many contributors, the facts of past
belief are not terribly important since, after all, beings like church grims have never existed.
Despite her generally-impressive folkloric knowledge, Sophie Elisabeth Seidelin, one of
Marstal’s pastors, knows as little about the church grim as Karoline does. Still, when I ask about the
Death-horse, she tells me a story that she heard in Jutland as a child concerning a local woman:
In her childhood, she’s seen a dreadful animal like that. People used horses as riding animals of
course and as a means of transport, and as you know, then they can suddenly come to a halt and
refuse to move a foot or walk because there was something or other. Many notions are
connected with horses. But when she had to go through a narrow road that was a bit scary, a
road that went in between two hills, where it was dark and one drove up in the wheel tracks and
such like, then she wanted to have her friend or her sister with her so they could hold tight each
others’ hands because there, one could, namely, meet the horse-head [hestehoved]. They were
very afraid of it.
Sophie thought of this story simply because it involved a phantom horse, but it does, indeed, sound
like a Death-horse tradition that survived into living memory.
In a similar though more personal vein, the former historian, Jesper, mentions the Death-horse
on Ærø without prompting, and says that it is “an especially scary horse with three legs. It’s been a
horse that warns of misfortune. And it’s, you know, because of it that I don’t go down there [to Rise
Mark] to meet that horse without a head.” Later, Jesper connects the Death-horse with the gravepig, explaining the link by saying that they are both “scary animals that you shouldn’t meet.” It is
impossible not to notice here the strong suggestion of belief in Jesper’s statement, and we will deal
with this in greater depth in a later chapter. For now, we will merely note that Jesper professes
disbelief in the Death-horse and other supernatural phenomena.
The best description of the church grim that I obtain in my interviews comes from the everinformative Michael Banke. I ask Michael about the black dog, and he explains that it is a death
omen. He then says:
Michael Banke: To the contrary, I get to thinking about the black sheep [den sorte får] or the
church-sheep [kirkefår]. Almost every church has a church-sheep haunting it. And it forebodes
death. If you see the church-sheep, then the forecast isn’t good. It’s a particular sheep that’s
been sacrificed and laid in the foundation of a church. And I think that it had a heathen origin. I
mean, from heathen times with offering ceremonies that’ve been transferred in the start of
Christianity where people have built churches but where some of the heathen traditions have
overlapped a bit. In the beginning, where people have sacrificed a sheep to... I don’t know why,
but that that sheep has been laid down in the foundation. [...]
Adam Grydehøj: Could you name any other types of animals that haunted graveyards?
MB: In a graveyard? No, but the black dog, you could also see that in the graveyard. […] But
other animals in the graveyard? A three-legged horse or what the devil was there about that?”
AG: The Death-horse?
MB: The Death-horse… Yes. It could damn well have been that. They’re a bit unsure for me
right there.
Michael is, then, the sole contributor who knows of the connection between animal sacrifices and
the church grim although he never uses the terms kirkegrim or kirkevare himself. Amazingly, a
complete amateur, a man who does not even pursue history or folklore as a major hobby, is the
most knowledgeable of all of my contributors concerning the most obscure beings of past
supernatural belief. Despite all this, we have to remember that not one of my contributors mentions
the guardian role played by the church grim, Death-horse, black dog, corpse-lamb, etc.
A quick look at our findings reveals that, while four out of six of Ærø’s pastors are aware of the
material tradition of sacrificing or offering animals,409 none of them connect this custom with
church grim folklore of any sort. As a group, the pastors are still far-better folklorically informed
than the average individual, and that they know of the animal sacrifices at all is a sign of this, but it
is worrisome that they have neither been taught nor come across in their numerous leisure-reading
folklore books anything about church grims, the type of supernatural being with the most affinity to
the church. Considering the vehemence with which all of these pastors oppose the idea that
supernatural beings have ever played a role within Christianity, there may be unwillingness within
the Church of Denmark to pay any attention to a type of legend that can be seen as jeopardizing the
religion’s present-day reputation for scientific rationality.
Chapter 17: The Trouble with Theories
Belief in the supernatural is a massive subject, and in this book, we have not only had to pick and
choose which types of supernatural beings to look at but also which aspects of belief in these beings
to highlight. We have attempted to take folklore at face value and not give in to the temptation to
theorize. While this does not mean that we have accepted that fairies exist, we have always sought
to recall that it is belief we are dealing with, not literature or mere storytelling. One reason,
however, for the current lack of interest in serious fairy studies is surely that so many scholars
approach the subject from a different angle. When we analysed Dennis W. Felty’s ill-conceived
essay on mermaids/sirens, we may have gotten the impression that this text’s fundamental errors are
somehow the preserve of amateur folklorists. They are not. In this chapter, we will look at a number
of the most common ways in which folklore of the supernatural is misrepresented and
misinterpreted by scholars.
We can split up these misinterpretations into two broad categories: Theories that attempt to
explain the supernatural in order to forward a separate theory and theories that attempt to explain
the supernatural for the sake of having an explanation. The second of these categories is, I believe,
more agreeable than the first. As for the first, even though I believe that the vast majority of
scholars are both sincere and well-meaning, one cannot help but feel that people are sometimes a
little too willing to manipulate evidence so that it supports a more general and not purely-folkloric
mindset.
W.Y. Evans-Wentz, a fairy researcher from the early-20th Century, came to same conclusion as
a number of other prominent folklorists of his time who accepted the simplest of all explanations
for the origin of fairy belief, namely that fairies actually exist. The evidence for this theory is that,
in the absence of other reasonable explanations, we might as well place trust in our senses. This
theory not only holds but scant comfort for those of us who do not believe in fairies; it is also often
– though not always – accompanied by the belief that fairies are glorious, awe-inspiring beings.
Evans-Wentz did much important fieldwork throughout the “Celtic” realm, and the stories he heard
from his rural and “uncultured” contributors fit well with what we have ourselves said of traditional
fairy belief. For Evans-Wentz, however, the reports of the common folk could never be sufficient
since the fairies in which this scholar believed were far from the sometimes ugly, vindictive, and
child-stealing beings of the rural mindset. Thus it is that Evans-Wentz adds adds a different kind of
contributor into the mix. What is worrisome is that Evans-Wentz introduces this contributor by
saying, “To anthropologists this evidence may be of more than ordinary value when they know that
it comes from one who is not only a cultured seer but who is also a man conspicuously successful in
the practical life of a great city.”410 Frequently, such statements – and they are never made in
folklore texts nowadays – straightforwardly suggest that we can trust the testimony becomes it
comes from a well-known individual, and there is, perhaps, more merit in this view than it is
usually credited with. Nevertheless, Evans-Wentz’s introduction takes on a secondary meaning
simply because his anonymous “cultured seer” has quite different ideas about fairies than the
country-folk. The following is an excerpt from Evans-Wentz’s interview with the seer about the
sidhe, the fairies:
Question: Do you in any way classify the Sidhe races to which you refer?
Answer: The beings whom I call the Sidhe, I divide, as I have seen them, into two great classes:
those which are shinning and those which are opalescent and seem lit up by a light within
themselves. The shining beings appear to be lower in the hierarchies; the opalescent beings are
more rarely seen, and appear to hold the positions of great chiefs or princes among the tribes of
Dana. […]
Question: Can you describe the shining beings? [...]
Answer: The first time I saw them with great vividness I was lying on a hill-side alone in the
west of Ireland, in County Sligo: I had been listening to music in the air, and to what seemed to
be the sound of bells […]. Then the space before me grew luminous, and I began to see one
beautiful being after another.
Question: Can you describe the opalescent beings?
Answer: The first of these I saw I remember very clearly, and the manner of its appearance:
there was at first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure
with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body
ran a radiant, electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre. Around the head of this being
and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of
gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras. From the being itself light seemed to stream
outwards in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of extraordinary
lightness, joyousness, or ecstasy.411
Now, it would never occur to us to denigrate belief, and this seer is far from alone in having had
such experiences. Regardless, his descriptions would have been completely foreign to all but a few
of the Irish – and English, Scottish, Nordic, and so on – country-folk, the people to whom EvansWentz looks to confirm the reality of the fairies. The anonymous seer harkens back to the oldest
extant Irish fairy traditions by calling these being the Sidhe and speaking of the tribes of
Dana/Danu. While there were uneducated Irishmen who knew something of their nation’s
mythology and linked the Túatha Dé Danann to their own, local social fairies, the seer’s ecstatic
otherworld-view could hardly have contained child-stealing and murder.
Evans-Wentz, being a good scholar, provides all of the stories of fairy unpleasantness from the
common folk as well, and it is, perhaps, intended that we will look at these legends and see them as
misinterpretations of the sorts of events that cultured seers experience. After all, social fairies are
social fairies, and any sort of first-hand report counts as another bit of proof for the grand argument
in favour of the fairies’ existence. Brownies, however, are different. Few spiritualist writers pay
attention to brownies because brownies are never – cannot possibly be – grand and awesome. Even
when social fairies act badly, they still possess an air of mystery and can be easily redeemed by
well-wishing spiritualist folklorists like Evans-Wentz. But not brownies. Brownies are what they
are, and because they live in the barn, one gets to see what they are often enough to get the
message. So, despite the fact that brownies are the subject of an enormous quantity of legends
internationally, they are largely ignored by the spiritualists. In his hefty The Fairy-Faith in Celtic
Countries, Evans-Wentz mentions brownies and their analogues but three times, always in passing
and as a means of describing some foreign type of fairy.
It cannot be that Evans-Wentz did not hear brownie stories during his travels through Ireland,
Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany. His many, many contributors have no
doubt told him brownie stories during those same conversations in which they spoke of social
fairies. And yet, presumably because Evans-Wentz cannot reconcile the uncouth brownies with his
ethereal denizens of higher planes of existence, he leaves them out of his powerful folkloric
narrative. An amateur reader of Evans-Wentz’s magnificent book could be excused for thinking that
the brownie is but a minor player on the folkloric stage. Nor are brownies alone in missing EvansWentz’s attention. The scholar mentions the kelpie only twice, and again, only in passing. It is
noteworthy that, although Evans-Wentz clearly does not see the brownie and the kelpie as important
to his work, two of the people who he asks to write lengthy chapter introductions disagree: Henry
Jenner, introducing Cornish tradition, goes into some detail about a variety of crude spirits and
mentions the kelpie and brownie412 while the eminent folklorist, Douglas Hyde, introduces Irish
tradition by attacking some of Evans-Wentz’s central tenets, bringing up the kelpie in the
process413.
It is, of course, a great credit to Evans-Wentz that he allows a critical piece to be published
within his own book, and notwithstanding his manipulation of the evidence by omission, The FairyFaith in Celtic Countries is one of the most important fieldwork-based fairy books of the 20th
Century. This fact proves that few – not even many of the finest scholars – are immune to the
temptation to slant folklore to fit their own purposes.
The existence of brownies in folklore is problematic, and not just for spiritualists. It is also
troublesome for researchers standing on the other end of the theoretical divide, the psychoanalysts.
We have already seen in Felty’s mermaid/siren article how the psychoanalytic approach has
sometimes been brought to bear on fairy folklore.414 Not all psychoanalytic folklorists are nonacademics however. One psychoanalytic scholar is Diane Purkiss, whose Fairies and Fairy Stories
represents one of the most impressive and wide-ranging books on fairies written within the past few
decades.415 Although Purkiss does excellent work in many long-neglected fields, her underlying
assumption that fairies are symbols of illicit sexuality and the oppression of femininity is as
untenable as the spiritualist idea that all fairies are magnificent. What is Purkiss to do about the
brownie? She cannot let something as desexualized and relatively benevolent get anywhere near her
collection of seductive and/or violent fairies. So, like Evans-Wentz, she writes the brownie out of
the story.
Purkiss holds that Shakespeare received his ideas about Robin Goodfellow/Puck from
Reginald Scot and that Scot himself pulled together various strands of fairylore willy-nilly in
order to invent a kind of jack-of-all-trades hobgoblin.416 We are to conclude that the brownie,
in its domestic form, is a relative newcomer, is not traditional. This does not, however, seem
to be the case: Gervase of Tilbury’s portunes are good-humoured tricksters both in and out of
the home, and they predate Scot by 369 years. And what about Olaus Magnus? He wrote of
far-travelled brownies almost 30 years prior to Scot, and since Olaus’ book did not become
popular in England until its 1658 translation, he would seem to have no connection to either
Scot or Shakespeare.
Ideological concerns have gotten a hold on Purkiss’ scholarship. Her feminist,
psychoanalytic approach to fairies is troubled by the breadth of brownie belief since brownies
are hardly the wanton deflower-fairies her thesis suggests. Faced with this obstacle, Purkiss
attempts to prove that brownies as we know them today never existed prior to Scot. Even if
she were correct on this point, it still would not be enough, as she realises herself, for
although the brownie might have originated in Scot’s poetic pen, there is still the indisputable
fact of later brownie belief. Purkiss deals with this by discussing England’s racist imagery of
colonial peoples:
It may not be irrelevant to note that the fairy who most resembled a household slave was called
the “brownie”, a name which suggests darkness. Brownies, like slaves, did household and farm
chores in exchange for enough food to stay alive; a bowl of milk or cream was the usual
payment.417
For Purkiss, then, brownies are no longer friendly, free-spirited guardians of farm and family; they
are now subconscious symbols for the outwardly subservient but inwardly threatening “other.” Yet
this view is simply not backed up by the evidence, and considering Purkiss’ deep research into fairy
traditions, it is astounding that she does not realize this. Brownies are far from slaves. They seem to
accept their rations of food out of honour more than real need and can react as disastrously to being
given too fine of food as to being given no food at all. One could, I suppose, hold that this is all part
of an invidious, subconscious ideal of slaves who do not want to be free, but this would bring us
even further from the actual facts of belief. It is, in any case, clear that a brownie does not live on
his bowl of milk or porridge; he takes – and demands – the bowl as a sign of gratitude. Brownies
also dislike nothing more than attempts by humans to press them into doing work. It might also be
noted that, already in 1513, the Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, used “browneis” to mean fairies in
his loose translation of the Virgil’s Aeneid,418 a usage that suggests the word was already generally
known by the early-16th Century, about 100 years prior to the earliest use of slaves for manual
labour in Britain’s American colonies. Purkiss is aware of Douglas, but she dates the book at
1533,419 It is only by squeezing the ill-fitting brownies into her folkloric system that Purkiss
manages to present a coherent thesis, but her claims’ complete lack of folkloric basis show the
cracks of the thesis as a whole.
This is not merely a matter of contention for stodgy academics to discuss either, for the survival
of psychoanalytic techniques in folklore scholarship is representative of a larger problem. These
techniques, honed first on dreams, then on myth, then on literature, have returned to myth and
folklore, but not until after accumulating the baggage of literary criticism. Literary and legendary
narratives cannot be analysed in the same ways. When we start breaking down the distinctions
between the two by treating fairy legends as though they were intricately-constructed but
subconscious windows into our souls and treating poems like clear reflections of the real world, we
might gain something approaching a universal system of thought but only at the expense of losing
sight of reality.
For example, on the evidence of nothing more than psychoanalytic literary criticism aimed at a
single poem, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Purkiss strongly hints that the poet, Robert
Browning, had – for ominously unexplained reasons – incest on his mind:
Nevertheless, something has blasted this land [in the poem], and blasted Roland too; he sounds
exhausted, old-young, and he has forgotten why he has come. The land speaks to him and the
land is him and he cannot read it, but it maddens him. Like the poem, it is a story without a
beginning, without an end, a story that cannot be told. And what else is incest? Browning
always refused to explain the poem himself, saying it came to him in a dream. Perhaps it
contains a story that he could not tell directly, did not want to read there.420
Purkiss has little patience for those who dream of glorious, benevolent fairies and try to rework the
mass of folkloric fairies in that image, yet her own perspective is equally skewed. It is, for instance,
unlikely that she would have made her argument about Browning had not Childe Roland been
named after a Shakespeare quote421 that itself was inspired by a folktale involving fairies. Whereas
the rest of us may struggle to see sexuality in the poem, these fairies twice removed – there are,
after all, no fairies in either Browning’s or Shakespeare’s versions – and a bit of creative thought
about the relationship between the folktale’s hero and the sister he saves gives Purkiss the impetus
to see the poem as a tale of incest. Purkiss has taken the psychoanalysis of literary critics, applied it
to folkloric fairies, and used these unlikely results to interpret literature and its authors. Even if
there were conclusive proof that the idea of incest lurked in Browning’s subconscious, this poem’s
fairy association are irrelevant to the discussion of it.
I do not single-out Purkiss here because her work is pernicious but because it is both recent and
based on vast reading. It will almost certainly be – and deserves to be – an influential book in the
field for years to come. Unfortunately, it is not unusual for folklorists’ ideological stances to get in
the way of what seems, objectively, to be the obvious truth. The vast contradictions present in the
varying strands of folk belief of the supernatural are not conducive to academic ideologies, and the
best folklorists tend to be those who draw as few ontological and psychological conclusions as
possible. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why the work of Katherine Briggs is so valuable:
Even though her writing might be the 20th Century’s most important in terms of promoting
academic study of fairies, one learns from her only that which is present in the source material. She
is completely without theory.
Most folklorists are not as extreme or consistent in their theorizing as Purkiss, possibly because
most of them have not had the necessary training for it. Since psychoanalysis is so tempting though,
many folklorists engage in a watered-down version of it, mixing its methodology with that of other
theories. The standard Danish text on supernatural belief is Bengt Holbek’s and Iørn Piø’s 1967
Fantastic Creatures and Legendary Folk, a book that we have noted before, not always with
admiration. Holbek and Piø are, however, unavoidable because – despite their decision not to cite
their sources – they garnered immense respect for their research on Nordic folklore. Nevertheless,
they are unsure of how to approach fairies theoretically. Their basic idea seems to be that belief is
vaguely absurd, so they are constantly searching for explanations and using whatever appears best
in each instance. This leads to a blend of psychoanalysis (some heavy and some light) and
naturalistic theorizing, yet since the former method renders the latter unnecessary, and the latter
makes the former look like a stretch, the book lacks cohesiveness. Consider, for example, their
comment that “Most of the accounts of the mermaid are known from fishermen and sailors in 19th
Century tradition, and there is no doubt that a seal observed under conditions of reduced visibility
by men with women on the mind has been conducive to the mermaid concept’s continued life.”422
As far as mermaids are concerned, the most common explanation among both folklorists and
complete amateurs is that merfolk were, in fact, everyday animals incorrectly observed. One will
note how Holbek and Piø add a psychoanalytic rationale to this incorrectness by attributing it to
sexual desire.
Let us try, for a moment, to take at face value the claim that normally-rational people are,
under certain conditions, apt to mistake seals, manatees, and dugongs for merfolk. We can,
first of all, clear manatees and dugongs out of the way: While manatee and dugong sightings
by explorers and their crews might explain some part of the mermaid folklore connected with
exploratory expeditions, they have little relevance for mermaid belief in Europe, belief that
pre-dates the first European voyages to regions inhabited by these mammals. The seal
question is rather more complex. Holbek and Piø go no further than to say that seal sightings
have “been conducive to the mermaid concept’s continued life.” This is, presumably, because
these scholars link merfolk to Classical tradition, and it would be illogical for them to hold
that Ancient Greek sirens originated from seals. We have already covered the mermaid/siren
debate in some depth, but for the sake of argument, let us follow Holbek’s and Piø’s line of
thought a bit further. If, as Holbek and Piø believe, there is an intimate connection between
sirens and merfolk, Northern Europeans should have had no problem believing in mermaids
without the help of seals since the Ancient Greeks and Romans managed to do the same.
But let us say that Holbek and Piø are onto something with their description of love-sick
sailors fantasizing about seals. What kinds of sailors are these? They might be sailors on
exploratory expeditions, but they probably are not the kind of sailors who are likely to be
sailing around Northern Europe. Boats involved in the shipping trade in the 19th Century were
in port quite frequently, and fishermen, who are the protagonists of most of our sea-faring
mermaid encounters, were not at sea for months at a time either and were hardly the sort of
fishermen who would be expected to develop cabin fever. Furthermore, besides stories of
mermaids warning sailors of storms (precisely the type of legend that makes the most sense
when the boat is close to land, i.e. when the sailors have a chance to save themselves), most
mermaid legends actually take place on the beach, and the whole question of sex-crazed
sailors becomes insignificant. It is possible that the majority of merfolk sightings take place at
sea, but there is no doubt that most merfolk stories take place on land; there is, in any case, no
scientific method of quantifying mermaid encounters as opposed to mermaid legends, the
latter holding so much greater currency in both oral and literary tradition by virtue of
possessing narrative interest.
Another impediment to the mistaken seal theory is that, besides regular merfolk, a strong
though less extensive tradition of seal-folk exists, almost always side-by-side with merfolk
belief. When people in the Northern Isles, mainland Scotland, and Ireland who are familiar
with both concepts see a particularly humanoid seal, they will, at worst, believe it to be a
member of the seal-folk rather than the merfolk. Besides, the very fact of the existence of
belief in shape-changing seal-folk means that people did not have any trouble differentiating
between seals and humans/mermaids.
Despite these counter-arguments, such is the paucity of Danish literature in the field that
Holbek and Piø have become the national folklore arbiters. When they support the seal theory,
amateurs follow suit. The following is an extract from a newspaper article, Mermaids Exist
Even Now, by Søren Olsen:
It was seldom thought that people outright got mermaids in the net, but it happened, apparently,
in 1749 in Lim Fjord by Nykøbing Mors [in Jutland]. In any case, the Copenhagen Danish PostTimes could report on some fishermen who had caught a live mermaid and brought it in to
Nykøbing Mors. This created, according to the magazine’s information, a large flow of curious
people: “People have never heard of or seen such a quantity of peasants, authors, and painters
by Lim Fjord and through Almue who daily, in the town, are nearly trampling one another out
of eagerness to see this sight.”
Now, the people of Lim Fjord knew well enough the regular common seals, so in this case,
we must be dealing either with an unknown or rare species of seal. Maybe a grey seal, a ringed
seal, or a completely different species. Every so often it happens occasionally that these seal
species visit the Danish seas.423
Olsen has learned about the naturalistic seal theory of merfolk, but he has taken this idea to its
absurd extreme. One can imagine cases in which a seal out at sea might look human, but the
mermaid of Nykøbing Mors is a different matter entirely. Hundreds of people are examining
the mermaid at close range, out of the water. It is difficult to explain how belief in this
mermaid came to exist, but a mistaken seal can hardly be the answer. Olsen has an inkling of
this himself. After all, he thinks, these fishermen surely would have been able to tell a harbour
seal from an aquatic fairy. So, Olsen – or an unnamed source – decides that an unusual
species of seal must have been the cause of all the trouble. Now, harbour seals may not look
exactly like grey seals or ringed seals or what have you, but all of these animals are seals, and
when on land, they all resemble one another far more than they resemble humans. Olsen’s
argument is the equivalent of saying that Danish farmers living 200 years ago believed in
Christmas-brownies. Again, what kinds of idiots do we think our ancestors were?
It will be noted that Olsen’s mermaid theory lacked Holbek’s and Piø’s psychoanalytic
slant. A great many of Holbek’s and Piø’s arguments are, however, a mix of the naturalistic
and the psychoanalytic. Consider their explanation for changelings, the ugly and often
mentally-deficient beings with which fairies replace kidnapped human children:
The changeling occurs in many legend traditions, and there is scarcely any doubt that the
Swedish-German folklorist Elizabeth Hartmann is correct that the anxiety dreams of postchildbirth women have played a decisive role in the construction of the changeling as a
legendary being. Women who had just given birth have in their concern for the newborn child
dreamed and told of how terrible it would be if their child were exchanged. They were familiar
with the supernatural folk themselves, and they knew from others that exchanges were a reality.
And if they did not know, grandmothers and neighbouring women who visited the mother
certainly, with great diligence, related it. The anxiety dreams of post-childbirth women are, in
any case, comprehensible.424
One of the advantages of pure psychoanalysis is that, unlike naturalistic theories and hybrid
theories, it does not suffer from the question of how beliefs first arose. The above theory,
unfortunately, does nothing more than beg the question. Once we have accepted the psychoanalytic
framework, we can look at Holbek’s and Piø’s argument: 1) Women who give birth often have
anxiety dreams. 2) Women know stories about fairies and have been told about changelings. 3)
These stories cause anxiety dreams. The argument is entirely circular, holding that anxiety dreams
are the cause of changeling belief and changeling belief is the cause of anxiety dreams.
Even some of the most careful and scientific folklorists fall into the naturalistic trap. Susan
Schoon Eberly, for example, makes an excellent comparison of changeling legends with medical
evidence regarding various types of childhood diseases, pointing out how closely some changelings
match descriptions of sick, altogether human children. This is wonderful work, and one is left in
little doubt that, historically, many disabled children were believed to be changelings. Eberly,
however, continues by expanding her thesis into a theory of origin, holding that diseased children
were the cause of changeling – and possibly even fairy – belief. Yet the explanation simply is not
there. Assuming pre-existing belief in fairy kidnappers, it is easy to see how disabled children could
be mistaken for changelings, but it requires rather more of a stretch of the imagination to accept that
interactions with disabled people were the source of belief in fairies. What of the fact that,
according to tradition, a changeling might be caught off guard and be seen playing the fiddle,
dancing, and speaking like an ordinary adult? Or that, when banished, it might fly up the chimney
with a screech?
Disabled children surely did reinforce belief in fairies, but they did not prompt the belief itself, a
belief so deep as to be unattributable to simple causes like hallucinogenic mushrooms, self-igniting
marsh gas, or that old standby, “bad lighting.” If, as Eberly argues, a comparison of modern medical
science and fairy physiology proves that disabled humans formed the kernel of belief in
brownies,425 then why are the stories of changelings and those of brownies never linked in the
folklore itself? Additionally, why do stories of children and adults “changed” by fairies sometimes
persist even in the presence of medical knowledge?426 It is not that naturalistic theories such as
Eberly’s are worthless; we just have to recognize their limits. At best, naturalistic explanations
show how natural events help encourage and explicate pre-existing supernatural belief. The original
belief itself, however, seems untouchable.
Or does it? Jeremy Harte, author of one of the most recent serious books on fairies, Explore:
Fairy Traditions, somewhat opaquely suggests that people never really believed in fairies at all.
While Harte argues that many fairy stories were taken seriously, he views most of these as
conscious metaphors.427 This approach is more respectful of tradition than is that of Purkiss,428 if
only because it credits “believers” with the ability to understand their own thoughts. Nevertheless,
Harte comes no closer than Purkiss to basing his theories on tradition: Even if Harte does not
engage in psychoanalysis, his critical tools are based on psychoanalysis’ symbolic tendencies. For
example, near the start of his book, Harte explains:
Fairies are not real as the things of this world are real. They live in grassy mounds, but if you slice the top
off a mound, you will not find the fairies inside – though you may soon find out that should have left well
alone. In areas with a rich folklore of caves, like North Wales or the Hebrides, there are very few stories
that link them with fairies. Why so? It is not hard to imagine an actual tribe of people dwelling in caves,
while it is quite impossible to imagine a real race that lives inside mounds or rocks; and fairies have to be
unimaginable. That’s what makes them fairies.429
Just like Holbek’s and Piø’s changeling argument, Harte’s analysis here is circular: The reason why
fairies are unimaginable is because they clearly do not live inside mounds and rocks, and they live
inside mounds and rocks because they are unimaginable. Harte is mixing the traditional with the
scholarly mindset. It may well be that you will find no fairies if you open up a mound, but it is by
no means obvious that people who believed in fairies 200 years ago would have said this. Indeed,
some legends do involve encounters with supernatural beings as a result of digging into mounds.430
If most believers in fairies never encountered fairies after cutting the top off of a burial mound, it
was probably precisely because, as Harte himself notes in the passage quoted above, they were
worried about the dangers of doing so and therefore avoided the activity. Harte insists that “When
people use a fairy story to talk about other things that matter to them, the story itself is not
diminished. We are looking for a kind of truth which will heighten the poetry of the tale, not whittle
it away.”431 What he fails to see is that this view is just a reflection of his own desires: Because he
cannot imagine fairies, he wants to turn fairy legends into folk poetry, whether or not such an
intention is expressed within tradition.
It must be reiterated that none of these charges are unique to Evans-Wentz, Purkiss, Eberly,
Harte, or Holbek and Piø. Of these mindsets, however, only Evans-Wentz’s receives much support
from folkloric primary sources, and even so, his was definitely a minority opinion in the early
1900s.
Back near the beginning of this book, we briefly considered why the naturalistic theory of
fairies is insufficient to explain belief, and the extract from Olsen’s mermaid article that we saw is
just another example of this. Nonetheless, the naturalistic theory has been the scholarly – and most
definitely the popular – norm. Unfortunately, it is not merely that naturalistic theories do not always
stand up to close inspection; the idea itself is fundamentally flawed. David Hufford, an innovator in
what he terms the experience-centred approach, discusses one of the problems with naturalistic
methodology:
Events accurately observed and reasoning properly carried out are in some cases central in the
development and maintenance of folk belief, even when the beliefs appear fantastic. [...] The
merman example [that attributes merfolk to manatee sightings] also indicates that such
explanatory efforts should demonstrate a high degree of correspondence with the details of the
tradition in question. Explanations that require the omission of substantial quantities of
traditional features or the attribution of poor observation and faulty reasoning in the
development of tradition are more speculative. [...] The sole advantage of this “explanation”
was that it replaced a creature of folk tradition with an animal that had been described by
naturalists. This was accomplished, however, at the cost of extreme and unsupported
implications about the powers of observation, knowledge of the environment, and reasoning
ability of northern sailors. Such explanations are not necessarily inaccurate, but empirical
support for them is vital. Otherwise, they tend to be circular.432
One issue that is rarely taken up by the naturalistic theorizers is why, exactly, people all over
Northern Europe had such a hard time observing things prior to about 1800. When hardly anyone
today would mistake a manatee for a mermaid – no matter how poor the light – it is difficult to
understand why people would have done so long ago.
Hufford is not, however, content with debating against the naturalists:
Explanations also should presuppose only phenomena that are themselves subjects of empirical
investigation and therefore are scientifically well authenticated. To the extent that an
explanation relies on phenomena whose existence is controversial (e.g., the statement that
death-announcing apparitions are merely symbolically represented telepathic perceptions) or are
poorly understood, that explanation must be considered speculative. In some cases there is
simply a change in language that trades one unknown for another and thus is redescription or
translation rather than explanation. The folk belief has been explained away rather than
explained.433
Hufford uses spiritualism as his example here, but he could just as well be speaking of the
psychoanalytic approach. What do Purkiss’ arguments actually explain? Do they not simply replace
fairy with sex urge?
The trouble with folkloric atheism, with not believing in any theory that is not supported by the
primary sources, is that it – unlike psychoanalysis – is terribly unsexy. The experience-centred
approach, which tries to take legendary material at face value, may be more accurate, but this
accuracy comes at the expense of grandiosity. The experience-centred methodology rarely explains
anything besides the experience itself. A reader of Hufford’s The Terror that Comes in the Night
may finish the book convinced that a large number of people have had and continue to have
startlingly-consistent experiences that they regard as supernatural, but this reader will be no closer
to understanding why the experiences happen. All that has been achieved is an excellent description
of the experience. For most people, this result is just not good enough, and even experience-centred
folklorists must yearn for a real answer, for something with the sweep of psychoanalysis or
spiritualism. However, the best we can say is that, even though we do not have the answer, it is
unlikely that the rival methodologies have it either, and if nothing else, our methodology takes the
least chances and is the most intellectually honest.
We have been speaking in the present tense here, which may seem odd considering that, up until
now, we have been studying beliefs that were only widespread from the Middles Ages until,
perhaps, the mid-1800s. Up until now, we have been interested in what people once believed and in
how much people today know about past belief. Our argument has been that an understanding of
past belief is a prerequisite for an understanding of cultural history.
Still, it is misleading to label belief in the supernatural as a historical phenomenon. Belief in the
supernatural is far from dead today. We are not speaking of religion now either, not of Christianity
or Islam or Judaism or Buddhism or neopaganism or any other mythological system. We are
speaking of supernatural events that are experienced by average, everyday people. We do not limit
ourselves to hippies or spiritualists, to any oft-insulted sub-culture. Northern Europeans today have
a good deal of pride in their rationality, in the fact that they no longer believe in social fairies,
mermaids, or the Catholic godhead. People find it impossible to believe that even 300 or 400 years
ago, there was belief in fairies. Average, everyday people tell me that fairies have always been the
preserve of fairy tales and that they have never truly been believed in or, if they have, then it was a
long time ago that it happened, probably not since the coming of Christianity and definitely not
since the Reformation. Then, when they are through telling me that the very idea of belief in fairies
and all the rest is absurd, they proceed to tell me the same stories I read in books on supernatural
folklore.
It is as David Hufford says. Language trades one unknown for another, and unbeknownst to
almost everyone, that same strand of belief that survived from at least the Middle Ages until well
into the Romantic period still thrives today. Faith, you see, is eternal.
Chapter 18: Back to the Ghost Hill
Let us return to Lille Rise’s ghost hill. My father-in-law, 53-year-old Peter Grydehøj, grew up on
Grydehøj Farm and has no memory of the burial mound for which he and the farm were named.
Already in 1952, the hill had, to the untrained eye, disappeared. However, for Jørgen Skaarup of
Langeland’s Museum, the archaeologist who led the last excavation of the burial mound in 1975,
Grydehøj is very much present:
Jørgen Skaarup: We found some remains of skeletons inside [the mound], and the funny thing
about it was that some of them had been dug up before. And they’d then been taken home to the
farmhouse, Grydehøj, by one of the farmhands who’d dug in there. And then, at home on the
farm, so fearsome a haunting began that the farmer’s wife didn’t want to have them anymore. It
was an account I was told by the then-owner of the farm. I don’t know... Was it your current
family that owned the farm?
Adam Grydehøj: Yes. [The farm was then owned by Hans Peter Simon Grydehøj, Peter
Grydehøj’s father.]
JS: In 1975? Good. He told me, then, that story. So, we went over and dug in the hill and
opened up that which you can see here [In a diagram in Skaarup’s Yngre Stenalder på øerne
syd for Fyn.] and dug down to the chamber area, and there, we found a wooden box – about the
size of a contemporary beer-case – completely packed with human bones. So, it was simply that
someone had dug these bones down again in order to escape the haunting over in the house.
AG: Do you know when it happened?
JS: Yes, we do. […] Yes, there were excavations in it in 1865. […] I can’t remember who it was
from the farm who told me that story. I just think it’s funny that, afterwards, we dug in the
mound-chamber, then we found, you know, the buried bones. […] I’ve also been out here on
Langeland [A larger island near Ærø.] and excavated a Viking Age burial place out where
there was a tradition that two beheaded men were supposed to haunt. There, we found those two
beheaded men. It’s 1000 years back, right? That tradition has, then, survived, that there were
supposed to be two decapitated people buried there. It’s called Kumle Hill.
Peter Grydehøj feels very strongly that his father did not believe in the supernatural, and this may
well be the case, but it is amazing nonetheless that memory of the reburying of bones in Grydehøj
survived intact for 110 years. There is a traditional taboo against disturbing the remains of the dead,
an act that often brings on the wrath of ghosts, and looking at the archaeological evidence, we can
assume that this had a hand in the events on Grydehøj Farm. We might, however, have a niggling
doubt over whether the reburied bones incident is strictly ghost oriented.
We must recall that Hübertz singled out Grydehøj as a hill around which social fairies were
active, and a large swath of folklore is devoted to the results of damaging or even walking atop fairy
hills. An Irish storyteller, Jenny McGlynn gives an instructive account of her husband’s experience
with the Rusheen, an ancient, bush-covered fortification that is associated with the fairies434:
I feel there is something, something there, because Tom got a firing – the people that owned the
Rusheen told Tom to get a fire out of it – and he went in and got the firing. And from that day
he got it until the last stick was burned we were in want and hardship. And I believe it happened
because of that place.435
In this legend, Tom and Jenny – like the inhabitants of Grydehøj in the 1860s – get off lightly, but
interfering with mounds connected with the fairies sometimes leads to permanent physical harm436
or death.
Although, from Jørgen Skaarup’s statement, it is impossible to know whether the people of
Grydehøj Farm were plagued by fairies or ghosts, we might assume that the supernatural
antagonists are ghosts because they are placated by the replacement of the bones. If we were of the
mind to say that these beings were, in fact, fairies though, we would have little trouble arguing that
the fairies were simply angry at the taking of anything from their mound, and the fact that bones
were taken is irrelevant. The entire question is, of course, somewhat silly since most people will say
that is unlikely that the Grydehøj family was haunted by anything whatsoever. From the point of
view of the nonbeliever, the haunting was some sort of figment of their imaginations. Folklorically,
however, the distinction – or lack of it – between some ghost experiences and some fairy
experiences is important. It is not just that fairies and ghosts can act alike; as we have seen, to many
past believers, some fairies were dead humans. People of this sort would have believed in two
supernatural orders of the dead: The dead who lived with fairies and the dead who were actual
ghosts. Believers in general had quite different ideas about ghosts and fairies, may have had varying
techniques to combat their ill influences, and were certainly not indifferent to the distinction
between the two classes of beings. Still, the point remains that some types of legends can involve
different types of supernatural beings. On an experiential level, when we consider what the people
of Grydehøj actually touched, saw, heard, smelled, and tasted when undergoing their haunting, their
experiences could have been attributed to either fairies or ghosts.
The deciding factor as to which being took the blame was the type of belief prevalent on 1860s
Ærø and – just as importantly – the type of belief prevalent today. Jørgen Skaarup’s narrative does
not specify ghosts or fairies, yet we fill in the blanks and guess ghosts almost as second nature.
Why? Because when details are lacking, we assume that explanation which best fits into our own
worldview. Even those who do not believe in ghosts are unlikely to view ghost “superstition” and
fairy “superstition” as equally superstitious. Just about all of my contributors – barring spiritualists
– sees fairy belief as ridiculous, regardless of whether they are believers or nonbelievers in ghosts.
At worst, ghost belief is a delusion. Fairy belief, on the other hand, is commonly seen as insanity.
In my interviews with people living on Ærø, six people speak openly about believing in fairies.
All of these contributors are spiritualists. A further three individuals hint at fairy belief so heavily
that I have concluded that they are believers even though they go short of professing belief, with
two of them even explicitly denying belief when pressed. So, with some degree of certainty, we can
say that at least nine out of 61 contributors believe in fairies. We must recall that my sample group
is skewed towards those with a prior interest in the subject matter, so spiritualists – of which I
interviewed nine – are probably overrepresented. Nevertheless, I suspect that people with
spiritualist worldviews are more common than even the worst of cynics fear, and the spiritualists’
ideas about the supernatural realm are, in many ways, the foundations of the broader public’s
conception of it. Even people who do not hold to spiritualism usually accept the spiritualists as
representative of supernatural believers in general. Thus, when we begin to explore belief today, we
must start with those who believe most strongly.
Chapter 19: Spiritualism on Ærø
Typically, today’s spiritualists work under the assumption that the fairies and spirits they believe in
are more or less the same as the fairies and spirits of 18th- or 19th-Century folk belief. Still,
spiritualism is – and has always been – a multi-pronged movement, holding various groups with
quite different philosophies and sets of beliefs, so we must always be aware that spiritualism is just
a handy word, not a terribly descriptive one. It is interesting that, despite the fact that there were
various types of 17th Century spiritualists, the different spiritualist groups today have more or less a
common ancestry. For example, even though present-day Wiccan neopagans and Freemasons hold
radically divergent philosophies, they are both linked to the same historical events.
Spiritualism is at once a narrower and broader subject than folklore of the supernatural. At one
level, spiritualism can be seen as the “academicizing” and systematizing of folk belief, yet it also
reaches beyond folk belief, into the realm of metaphysics, religion, and philosophy. It is not my
intention to debate the relative merits of the different schools of present-day spiritualism. We will,
rather, in order to comprehend those who believe most strongly in the supernatural, look briefly at
the evolution of these movements. Just as today’s adherents to, say, Judaism and Christianity might
have difficulty accepting the commonplace quality of supernatural belief in their own religions’
histories, some of today’s spiritualists might be surprised at their religions’ pasts. In the case of the
Freemasons, the past may be obscured for the sake of possessing a mythical or more noble heritage.
For the Wiccan and Germanic neopagans, it may be to provide a historical basis that does not
otherwise exist. That the historical ideas held within these movements are often incorrect does
nothing to lessen the potential value of what the movements believe ought to be done in today’s
world.
The search for the origins of Western spiritualism can be brought as far back as you please, but
it is probably best to start our analysis at the spot where the field-exploding Frances Yates started
hers, in the Renaissance. Throughout the pre-19th Century part of this story, Yates will be our
primary point of reference.
Our story of the history of today’s spiritualism begins in 1453, when the Ottoman Empire
captured Constantinople, and many of the resident Greeks fled to the West. The Greeks brought
with them historical texts that had been famous by reputation in Western Europe but unavailable –
often considered “lost” – throughout the Middle Ages. Among these were the works of Plato. This
may not appear too significant, but it must be considered that although educated men of the Middle
Ages would have been able to debate Platonism until the well ran dry, they lacked direct sources of
this ancient Greek thinker, the most important philosopher of the Catholic Church. One notes with
shock, for example, while reading Gervase of Tilbury’s immensely learned Otia Imperialia, that he
everywhere assumes that Plato and the other Greek philosophers were familiar with the Old
Testament and had encountered the holy book in Egypt. Whole portions of Plato’s philosophy were
thought to either have been inspired by Judaism or composed in response to Judaism, something
that we now know to be untrue. The fall of Constantinople might have recovered Plato for the West
and shown theologians that he was free from Biblical influences, but as far as spiritualism is
concerned, it had far more significant repercussions.
Besides the works of Plato, the fleeing Greeks brought to Italy a series of texts written in Greek
that came to be called Corpus Hermetica. Corpus Hermetica actually arrived in Florence shortly
after Plato’s texts did, and amazingly, such were the hopes for the former work that the translation
of Plato was put on hold until a translation of Corpus Hermetica could be completed.437 Corpus
Hermetica was thought to have originated in ancient Egypt at about the time of Moses and consisted
of writings concerning a priest-king named Hermes Trismegistus [Hermes the Thrice-Great], who
speaks at length about an Egyptian magical religion and is said to rule over a utopian City of the
Sun. Like Plato, Hermes Trismegistus had been known in the West prior to his arrival since a
number of Church fathers – most prominently Lactantius and Augustine – had written about his
work, believing him to be ancient.438 In 1614, the Swiss philologist, Isaac Casaubon, undertook a
textual examination of Corpus Hermetica and proved the book’s relative youth by tracing Corpus
Hermetica to Greek Gnostics of the 2nd and 3rd Centuries CE.439 There were still many philosophers
who did not fully accept this judgement, in part, perhaps because assenting to Casaubon meant
denying such authorities as Augustine and the great thinkers of the early Renaissance. The result
was a tendency among theologians and philosophers to doubt Hermes Trismegistus’ historicity
while nonetheless elevating the content of his supposed sayings.440
The real trouble was not that there was necessarily anything terribly profound about the ideas in
the book but, rather, that the Gnostics – really, a term referring to various religious groups that
flourished in the Middle East and Persia at this time – had borrowed ideas from the New and Old
Testaments and the Ancient Greeks. A sign of the vast variety of influences that entered into
Gnostic work is that even though the writers of Corpus Hermetica stressed personal spiritual
development without any outright mention of Judaism or Christianity, other Greek Gnostics during
the same period were responsible for overtly-Christian, non-canonical New Testament works such
as The Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians, The Gospel of Mary, and The Gospel of Judas. It might
seem obvious to scholars today that Corpus Hermetica was unlikely to have been ancient, but in the
1400s and 1500s, the Hermetic writings’ ancientness went virtually unquestioned.
What amazed the scholars of Renaissance Italy was that, even though Hermes had apparently
lived 7,000 years before Jesus and 5,000 years before Plato, his philosophy contained aspects of
both Christian and Ancient Greek thought. Hermes was seen as a prophet of Christianity. The
rediscovery of Hermes more or less coincided with the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and
the Jews’ subsequent spread throughout Europe led to Christian interest in Cabala, or Jewish
mysticism.441 The then-famous second-generation Hermetic scholar, Pico della Mirandola, realised
how well Hermeticism, Cabala, and the angelic hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius fit together,442 and
his synthesis of these three religious movements would persist until long after the Corpus
Hermetica itself ceased to be viewed as ancient. Much of what can be said of Hermes Trismegistus
can also be said of Pseudo-Dionysius, a man whose 5th Century CE works would not have received
so much attention had they had not been mistaken for texts written 300 years earlier.
Although the legendary Hermes Trismegistus was not a Christian, his vague prophesying of
Christianity allowed his followers to place the Hermetic synthesis philosophy within a Christian
framework. This magical philosophy aimed at opening the practitioner up to influences from the
angels, leading to its ready acceptance by many alchemists of the period. Cornelius Agrippa’s De
occulta philosophia of the early 1530s brought various strands of Pico-inspired philosophy together
and truly popularized Hermeticism, becoming the primary Hermetic textbook for scholars.
Although Agrippa was hounded as a black magician even during his own lifetime, opinion against
him became far blacker after his death, and he became a sort of symbol of Satanic influence. 443
Alchemists are today caricatured as madmen seeking the transformation of base metals into gold,
but historical alchemy represented an attempt at creating a philosophical system that could meld the
spiritual and natural worlds.
Cornelius Agrippa and the majority of the other Hermeticists at this time were devout
Christians, yet some philosophers took the more extreme view that the heliocentric, or sun-centred,
religion described in the Corpus Hermetica was, in fact, superior to that of the Jews and Christians
and that later religions had simply misunderstood Hermes’ wise teachings. One of these
philosophers was the Italian monk, Giordano Bruno, who travelled Europe in the second half of the
1500s, trying to convince both Protestants and Catholics to turn to Hermes’ apparent Egyptian
religion of universal love and brotherhood. It was Bruno’s belief that the world would soon be
united under a single priest-king of this religion, a belief that was not, after all, that different from
the contemporary Christian apocalyptic and millenarian ideas. Bruno’s energetic support for the
dawning of this new era led to his being burned at the stake by the Papal Inquisition in 1600.
Nevertheless, Bruno’s life’s work was not entirely unsuccessful: His philosophy was influential in
the creation of a supposed later secret society known as the Rosicrucians or The Brethren of the
Rose Cross.444
A younger contemporary of Bruno was Tommaso Campanella, another Italian monk and student
of Corpus Hermetica. In 1600, he planned a revolution in the Kingdom of Naples, hoping to turn
the city into the City of the Sun, a state ruled by magic and based on the principles of Hermes
Trismegistus. This revolution failed, and Campanella was imprisoned until 1626, escaping Bruno’s
harsh fate by feigning insanity. During his time in prison, he wrote prolifically and was in contact
with those behind the alchemical Rosicrucian movement mentioned earlier. In 1634, Campanella
was given his freedom, and he eventually went to France, finding a welcoming monarchy there.
Shortly before he died, he prophesied that the newborn son of Louis XIII would unite the world
under one religion and state and would take on the role of priest-king in the City of the Sun.445
When we realize that it is in this way that Louis XIV became known as the Sun King and that many
influential people expected him to usher-in the universal reformation and return to paradise, Louis
XIV’s fabled self-obsession is, perhaps, easier to comprehend.
It is unlikely that the Rosicrucians themselves actually existed at the time when their existence
was first heralded in the 1610s, but the intention of the hoax concerning this all-knowing Christian
fellowship was intended to inspire “a third Reformation” — following the Protestant Reformation
and the Counter-Reformation – along Hermetic lines.446 Even though Rosicrucianism itself was
inspired both directly and indirectly by Hermeticism, the hoax led to an altogether real Hermetic
renaissance. Frances Yates holds that the most important influence on the Rosicrucian masterminds
was John Dee, the greatest scientist of Elizabethan England, who – like most contemporary
scientists – was heavily interested in the occult. Dee’s took a Hermetic approach to the occult and,
like Agrippa, has suffered much posthumous indignity.447 In 1659, a half a century after his death,
Dee’s personal records of his summoning of and communication with angels by means of his
medium friend, Edward Kelley, were published by an unsympathetic source. This resulted in a
strong reaction against Dee’s already-suspect philosophy, not because it proved that Dee was
delusional but because it was taken as evidence that he had been in touch with evil spirits, making
him a kind of witch along the lines of Agrippa.448 It was only much later, when scientists stopped
concerning themselves with angels, that Dee came to be mocked as a lunatic rather than a heretic.
Such was the fate of one of the most prominent and scientifically-productive mathematicians of the
1500s.
We have looked at Renaissance Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism because they resulted in
actual, later Hermetic secrets societies. Although few of these societies are well-documented (a
result, as Yates cleverly notes, of their being secret societies), the earliest known Masonic
organizations pop up in mid-17th Century England and are linked to prominent Hermeticists.449
Some of these same Hermeticists later founded London’s Royal Society,450 yet another reminder
that it was only relatively recently that greatest minds in science ceased to be the greatest minds in
spiritualism as well. The Masonic Grand Lodge of England was formed in 1717, and Freemasonry
in more or less its current form spread quickly thereafter.451 The 1888 London founding of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by three Freemasons had little effect on the majority of
concurrent Masonic institutions, but this overtly-Rosicrucian religious order offered a resynthesization of contemporary Freemasonry with alchemical Hermeticism, bringing the Masonic
philosophy somewhat back to its roots. 452 The Golden Dawn was, in part, made possible by the
success of Theosophy, a discipline that we shall examine shortly. Among the early, influential
members of the Golden Dawn were W.B. Yeats453 (who was also a Theosophist and would become
instrumental in the 20th Century re-imagining of Irish myth and legend) and Aleister Crowley454
(who we will have occasion to mention later).
The Hermetic, Rosicrucian, and masonic movements did not develop in a vacuum but were part
of a broader alchemical revolution. In his séances, John Dee skirted the edges of a very active subdivision of Early Modern alchemy that concerned itself with communication with and control over
spirits. Alchemical spiritual manipulation was the preserve of the educated classes, was not the
folklore of the common folk: To its practitioners, the summoning and ordering about of spirits was
a true science. Despite the academic nature of such summonings, those who practised it were not
universally respected by their scientific peers, perhaps because manipulation of spirits was seen as a
gross and self-serving use of knowledge. One notorious summoner, the late-16th Century London
physician, Simon Forman, describes how he spent much of the year 1588 engaged in necromancy
and the “calling up angels and spirits.”455 If men like Forman were disrespected, it was not because
they believed in the supernatural but because of their methods and aims, and their magical
achievements were widely believed in by the upper classes.
The spirits that such magicians summoned helped their summoners less out of goodwill than out
of magical necessity, as is evidenced by the amusing 16th-Century tale of William Stapleton.
Stapleton, a monk, had left his monastery in search of spirit-obtained wealth. Being unsuccessful in
this quest, he found it necessary to defend himself to Thomas Cromwell. Stapleton’s letter to
Cromwell contains a description of how:
The parson of Lesingham and Sir John of Leiston with others to me unknown had called up of late
Andrew Malchus, Oberion, and Incubus. And then the parson of Lesingham did demand of Andrew
Malchus, and so did Sir John Leiston also, why Oberyon would not speak to them. And Andrew Malchus
made answer, for because he was bound unto the Lord Cardinal.456
Cromwell himself, as Katherine Briggs notes, was known for possessing a familiar spirit, so it
should not come as a surprise that Cardinal Wolsey did as well. This story plays upon the
Cardinal’s reputation for greed, but however much Stapleton himself believed in what he wrote, it is
interesting to note the choice of spirits summoned by the parson.
Andrew Malchus is an Anglicization of Adramelech, an ancient Assyrian god who was, like
most pagan gods, demonised by the Jews and Christians (II Kings 17:31). Incubus, on the other
hand, is a general name, simply being a Classical night demon that afflicted women, often sexually.
Meanwhile, Oberion is the same as the fairy king, Oberon, now famous on account of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This Oberion is an Anglicization of Auberon, the
powerful dwarf who appears in the13th-Century French Romance, Huon of Bordeaux, which
became popular in England following its translation in 1540. Auberon himself is derived the
Germanic Alberich [Literally, “Elf-Ruler”], who appears in the German Ortnit poem, written about
1230. Ortnit and Huon of Bordeaux are very similar, suggesting that the one derived from the other
or that they share a common source. If this is so, then the original is surely Germanic, for Alberich
is one of the few widely-known named fairies in Medieval Europe. This character appears in many
of the Germanic literary works concerning the Roman and Hunnish destruction of the Burgundians
at Worms in 437:457 He is variously named Andvari (Iceland’s Poetic Edda and Volsunga Saga),
Alfrik (Norway’s Thiðrek’s Saga), and Alberich (Germany’s Nibelungenlied). Alberich was, of
course, the inspiration for the primary antagonist in Richard Wagner’s operatic Ring Cycle.458 The
result is that, via a French intermediary, the most famous fairy in German literature is the same as
the most famous fairy in English literature. Stapleton’s use of Oberion here is, furthermore, an
interesting sign of the learned adaptation for domestic purposes of named fairies from elsewhere in
Europe.
From a folkloric perspective, the three spirits summoned by the parson of Lesingham – a
Biblical devil, a Roman demon, and a Continental fairy king – are all radically different from one
another. To educated Englishmen of the 16th century, they were all the same. Whereas most
commoners would baulk at the idea of comparing hell-fiends with fairies, the aristocracy tended to
view the whole lot as evil and, consequently, as immensely valuable to have around for magical
purposes. After all, whereas one might feel some guilt about bossing around an angel, it was more
morally ambiguous to compel a malevolent spirit.
After the Early Modern experiments with Hermeticism, which culminated in the Freemasons,
the next great development in spiritualism came with the 1875 founding of the Theosophical
Society in New York by the Ukrainian medium, Helena Blavatsky. There was certainly no lack of
interest in the occult prior to this, but whereas popular spiritualism tended by unsystemicized, and
Freemasonry was defined by its exclusivity, Theosophy was philosophical and open to all. Most
significantly, Theosophy marked the first major attempt in recent Western history to reconcile the
world’s various religions, which, we may recall, was the precisely the appeal of Christian
Gnosticism during the Renaissance and Hermeticism later on. By mingling Hinduism, Buddhism,
and Western mysticism, Blavatsky set the mould for what is now commonplace belief among
spiritualists. Unfortunately, intercine squabbles shook the Theosophical movement shortly after its
founder’s death in 1891, leading to a series of schisms concerning philosophical issues. In 1912, the
next great sea change within the movement occurred when the multi-talented German, Rudolph
Steiner, left the Theosophical Society and founded the Anthroposophical Society due to his
aversion to Theosophy’s ever-more Eastern slant. Anthroposophy has much in common with
Theosophy although the former has, obviously, the more Western outlook. Steiner’s integration of
Anthroposophy into everyday life resulted the two achievements for which he is best known today:
An alternative pedagogical system (Steiner-Waldorf education) the biodynamic agriculture
movement.
Although there would always be angry sectarian divisions within spiritualism, once both
Blavatsky and Steiner were dead and most of the leading occultist organizations like the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn had broken up into innumerable splinters, it seems as though – for the
average spiritualist at least – the great age of identification with any one movement came to a close.
Today, most spiritualists read the works of neither Blavatsky nor Steiner, and if Steiner’s popularity
is greater than that of Blavatsky, it is simply because Steiner is famous outside the spiritualist world
as well as within it. Most spiritualists are now only loosely dogmatic, probably the result of their
having gained their belief systems by reading numerous books of light philosophy written by
various, often contradictory authors.
While it is fair to say that few of today’s spiritualist movements have even weak links with
Freemasons, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn wielded philosophical influence far beyond
what its membership rolls might suggest, partially because this order placed more focus on religious
ritual than did the more philosophically-minded Theosophy and Anthroposophy. This ritual became
important since the next major development in spiritualism was an overtly religious one. In 1954,
an Englishman named Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today, a book describing his 1939
initiation into a witch’s coven in New Forest, in the south of England. The book came out just three
years after the repeal of the last of the British anti-witchcraft laws and four years after Gardner had
met the infamous former Golden Dawn enthusiast, Aleister Crowley. Gardner would later write The
Meaning of Witchcraft as well, and his two books claim to present the tenets and rituals of a preChristian religion that had survived into the present-day but was at risk of going extinct. This
religion would eventually come to be known as Wicca. Gardner’s “historical” rituals and overall
philosophy seem to have acquired much from earlier spiritualist movements like the Golden Dawn,
and from the philosophy of Crowley in particular.459 Like Freemasonry, Wicca was, at first, an
exclusive and initiatory religion, but as it grew in popularity, many of its adherents began practising
it on a more casual level, with the result that people who today identify themselves as Wiccans are
not necessarily part of a secret society.
Margaret Murray, an English comparative religionist and Egyptologist, published her The
Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921 and The God of the Witches in 1931, and these books
offered the future Wiccans a scholarly basis for the religion’s supposed history.460 Murray claims
that there existed a pan-European, pre-Christian paganism that had continued an underground
existence despite centuries of Christian persecution. This is a pretty thought, yet it is unfortunate
that, historically speaking, Murray’s conclusions are unfounded. From the available evidence it
seems as though her methods were, at best, disingenuous but, more likely, the result of wilful
manipulation of evidence. Nevertheless, her work was popular when published, and the eventual
emergence of Wicca ensured that it would not be forgotten. It is even possible that the New Forest
coven into which Gardner entered was, in a stunning display of circularity, a quite new group that
based itself on Murray’s scholarship.
Murray’s influence extends beyond Wicca, however, for her focus is not on how witchcraft
ought to be practised today but on proving the reality of a pan-European, pre-Christian matriarchy
that worshipped a horned god. This idea, as well as Murray’s feminist take on the witch hunts,
draws feminists thinkers from outside Wicca and – rather perversely, since Murray’s thesis
concerns a horned, male god – has been appropriated by those who support the theory of a
universal, pre-Christian cult of the Earth Mother. Sadly, neither the Earth Mother, the horned god,
nor the matriarchy theories are accepted by most reputable historians, comparative religionists, and
folklorists.461
Wicca is far and away the most popular of the neopagan religions, and it is the only neopagan
religion – excepting Theosophy and Anthroposophy, which have more or less become common
property – that has had any influence on any of my Ærøese contributors. Ásatrú (Old Norse
religious revival) and specifically-Celtic forms of neopaganism have had no impact locally.
Regardless, all of these aforementioned religions are at least acceptant of belief in what their
believers call fairies. Throughout this book, we have analysed the thoroughness with which fairies
have been Christianised. In my experience, neopagans tend to swallow Christian propaganda by
accepting that the fairies believed in a few hundred years ago were remnants of paganism, were
pagan gods or “nature spirits”.
Today, the Freemasons have retained the Rosicrucian ideal – based on Bruno, Campanella, Dee,
and others – of philanthropy, the Hermetic/Cabalist geometric philosophy, the Hermetic Egyptian
symbolism, and the non-denominational creed of those enlightened Renaissance men who
envisioned a unified world. The various strands of neopaganism that now exist also owe more to
Rosicrucianism and Hermetic mysticism than they do to any actual ancient religions or societies of
witches. That relatively few members of these different movements are aware of their movement’s
history hardly justifies calling the objectively-documented history into question.
Realisation that magic, religion, and science were closely related in the Medieval and Early
Modern periods is essential for understanding spiritualism’s historical development. Corpus
Hermetica is as much an astrological/astronomical text as it is a philosophical or religious one, so
much so that when Copernicus first revealed his heliocentric theory of the universe in 1543, he
introduced it by means of reference to the thoughts of Hermes Trismegistus.462 The great scientists
of the 16th and 17th Centuries hoped that their work in physics and chemistry would help prepare the
world for the long-awaited universal reformation and were very much at the centre of the debate on
whether magical practice was good or bad.
And today? The development of spiritualism has not come to an end. Like every movement, it
waxes and wanes in popularity, occasionally finds supporters in its enemies and detractors in its
friends. And now, it has brought us home to Ærø.
On the pedestrian street in Marstal, beside the hotdog grill-bar, lies the Health Clinic. The
Health Clinic consists of two, small rooms, the one crammed with crystals and the other lightly
decorated and arranged for therapy sessions. Between these two rooms is the store’s foyer, no larger
than a closet and dominated by a display of organic herbs and dried beans. Unless one is there for
therapy or to buy Indian tea, it is to the left side that one turns, into the chamber overflowing with
bubbling crystal fountains. Hematite, amethyst, citrine, Nepalese quartz— The Health Clinic has
flown-in life-enhancing crystals from around the world, and I am so amazed by all the sparkly rocks
and the accompanying explanations of their metaphysical properties that it takes me a moment to
notice the fairies. These are winged fairies, made of porcelain and bearing flowers, and they have
been placed in the pools of the burbling fountains, purified water mingled with scented oil purling
about their dainty, fairy feet.
I am in the Health Clinic to speak with the store’s owner, 49-year-old Marijanne Meyer.
Marijanne grew up in the German countryside and just came to Denmark four years ago, so her
mastery of the language is as yet incomplete. As we sit together in the therapy room, she tells me
her views on the spirit world:
I believe in different worlds, in different levels in one world. And in the old times, people
were… They were born in a different way. It was not so hectic, and they had work with earth,
and they came in relation to nature. And of course, I believe that there are other beings, not just
in the world, but everything. Also, other worlds, other solar systems. But that is very much my
belief. We all have different tasks in the world, and these beings are there if we go in contact.
And they are different. I mean, different tasks.
This is a romanticization of the past. While people hundreds of years ago probably were closer to
nature, the fairies about which they told stories were not like those that spiritualists know today.
Marijanne tells me that most of her customers do not share the totality of her beliefs, and that the
majority of people who visit the shop believe in some aspects of her worldview but not others.
Some materialists even come in to buy crystals and porcelain fairies, not because they believe in
their efficacy but because they “enjoy them.” For Marijanne though the crystals are not just shiny
rocks:
Marijanne Meyer: Every stone has, I believe, its own being. All different materials have their
own information, and by this, I mean, you know, a type of being. Some people can see a being
in a stone or a plant. And fairies [elver]… I have a big garden, kitchen garden, and also a big
yard. I love flowers. […] This idea means that they aren’t dead. Flowers and stones, they aren’t
dead. You can communicate with them. They have a soul.
Adam Grydehøj: Are these beings the same as the ones on your earrings? [Marianne is wearing
flower-fairy-shaped earrings.]
MM: Yes, a type of fairy. But they are very different too. They can also be like a little dwarf
[dværg], a gnome, an Ærø-brownie.
Marijanne’s mention of the Ærø-brownie is interesting. These little Danish Christmas-brownie dolls
are not unique to Ærø, but the woman who makes and sells them has added the island’s name to
that of the doll. Gnomes, as we have already noted, are not a part of traditional folklore, but it is
fitting that Marijanne speaks of dwarves since beings with this name are very much a part of past
German belief.
Marijanne believes that these beings inhabit stones and flowers but that few people are aware of
their existence:
Marijanne Meyer: Now, we do not have very much contact, now, people in the modern world.
But before, we had it. Also the Indians. If people are sick, then they make a tom-tom and
*pstui!* They say, if people are sick, then there is a spirit, a bad spirit. It is the same with my
homoeopathy.
Adam Grydehøj: Are all of these beings just essences of other things, or are some of them
independent?
MM: No, they are not independent. I do not think so. They work together in a particular way.
But you can also… There are angels. Angels work independently, I think. But also all on that
particular principle of love. And all together with a higher intelligence. I am open. I believe that
all religions have the same message. It is the most important. People should live their message
in a global way. The same works with animals, with plants, with fairies, with different beings.
Maybe also with angels, with different angels, with spirits.
AG: Hollyhocks. They exist here and in England and in the USA. Do the same beings exist in
all of these different places?
MM: Interesting. Very interesting. I think, maybe, they are the same with different people…
They are all people, but the one is brown, the other is white. I think so. It is not the same. I think
in England, there is a different being than in Denmark or America. I think they resemble one
another. They are one family, but they are not the same.
AG: The fairies with wings, like in your earrings— Where is it that they live?
MM: They live in plants.
AG: But where in the world?
MM: Over the world. I do not know. The important thing is to feel, but I cannot see fairies. But
because I feel, I believe in them. In England, for example, there are many fairies, many green
plants. They like green plants. Many grow, grow, grow, rain, and flowers and everything.
Maybe, in the desert, there are maybe not the same little fairies.
This concept of a universal force of love is common to most of my spiritualist contributors.
Certainly, it makes for a happy worldview, but it does no favours to traditional fairies, which only
rarely work for a higher power— Unless that power happens to be Satan. If one were so minded, it
would be possible to interpret certain traditions as proof that some fairies were viewed as local
fertility deities, but the essential point here is that they were local. If they helped crops grow, it was
because they benefited from doing so, not because it was their job. Similarly, although some plants
are dear to the fairies, it is only exceptionally that tradition suggests that a fairy lives in symbiosis
with a plant or rock, much less that it is a plant or rock463.
Marijanne has been a spiritualist for most of her life. Already when she was 16, she started
working as a healer, which did not go down well with her uncomprehending, materialistic family.
So, since her youth, she has decided to seek out people who understand her. Some such people visit
her shop in Marstal. Both locals and tourists stop by, and some of them are believers:
Marijanne Meyer: Old people come to me. They believe in powers, in other powers. Also in
beings and stones. Also in natural medicine and everything.
Adam Grydehøj: It surprises me that the old people are those who believe in it.
MM: Yes. And the modern people, they do not believe in it. Again, children. They come also
and believe in it. But between 30 and 50, they are very intellectual, focused on a way that is
materialistic and technical. But the elderly come to me as well. They know it from the old times.
They have worked. Either they have done some things on the farm. There they have spoken
with the being, “Come help me.” And thank them if they have gotten a good horse. And
afterwards, they talk with beings, with animals.
AG: Do you think that today’s youths will come to have the same beliefs when they’re 60 yearsold?
MM: No… Maybe, they don’t need the old names, Ærø-brownies... Maybe, they have another
name but the same principle maybe. [...] The Danes, compared with the Germans, are more
open to the mystical beings. You can feel it in the Scandinavian mythology. They are more
open, they believe… They come in this store and say, “I have a ghost. What can I do?” And
they are normal people, not a person who— [Marijanne pantomimes insanity.]. They are
intelligent people, and they say, “What can I do?” They feel it, they see it. […] Spirits and
ghosts have a problem if they come to you. Maybe, they have information for you. They contact
you and say, “You are not in the right room, apartment.” On the same principle as Christianity.
But I do not believe they are devils.
For Marijanne, it is a point of some concern that even though people from all walks of life are
sometimes afflicted by ghosts, only certain people come to her for help. I ask why some people fail
to deal with their ghost problems directly, and she replies, “They have angst. And if you have angst,
then you do not want to have it [A ghost.]. That is the first reaction. You say, “Get that away.” But
that is not how it works with sickness or with bad people. They come anyway. […] It is a message,
a piece of information for you.”
Marijanne’s fairy theory does not find broad acceptance in Denmark, but as we will see, both
spiritualists and non-spiritualists tend to view ghosts in broadly the same ways. What makes this so
odd is that spiritualism’s worldview is not, at first glance, compatible with that of “traditional”
ghosts, the ghosts believed in during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period and the ghosts
who appear in horror films. These earlier ghosts were most definitely Christian, and even after the
Protestants had abolished Purgatory, it seems as though most people – when personally confronted
with a ghost – were willing to view it as a restless spirit, not as a demon from Hell. Even though
these ghosts were not demons, Hell still loomed large over their existences, for ghosts were, like
fairies, trapped between salvation and damnation, unable to enter either Heaven or Hell. Ironically,
the loss of Purgatory may have made ordinary Protestants more rather than less apt to interpret
spirits as ghosts – as souls of the dead – since so long as Purgatory existed, there was an official
prison for unfulfilled souls, but without it, those people who died unprepared for either of the polar
afterlives had nowhere to go. Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant theologies appear to mesh well
with today’s spiritualism, however, because this spiritualism is most frequently – and I intend no
disrespect here – sunny, rosy, and sweet. Hell has no purpose in a worldview governed by a
universal principle of love.
Lutheranism is still Denmark’s state religion, but only about 41% of my contributors believe in
the Christian God. In contrast, 30% believe in no god, and 29% hold spiritualist religious ideas or
some other, non-traditionally Christian image of God. Even factoring in my skewed sample group
(including a disproportionate number of spiritualists and pastors), this is somewhat surprising since,
in 2005, 83% of all Danes were members of the Church of Denmark.464 There are many Danes who
believe in what they see as the general message of the New Testament but who do not believe in
God. These Christians are just as hostile to the idea of Hell as are spiritualists, and even among the
truly faithful Christians with whom I spoke, I only rarely get the impression of belief in a
Heaven/Hell dichotomy. Probably because spiritualism’s precept of universal love – both during
and after this life – really is so pleasant, it has been taken up non-spiritualists as well. This would, it
seems, leave ghosts in a bit of a bind. What, after all, are ghosts doing on Earth if they are neither in
a kind of worldly Purgatory or some other sort of balance between Heaven and Hell?
I am offered more detailed insight into the spirit world from 56-year-old Elenna Christensen, the
leader of Marstal’s after-school childcare service. Like many spiritualists, Elenna has an
impeccably-decorated home, a credit to the artistic tastes and abilities that infuse the movement. As
her enormous cat purrs away at my side on the sofa, Elenna tells me about her volunteer activities:
Elenna Christensen: I go out and cleanse [“Rense”. My spiritualist contributors rarely use the
term “eksorcisme”.] houses of – as I call them – earthbound spirits. And earthbound spirits, it
can mean ghosts, it can mean energy from the deceased who have not yet risen up, and it can
mean other forms of energy residing in a house. And it can also mean earth rays and water rays
and that sort of thing, right? But it’s more that old energy, energy that remains behind in a house
or in things – furniture or just about anything, right? – that one can lift that energy and change
it. It’s something I do when people ask me about it. So, I have both deceased people and all
sorts of types, children and old people.
Adam Grydehøj: You see them?
EC: Yes. I see them in here [in my head], right? So, I believe in it of course. Once, I spoke with
a very sick woman who was sick with cancer, and we spoke, of course, about what happens
when you die, right?, and how she’s lifted over into the light and that sort of thing and the idea
about another psychological body – because she was very sick in the end and very thin – and
how, when she comes over into the light, how different it could be. And so, she died. And three
days later, then she came home to my sitting room, in through the door and said I’d been
completely right and would like to say thank you because I’d told her about what it was like to
die and made it easier for her. And so, she could tell me that it was, actually, that experience
she’s had when she left her sick, dead body, right?, on the way to the new body and what it was
like crossing over to the other side and how big the difference was between being in the
physical body and the psychological [body]. And I told her children about it, and they became
so happy for her, that she was simply doing so well.
AG: When you say that you cleanse ghosts out of a house— Why are they there to start with?
EC: I can give you an example, a house here in Marstal. There was a young girl who’d moved
in, and she simply had so many problems with sleeping in the bedroom and that sort of thing,
right? And there was also something in the sitting room, which had previously been the kitchen.
And so, I go down there, and then it turns out that, inside her bed, there where her bed is, there’s
another type of bed, of course, and a woman was lying in that bed, a dead woman, her body
prepared. Back then, they lay in bed three days or something like that, and she was still lying
there. That energy that lay in her body hadn’t come up. Of course, she couldn’t sleep in that
room; she couldn’t lie on top of some other, dead woman. And that was the first thing. The next
was that, in the kitchen or that [room] which had been converted into the sitting room, a young
man came in and a girl who was a bit younger, right? And they were a family who’d lived there,
and they had so much sickness and sorrow and pain. The girl, she was handicapped. She had a
crippled leg, and the son, he had a psychological problem. And the mother was dead, and the
father, he was an alcoholic and wasn’t doing so well. So, there was so much pain in that family
that they had simply planted themselves down in the house and things and everything, right?
And it’d never been released. But they came eventually, one by one, and told their stories. Then,
I said, “Are you ready to go along into the light?” That they did, in turn. And when I left, I said
[to the girl who lived there], “Now, you have to keep a close eye on things” because if there
were still something, then she should tell me, and I would come again. So, she rings up two
days later, and then she comes with a big bouquet of flowers. And then, she says that she’s slept
in her bed now, and she slept the entire night. And her cat – her cat had also had problems –, it
went out, and it went in, and it went out, and it went in and couldn’t relax. Now, it just lay there
and slept. And it’s because there’s a suffering in it, a suffering or a sudden, violent death, right?
And then, they can’t find out where they are. They remain suspended between Heaven and
Earth. And many of them, they don’t know that there is another world. They believe in Hell,
they may believe in that, that Christian belief, right? And so, you don’t know that, when you
die, then you cross over to another world. It’s a perfectly natural thing. We all do it. They don’t
know that.
Although Elenna and the young lady she helps both have supernatural experiences and both believe
that they have interacted with the same ghosts, their experiences are completely different on a
phenomenological level. The young lady feels uncomfortable in her house, maybe has a sense that
there is someone else in the room: In any case, she is sufficiently convinced of a supernatural
explanation that she turns to Elenna for help. Elenna, however, can see and speak with the spirits.
To Elenna, Christianity itself is part of the reason why there are so many ghosts. People have
been confused by the concepts of Heaven and Hell. Elenna’s worldview is very much oriented
toward the individual: For example, one’s ability to cross over into the next world is determined by
one’s knowledge of the next world’s existence. In a sense, this is the same as the Protestant
Heaven/Hell dichotomy, with the corporeal world replacing Hell and “the light” replacing Heaven.
After all, the prospects for Protestant salvation are similarly linked primarily to knowledge and
recognition of God. The Earth might not be Hell to the living, but it certainly seems to be Hell to
the unfulfilled dead.
Most of my spiritualist contributors see ghosts as unhappy souls. For them, ghosts are miserable
by nature, which accords with past, Christian ghost belief. Elenna’s views on fairies, however, are
less traditional:
Elenna Christensen: For me, fairies [elverfolk] are this sort of not too big, glowing being. About
15 centimetres tall. They sort of have a glowing energy, little wings, and these very small,
splinky voices like *dee-dee-dee-dee*. They’ve lived, then, as males and females, right? [...]
AG: How long ago is it since people believed in them?
EC: They’re still up here in Ærø Elverhøj, and there’s an old legend that there has, actually,
been a fairy society in that hill. And how far back? I don’t think we have to go further back than
1800, 1700-1800. And maybe, further up. Maybe, also in 1900. […] There’re also these legends
where they have normal forms, right? And they’ve lived in those societies, and so then they
come out and lure men inside. There’s also something about that.
AG: Are they another type of being?
EC: Yes. They’re not the same. They are, actually, two different legends, one can say. Because
the small fairies, they’re only good, right? And the others, they can go either way. There’s
another type of subterranean being too that’s a bit more troll-like. I’m not sure if the Danish
troll is the same as the Norwegian troll. I’ve seen some Norwegian trolls in reality too, but I
haven’t seen any Danish trolls. But I think that the Danish trolls are different. I was on a
mountain hike at the time. Up in Norway, there are these sort of large nature Devas [“Gods” or
“spirits” in Buddhism and Hinduism.], right?, who guard some areas, landscapes, and that sort
of thing, right? And you have to request permission to go in. And so, we hadn’t done that. So,
we stumbled right into an area. It was up in northern Norway, those nature-folk, right?, and they
sort of lay some markers [to show one’s position] round about. They also use that shamanistic
energy and that sort of thing, right? And we hadn’t been attentive to it, so we stumbled, actually,
into an area where we should have asked permission to go in, right? So, we came around a sort
of cliff, and then these two trolls were sitting there. We’d never seen trolls before. […] And
then, they said, in Norwegian, “Who’s coming there?” [Elenna speaks the trolls’ lines in a very
high, somewhat indistinct voice.] or something or other, right? “What do you want here?” and it
was very “Oh, my goodness!” We just came stumbling in there, right? But then, we continued
because I became a bit frightened because of it, you know? So, we continued farther up, and
when we came back, then they weren’t there. There were two of us.
AG: How did they look?
EC: They were… They were sort of like how trolls look, I think. I mean, sort of a bit roughlooking, with sort of protruding ears.
AG: Like those statuettes one can buy…
EC: Yes, they were, actually, something like that. Not entirely, but… Now, it’s soon been many
years ago now. But when I saw them, I knew that they were trolls. […] They have brown skin,
right? And then, they’re a little overgrown, with a bit of hair. And then, they’re… These were,
maybe, a half a meter tall. They were sitting, right? And a bit broad-bodied. A powerful nose.
AG: Did they have clothes on?
EC: Did they have clothes on? Did they have clothes on? No, they didn’t. I don’t think so. I
can’t remember.
AG: Did they guard this area because it was their home or because it was their duty?
EC: No, it was because it was a part of their home.
AG: Do you know any stories about Norwegian trolls?
EC: No. Not that I can remember.
AG: I’m a bit surprised that you haven’t interested yourself in it since you’ve seen them.
EC: After, afterwards, I thought, “Oh, yes…” Of course, I was surprised when I first saw them,
but afterwards, it wasn’t strange for me because I’d worked with nature, right? And the man I
was together with, he was a shaman. He was a Norwegian shaman, right? He’d seen them too,
so he tried to explain to me that they lived there, and it was because we’d disturbed them that
they reacted in that way. You could meet them everywhere, anyway. If you were open for it,
then they’d be there, in many places. They’re a part of nature, or how do you say it? For me, it
wasn’t strange. It was five years ago, I think. Five or six years ago. And so, I relaxed a bit and
didn’t think any more about it. I think that’s why. Yes, they’re just a part of nature, right?
Although Elenna has above-average knowledge of past folklore, her views on supernatural beings
are influenced by her spiritualist philosophy, so she has trouble dealing with past belief. It is
impressive that she notes that not all fairies are unambiguously good, but she only achieves this by
differentiating between fairy races. Her little, winged fairies are typical flower-fairies whereas the
larger fairies are something more sinister. This permits her to retain something resembling the
universal doctrine of love although it is unclear whether or not, in light of the spiritualist
worldview, the larger social fairies could even be considered to be spirits or true fairies.
Nevertheless, this is a major folkloric improvement over Marijanne Meyer’s opinion that all fairies
– including such villains as the kelpie – are uniformly good.
Elenna’s uncertainty as to the connection between Danish and Norwegian trolls is fair enough
since folklorists might generally – though not absolutely – associate the Danish trolde with social
fairies and the Norwegian trolde with giants. Indeed, the statuettes that resemble the trolls Elenna
saw depict unsightly huldre, Norwegian social fairies that often possess tails and, like social fairies
everywhere, can be either beautiful or ugly. Despite being nearly analogous folklorically, however,
the Norwegian trolls have had a far more favoured passage into the 21st Century than their Danish
counterparts. Today, Danish trolls are typically thought to be either unpleasant or actively cruel, yet
in Norway, they still possess a degree of ambiguity and, for all their ugliness, are often considered
quite cuddly. Even from this perspective though, it is difficult to see where Elenna’s trolls fit in the
overall scheme of things. Unlike the nature-Devas she mentions, these trolls are simply mountain-
dwellers. They might help protect nature in some unexplained manner, and they are, we hear, “a
part of nature”, but unlike Marijanne Meyer’s fairies, these are more or less independent beings.
They live for themselves, have not been set to work in the spiritualist system of universal love.
Elenna is not the only spiritualist with whom I spoke who has decent knowledge of past
folklore, and this makes it all the more interesting that the spiritualists have not, on the basis of
historical evidence, decided to drop fairies altogether. It is clear from Elenna’s descriptions of
dangerous mermaids and human-sized social fairies that the only fairies who play a role in her
spiritualist system itself are the flower-fairies. It is not that she is unsympathetic to the other fairies;
it is just that they are self-interested beings. She knows that brownies are good helpers if treated
well and major annoyances if treated poorly, and while there is a good deal of pastoral Romanticism
in her thoughts on brownies today, there is nothing of Marijanne Meyer’s unified system. Elenna
imagines that brownies live in family groups, and she speaks of past belief in brownies on Ærø.
Although she is not positive that brownies exist, neither will she rule out their existence. This
prompts me to ask a question:
Adam Grydehøj: What do these brownies do now that there isn’t the same farming culture that
there once was?
Elenna Christensen: I think the brownies travel to other places where they can preserve their
culture. It might be in the north. It might also be in the south, to other countries like southern
Germany, Switzerland, where they even now have that old agriculture. I think they move. They
don’t want to live in hog farms and that kind of thing. It’s too modern. I think that they pull
away because there are many places where there’s a culture that’s equivalent to the one we had
a couple of years ago, in southern Europe.
In contrast to the brownies, trolls, and the other homely supernatural beings are the Devas:
Elenna Christensen: It’s a form of influx from the universal down to the Earth Plane, right? It’s
the Earth that receives energy. And it does it through this sort of being, yeah. The Devas, they
come from Deva Kingdom or Angel Kingdom. And so, they take part in transforming energy
from the universal down to Earth, right?, and then, they distribute energy out in a network.
Then, there are small Devas. It’s sort of a whole network of Devas. If they’re smaller, they’re
placed other places and that sort of thing. It works both on the Earth’s crust and works in the
earth as well.
Adam Grydehøj: Did people believe in them many years ago?
EC: No, I don’t think so. It was more these other things they believed in. This idea of Devas,
it’s something that they came to later, something that they figured out. There are, you know,
certain places on Ærø where you can still see that there’s been one of these subterranean
cultures. You can see it because it’s sort of like an area where – it’s tough to describe – if you
come driving, then you can see that, if there’s nothing now, then there’s been something. And
particularly with the old farms. It’s like, some trees can be standing there, and then there can be
a stone monument or something or other, right? Ad then, there can be a sort of grassy area, and
then you can simply see that there’s been a living culture of one type or another of subterranean
being there.
AG: Do some people have a better feeling for it than others?
EC: Yes. I think that it depends on how open you are to nature. If you don’t make yourself one
with it, then you can’t sense these things, I think.
The concept of Devas was popularised in the West by Theosophy and the writings of Helena
Blavatsky.465 Elenna tells me that East Ærø is very low in spiritual energy because it is no longer
very rural, but Skovby and Bregninge on West Ærø both have “heavier energy, [are] more oldfashioned.” That not even East Ærø is rural enough for Devas is surely bad news for cities and
suburbs elsewhere in Denmark. While it seems that Elenna is not limiting her discussion to Devas
here, it is still strange that she suggests that the activities of Devas – in Elenna’s belief, so
fundamental a part of the universe – are affected by the activities of humans. With the disruption of
the energy network, Earth has, presumably, a far less trustworthy flow of vital energy today than it
had 200 years ago. This does not, however, seem to be Elenna’s point of view. The effects of Deva
disruption might simply be personal. Elenna, like most of my spiritualist contributors, views
understanding of the universe as a special skill that can be acquired by opening oneself up to nature.
Marijanne and Elenna are not the only people on the island who occasionally undertake
exorcisms. Birthe Henriksen, a 52-year-old who lives near Søby but was born in Skovby, is also
something of a specialist. Her house is beautifully situated on a country road although the lashing
rain that accompanied my arrival did not permit me a view of the nearby sea. Despite the weather,
Birthe – who is somehow immensely active and brilliantly relaxed all at once – made me feel cosy
and at home by lighting candles and bringing in a cutting board heaped with cheese, herring,
sausage, and thick-sliced bread. After a chat about this and that, we began the interview, and it was
not long before we were talking about ghosts:
Birthe Henriksen: I think that there are very, very many people who’ve experienced something.
And ghosts, I mean, I think that they have to be defined. I believe there are both good, evil, and
unhappy ghosts. And the good ghosts, I think, actually, only come when they’re here to help. I
don’t, in the end, think that they’re necessarily ghosts. That’s not certain. About that, I can’t
give you an answer. I think that most ghosts, they’re people who are dead without being ready
for it, who then simply haven’t taken the elevator and are thus left hanging in a timeless
existence. And I think, in a way, that people see them because of this, because they try to make
people aware that they’re there. I think some are there because they haven’t realized that they’re
dead, right? And think that it’s them who cause trouble. They don’t understand that they’re dead
or won’t accept it. I’ve been employed in an old castle, and there were some [ghosts there]. It
was at Brahetrolleborg [on Fyn]. The old sewing-woman, she moved chairs in the attic. That she
did. And I went up and looked. There wasn’t anybody. There was nothing in the attic, and it
wasn’t in use, the sewing room up there. It was, actually, a very exciting period because it was a
very, very hard winter. It was only vehicles on tracks that could drive, and we needed a lot of
heat [in the house] for the old countess. She was over 90, right? [This is Lucie Marie Ludovika
Anastasia Adelheid Karola Hedwig comtesse Haugwitz-Hardenberg-Reventlow, who was 95years-old at the time, in 1979.] So, the pipes often burst when we had both light and heat
blasting and all sorts of things turned on. So, I ran around with candles. It was very, very cosy,
excluding the fact that you could hear the old sewing-woman. She pulled out the chair up there
and pushed it in when she was done or whatever, and I ran up and checked, and there was
nothing. But my dog could also sense it. It watched out for me very thoroughly. It began to
snarl. It looked around.
Adam Grydehøj: What was the story about this particular ghost?
BH: There wasn’t any story about the sewing-woman other than that she’d always been there.
And the old countess, she believed it was because she still wished to do her work, simply. The
countess also believed in ghosts, she did. And she’d also seen them in the house herself. […] It
was an old Cistercian monastery, or it was Cistercian monks who’d built Brahetrolleborg
originally. And a pair of monks walked there [as ghosts]. That, I don’t doubt. They did. The
countess, she saw them directly. They went in right past her bed at night. And I feel that a
woman of 91 years [sic], she doesn’t have a terribly great need to lie. […] That’s how it’d
always been. He walked and read a book, the one [monk], and went through the wall by the side
of her bed, right? I can’t say that I saw him, but I felt a nearness. I felt there was something,
right? It was in 1979. There was also a young girl who couldn’t have the one she loved. And she
walked again in the library. There was also a special energy.
So far, so traditional. Castle and manor ghosts are an interesting sub-category of ghost belief,
in part because belief in them tends to transcend personal experience. For example, a good
many people who doubt the veracity of most ghost reports are willing to believe in castle
ghosts with which they have no personal experience, likely because castle ghosts are so well
publicized by the owners or managers of the castles themselves, and this publicity makes
much of the long history of the ghosts’ sightings. Most people work under the assumption that
there is something distinctive about castle ghosts’ actions, and indeed, there are certain
widespread stories attached to these ghosts. It is, nevertheless, far from clear that stories about
castle ghosts differ essentially from those of ghosts elsewhere. Some particular classes of
castle ghosts – such as those of high-born young women who cannot marry their lovers –
would only seem to be relegated to castles because such women did, after all, live in castles
and manor houses, not in the cottages of the common folk. On a basic level, the ghosts of
castles and those of cottages are the same since they “walk again” for the same general
reasons. There is definitely no lack of legends concerning the unhappy love life of a ghostly
crofter’s daughter; only the details as to why poor and rich maids had unhappy love lives tend
to vary.
Why, then, are ancient castle ghosts apparently so much more common than ancient
cottage ghosts? Castles and manor houses are places of more permanence and with a greater
proclivity to record and preserve history than are the cottages of the commoners or the
townhouses of the merchants. In the latter cases, we usually must rely solely on oral tradition
or the intervention of folklorists if we are to hope to trace belief in a particular ghost down
through the ages. It takes only one gap in the chain of oral transmission for a new
experiencing of a particular ghost not to be connected with previous experiences, and in such
a situation, the entirely-typical actions of the ghost in question will simply be connected by
those who experience it to what they know about ghost activities in general, not to what was
known about this certain, recurring ghost. If we assume – and we have excellent evidence for
this – that a great many people have experiences that they attribute to ghosts, it is perfectly
normal for generations upon generations of people living or working in the same house to
have ghost experiences even if ghosts do not actually exist and no knowledge of previous,
localised experiences has been transmitted to them. If, however, people who experience a
ghost have knowledge of previous, localised experiences, it would be an odd thing indeed if
they did not connect the present with the past. It is not, then, that ghosts are more likely to
haunt castles; it is simply that ghosts in castles are far more likely than other ghosts to acquire
long-lasting personalities and back-stories.
So, most people with any ghost belief whatsoever credit castle ghost stories as true. They
would not though necessarily believe in Birthe’s worldview. Although she is not a true expert
like Elenna Christensen, Birthe has undertaken a single exorcism:
Birthe Henriksen: We try, you know, to create a connection so that they can go up. [A connection
between] them and Christ, right? We call upon Christ to help them. I can say that when my
daughter was to be confirmed, a few hours before, well, my daughter came and said that there was
a woman in a red dress walking around in the garden. “She’s standing around the corner of the
house.” Then, it was, “Well! Who could that be?” So, I went out and looked. There wasn’t anyone.
“Yes but, she looked strange,” she said, “because she didn’t look like she was real.” So, a few
hours later, her cousin comes. He said, “What kind of woman was that in the red dress?” He’d also
seen her, and it was strange because they hadn’t talked together because he’d just come with his
family, right? And so, she came along to the church with us. I never saw her at all, and I was busy
with this confirmation. During the entire sermon up in the church, I prayed that she might go up.
She wanted to see a little of the confirmation before she went up. Well, she got that. And then, she
went up. [...]
AG: So, you believe in the Christian god?
BH: Yes, I’m a Christian. But I have, maybe, more holistic of a life-view, and I’m employed in the
Christian church, Lutheran, Protestant church. And I’ve written to the Church Secretary about
whether he wants to throw me out because I believe in reincarnation. But I mean, now, I’ve heard
[which other spiritualists] who you’ve spoken with, and I think that there are many points of
similarity in attitude about these things.
Like the other spiritualists with whom I spoke, Birthe professes faith in fairies, and her ideas
about fairies are not totally compatible with those of the past. She sees social fairies – or alfs, as she
calls them – as being fond of teasing and as going about their work invisibly and parallel to human
work, sentiments that are traditional enough. Their work, however, seems to be to help nature, and
Birthe herself is unsure as to whether people 300 years ago shared her beliefs. Interestingly, she
links the fairy habit of luring people underground to fairy tales, noting that although people of the
past felt the need to be careful around fairies, it was not believed that the fairies went out of their
way to do harm to humans. These fairies range from a few centimetres to half a meter in height and
have pointy ears.
In one of the most surprising testimonies I recorded, Birthe describes a fairy experience she had
had 11 years previously:
Birthe Henriksen: I’ve communicated with some small fairies [alfer] that resembled bees. They
were small music things. They were very sweet. I don’t know if they were rose-fairies, but they
looked a bit…
[Adam takes from his bag a copy of Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology and shows Birthe the
cover, on which, along with three other winged fairies, there is depicted a jolly, bee-shaped
fairy.]
BH: Well, I’ll be!
Adam Grydehøj: Did they look like that?
BH: Yes, rather like that. I mean, the ones I saw, they had the bee-form, but they got their
colouring from the roses they were near. And they squealed music because music was the
precipitator of creation. I sort of saw the music in a golden stream, a stream of golden light. It
was the music. I could hear the music, and I could see it. And the fairies, these bee-fairies who
took on the roses’ colours, they were both more dark and dark and light and light and white, but
they resembled bees.
AG: Have you seen this sort of picture [The sort on the cover of Keightley’s book.] before?
BH: No. I didn’t think, actually, that there were pictures of them. It’s a bit funny. Because they
had, namely, faces [like the bee-fairies on the book cover]. They didn’t have bee-heads but faces
like faces of humans. And also [human] limbs with a bee-body, right?
The irony here is that Keightley’s Fairy Mythology is hardly the book to turn to if you wish to learn
about flower-fairies. Keightley’s 1870 tome is unapologetically academic, contains untranslated
passages in numerous languages, and is one of the first studies of comparative, international
fairylore. Unfortunately, presumably for the sake of increasing sales, its current publisher,
Gramercy Books, has rechristened it with the far more accessible title, The World Guide to
Gnomes, Fairies, Elves and Other Little People, and given it the cover of a book about flowerfairies. The greatest insult to Keightley is not the use of that pigeon-holing term Little People but
the fact that the new title places a spotlight on gnomes, a being that, prior to the British spiritualist
revival in the late-1800s, were still the preserve of Paracelsian natural philosophy and had nothing
whatsoever to do with folk belief, whether “traditional” or otherwise.
The real question here is, “Why did Birthe see bee-fairies at all?” The experience-centred
approach to supernatural experiences will hold that many experiences are genuine, something that is
proven by their historical continuity. For example, even if people once attributed certain
experiences to fairies or witches that are now often attributed to aliens, the experience itself remains
the same, and the question shifts to “Why do people experience things that, presumably, have no
material reality?” And yet Birthe’s experience does not have evident Medieval or Early Modern
parallels. It seems to be an experience along entirely late-19th-Century spiritualist lines. There is, of
course, a possibility that Birthe once saw a picture of bee-fairies and that, even though she has since
forgotten about it, it has continued to play some role in her imagination. If all this sounds somewhat
condescending, it must be realized that we would be in trouble even if we assumed the existence of
bee-fairies because we would then be forced to wonder why either bee-fairies first came into
existence during the British spiritualist revival or why they have existed all along but have only
recently chosen to make themselves known to mankind. This problem is similar to that concerning
Evans-Wentz’s collection of spiritualist testimony of encounters with resplendent higher beings:466
If relatively recent spiritualists experience glowing, lordly fairies, why do non-spiritualists and
Medieval and Early Modern spiritualists not have these visions?
Mai-Britt Rosendale, a 37-year-old English teacher at the local navigation school and adult
education centre, does not cultivate cosiness in the manner of Birthe Henriksen. A native of
Copenhagen who is now living in a Marstal apartment, Mai-Britt is refreshingly cosmopolitan, and
this is an unusual character trait on an island like Ærø. She is glad to get the opportunity to speak
some English with me, and our discussion constantly switches between this and Danish. It is a sign
of Mai-Britt’s education that she is the only of my contributors to mention Shakespeare’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream even though this is the watershed work in the shaping of today’s
conceptions of fairies.
Mai-Britt makes a greater – though not consistent – contrast between traditional, literary, and
flower-fairy fairies than do the other spiritualists we have heard from so far. On the one hand, she is
aware that people once saw social fairies as potentially either dangerous or helpful. On the other
hand, she describes fairy-girls [elverpiger] as “small and light, the sort of things with magic
wands.”467 These fairy-girls are somehow linked with human existence and lack independent lives
of their own, falling under the category of nature-forces. As evidence for this idea, Mai-Britt notes
the disastrous natural consequences of the argument between Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. When I ask Mai-Britt whether or not people actually ever believed in fairies of this
kind, she replies, in English, “They might have. It’s a bit easier to believe in flower-fairies than
large-scale fairies, isn’t it? It’s a bit like the spirit of a tree. It’s on the border of spiritualism.”
Despite this, it is not in Mai-Britt’s character to be too Romantic, and she sufficiently distances
herself from any associations with Marijanne Meyer’s type of universal love spiritualism:
Brownies represent nature-forces, like the hill-man [bjergmand]. Brownies live on a farm their
whole lives. A sour, old man, you know, right? They know many things, they’re basically good,
but you mustn’t step on their toes. Brownies, they aren’t Christian. They’re from before
Christianity, and if there’s someone who steps on their toes, then they just get *grrr*, then they
come to regret it. They a bit reminiscent, actually, of archetypes, some of Jung’s... They
represent something very basic that has roots all the way down in the earth. They live on the
farm their entire life, and then they help people with their magical powers, but then people have
to be good as well, take care of them and give them food. They’re human-sized, but maybe a bit
shorter. Maybe, they have a red hat.
Mai-Britt’s description of brownies is quite accurate, and she even mentions brownies’ propensities
to fight one another. She garnered this knowledge from a storytelling session held at Ærøskøbing’s
Ærø Museum, which is slightly odd since Karen Margrethe Fabricius, the museum’s director, is
unable to say anything about brownies whatsoever, possibly due to a fear of being incorrect. MaiBritt’s mention of Jung is also surprising and illustrates the divide between truly popular
spiritualism and a more academic kind of spiritualism that encompasses psychoanalysis.
Regarding ghosts, Mai-Britt proves to have thought deeply on the subject although she severely
underestimates the number of believers, guessing that only 0.5% of educated Danes believe:
Mai-Britt Rosendale: What many stories call ghosts, I would call energy impressions of things
that’ve been so violent that people, they’ve left something or other behind. An impression that
particularly sensitive people can feel. Like some people can sense smell more strongly than
others. But in my world, you don’t just die when you die, so I also operate [under the idea] that
you’re a soul without your body when you die, right? And what some people call ghosts, it’s
people who’ve remained behind, who haven’t come over to the other side, who hang on. I mean,
a soul who should move on, right? It is, as a rule, people who aren’t doing so terribly well
because they should’ve, you know, moved on.
Adam Grydehøj: I’ve spoken with a lot of people who think they’ve had a ghost, and they just
ignore it.
MBR: [From here on, in English.] That’s so extremely stupid!
AG: Do you think it’s because people don’t know the history?
MBR: I think it’s because people have… It’s all due to Descartes. After Descartes, it all went
haywire! No, when you adopt materialism as a metaphysical system instead of any kind of
idealism or religion or whatsoever, then you drop responsibility for everything you can’t see.
So, it’s not really real. It’s just for the fun of it, and you don’t have this ethical dimension to it
because it’s not really real. So, it’s just for your entertainment or something. [...] I think that our
entire culture has embarked on the supernatural sphere, just without the ethical dimension
because we left that along with spiritualism, right? But now, it’s very interesting, and we’re
beginning to see that it’s actually there, so we’re relating to it in a materialistic way. Just look at
all the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all that. Lots of movies. And it’s all a no-ethics scenario.
Significantly, Mai-Britt disparages belief in the White Lady of Søbygård, a ghost known islandwide and said to haunt the manor house at Søbygård. Mai-Britt’s spiritualism has a more rational
edge than that of the other spiritualists with whom I spoke, and she has certainly read a good deal
on the subject. It is probably important that, despite mentioning a good many philosophers during
our discussion, she never speaks of Helena Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, or any other of present-day
spiritualism’s founders:
Mai-Britt Rosendale: [In English.] The general setting [for my belief] is very non-controversial
from a spiritualist’s perspective. When you die, you go look at your life on a big screen or
whatever and you see, “Oh, did I do well? Could I do better? I’d like to do better? Nothing else
for the fun of it.” Then, you go back. Reincarnation. I believe in the Good. God. Not the oldfashioned Christian god with a long beard, necessarily. More like… Well, I wouldn’t buy
Spinoza all the way, but pan-psychism is a fact to me. I think it’s a working perspective to see
everything as alive, aware and responsive. Shamanism in a Hawaiian sense because it’s a nice,
positive way of doing it. It’s not a warrior kind of thing; it’s more an adventure. [...] I’m not
very interested in the drama of the supernatural because it’s just an ordinary thing for me, and
there are lots of things of that kind that I wouldn’t go into at all because it wouldn’t be good for
me, and I’m not interested in that. I like to stick with the good stuff, the things that are relevant
to me. Like, I think it’s a shame that there are drug addicts lying in the streets, but I’m not going
over to them and sharing their bad fortune because it’s their choice. I’ve had positive
experiences with energy, but everybody has. [….] Even my boyfriend thinks it’s nuts. He’s just
decided to accept it so far as “the weird woman.” Well, whatever.
Adam Grydehøj: How does he explain the same experiences?
MBR: He doesn’t. Because the world is made of tables and chairs and scientific proof and
falsification. I know the drill. I studied philosophy, so, yeah… But that’s the thing. Lots of those
people who live with a materialistic paradigm, they just take the entire life-world and realm of
emotions and energy and whatever, and they don’t explain it. And that’s what I like. Sometimes,
I think it’s enhancing to combine the rational sphere with the spiritual. Other people don’t feel
like that. Fine. [….] The most powerful energy thing I’ve experienced was when my uncle was
trying to help my father [Here, Mai-Britt switches over to Danish.] cut down some trees. [...]
Then, all of a sudden, it sprang out onto his head. The tree, down over my uncle. He was lucky
enough to land in a hollow, so he wasn’t crushed but got his legs broken in so many places and
many, many injuries and was in danger of losing his life. Most definitely, right? And when I
found out from my father on the telephone, then they were on their way to the hospital, on their
way to the operation. And I sat down on the floor afterwards and asked God whether it’d be
possible for me to do something, if I could be a tool to send pure love to him and help. It was
completely wild, and there I had the sensation that I had to sit up against the wall because it was
so strong, like a white light came [...] in a stream. And so, I spoke with my uncle about it later,
and there were many people who helped him, many people who thought about him. I wasn’t the
least bit doubtful that this was just as real as [a] table and chair because it was so powerful.
My research was unable to gauge the prevalence of like Mai-Britt’s since it is difficult to ask
about and categorize an event that need not involve ghosts, fairies, or even anything overtly
religious.
Equally delightful as Mai-Britt to interview was Mette Nyborg, formerly Mette Doller, a
vivacious 80-year-old living in a small, old, beautifully- yet brazenly-decorated house in Marstal.
Of the spiritualists with whom I spoke, Mette might be the best theoretically-informed, at least as
far as popular spiritualism goes. Her philosophy guides her life, so much so that the last time I
spoke with her, she was reading a heavy, English-language theoretical tome on the subject and
planning a three-month trip to a spiritualist commune in India. She is also the writer of Cosmic
Picturebook, a slim volume of her own spiritualist poetry and illustrations, published in 1982. Mette
has much to be happy about, and as – in a light haze of incense – she told me about the supernatural
realm, her eyes never ceased to sparkle. As with Marijanne Meyer, Elenna Christensen, and Birthe
Henriksen, she often interweaves her own worldview into descriptions of past belief in beings such
as mermaids and social fairies. About mermaids, she says:
Mette Nyborg: I think that there were some forces in the elements, that there were air-beings,
that there were water-beings, that there were earth-beings, beings that had various functions in
relation to the people. I believe that nature is full of life and spirit and soul and consciousness.
[...] Water-beings – what we call mermaids –, they’re forces that people, with a non-physical
eye, can maybe catch sight of. It’s not certain that they have the same image in the
consciousness, but images that reside on deep, spiritual planes that many people have in
common. They reside there on these planes. Also, air-beings and earth-beings. [...] They’ve
helped people. For example, in Iceland, people have believed that there are many of those earthbeings who protect an area. It’s also been like that here [in Denmark]. And there are, you know,
still people who believe in those graveyards – that you can find something there – here on the
island as well, right?
Adam Grydehøj: But 400 years ago, did people believe in another plane, or was it a different
mindset?
MN: It’s a state. I think that it’s a state. In the people who’ve found the way to produce images
of those beings internally because there wasn’t anything else. Not everyone saw them and
experienced them in the same way. So, I think that these beings reside in a state of
consciousness. I also simultaneously believe that these forces exist. There are living forces, you
know, in the earth, in the air, in the wind, in the ocean, and everywhere. Everything’s alive, and
I think that people knew more about it back then, nature. They had more contact with natural
beings. So, they were at one with it, they had respect for it. They weren’t afraid of it, I think.
Just of certain types [of supernatural beings].
AG: This sounds like a more advanced mindset than people used to have. Did people think of
them as nature spirits or just as another type of people?
MN: I think that they’ve looked at them in different ways, the nature spirits. Some were their
helpers, and some were their foes, and [people] avoided going in some areas where there were
said to be mysterious forces. [...] But I think that they had deep respect for those nature spirits in
general, round about. I’ve never personally seen that sort of being, but I know they exist, some
forces about which I don’t know much. We can’t study them. They’re not visible. But there’s a
parapsychological field where they’re already beginning to find out that these forces that
affected people back then exist, much more than they do today. People aren’t particularly
superstitious today. All that about spirits who walk again, it’s the same. It belongs under the
same category of subterranean spirits.
Mette resists saying that everyone in the past believed in the essential goodness of fairies; indeed,
her description of old mermaid belief is rather horrific. It seems that she sees this as a
misunderstanding on the part of past believers since her own ideas of “water-beings” do not mesh
with mermaids who can “go inside [men’s] beings and suck them to themselves.” This itself clashes
with Mette’s Romantic idea of past society’s unity with nature.
In the above passage, Mette briefly mentions present-day belief in Iceland, and she goes into the
subject at greater depth later in our conversation:
Mette Nyborg: I know on [the Danish island of] Bornholm, and I’ve also heard it up in Norway,
that they wanted to make a new road, a regional road, and it went, really, right through a
brownie area where people knew brownies lived. And there was something about how things
were ruined at night, and the stuff they’d built during the day, it was torn down at night. It was
so bad that they decided to reposition the road and avoid just particularly that area which people
knew to be a holy, hallowed area where subterraneans or brownies also lived. I don’t know if
they distinguished between the brownies or if there were only the subterraneans who took care
of that area. And they didn’t get permission to lay that road through. I mean, they’re forces that
are in the earth, and you can call them the subterraneans. You can also call them forces of
nature because we don’t know so much about what they are. There’s something they call Devabeings in the air. It was a very, very large light-spirit-being that holds an entire area in the palms
of their hands or however you want to say it, protects an entire area. These Devas have subbeings, those air-beings. [...]
Adam Grydehøj: Was it something people used to believe in?
MN: Yes, yes. There were many who had believed in it.
AG: Did they have the same name at that time.
MN: I think so. They stretch back into the religions.
Despite Mette’s intelligence, her theoretical background – based on Blavatsky’s fusion of Buddhist
spirits with the elementals of Early Modern alchemy – causes her to conflate past beliefs. Mette, for
example, mentions sylphs and says, “They were fire’s beings. You could see and find them in fire.
They also had, of course, a purpose. You could ask the sylphs to protect an area and not destroy it.”
Sylphs, like gnomes, are Paracelsian elementals, and Paracelsus neither took them from folk belief
nor intended them to be viewed in the same way as one views fairies.468 Oddly though, Paracelsus’
sylphs are air-elementals, the fire-elemental role being taken by salamanders, a creature that has had
a folk association with fire since antiquity. Even if this is merely Mette’s own mistake, it is a sign of
the malleability of tradition.
There is no doubting that, for Mette, Devas, sylphs, and brownies are all beings of the same
general type, are all elementals. The Victorian spiritualist revival co-opted fairies by taking past
reports of them as proof of the existence of elementals. Nevertheless, it may surprise those who
view spiritualists as unadulterated fairy fanatics that only one of my spiritualist contributors469 gives
fairies named after beings from past Northern European folklore any real prominence in her
worldview. The other spiritualists believe in fairies but do not give them much thought since beings
like Devas are seen as far more important. This is entirely in keeping with the spiritualist revival in
which fairies were of even less significance than they are today. In the early days of the 19thCentury spiritualist revival, fairies were viewed with some exasperation as the beings that disrupted
séances by speaking ridiculously, knocking things about, and generally causing trouble, actions in
which angels and spirits of the dead would have no reason to engage.470 They were, like the
Paracelsian elementals, hardly conscious and definitely soulless beings. Blavatsky’s Theosophy
gave them a somewhat more respectable countenance, but it will be noted that even these fairies are
a far cry from the flower-fairies who grace today’s animated films and picture books. As Blavatsky
writes:
Under the general designation of fairies and fays, the spirits of the elements appear in the myth,
fable, tradition, or poetry of all nations, ancient and modern. Their names are legions—peris,
devs, djins, sylvans, satyrs, fauns, elves, trolls, norns, brownies, kobolds, brownies, and many
more. They have been seen, feared, blessed, banned, and invoked in every quarter of the globe
and in every age.471
Such was the view, anyway, of the people who reintroduced the educated classes to fairy belief.
This theory was evidently not accepted for long – at least, not by the more Romantic of the
movement’s followers – since if spiritualists like W.B. Yeats and W.Y. Evans-Wentz equated
exalted, beautiful fairies with elementals, they did so by means of elevating elementals, not by
degrading fairies. Evans-Wentz reserved elemental categorization for the lesser, rougher fairies, yet
even so, Henry Jenner – leader of the Cornish language revival – puts forth in one of the
introductions to Evans-Wentz’s book that fairy sightings were the origin of Paracelsus’
elementals,472 the opposite of Blavatsky’s position.
With all this in mind, one might be inclined to take Mette Nyborg’s statements about presentday road-building problems as a scrap of balderdash. She is, however, correct. To the occasional
amusement of the news media, building sites and road works are still abandoned from time to time
due to local objections on account of fairies.473 When one considers that social fairies were once
known to tear down churches as they were being built and that they are willing to kill those who so
much as cut brush from the top of their mounds, it should not shock us too greatly that today’s
believers are wary of trespassing.
Mette’s belief in nature spirits feeds into her thoughts on extraterrestrial life:
Mette Nyborg: I believe fully and completely in beings who would like to establish contact with
us, and it’s first and foremost on the psychological plane, right? Because they land [on Earth],
you know, not so that we’ll kill them or send them to the hospital or to a mental institution,
right? I mean, I believe that they exist. Really. And one fine day, I also believe that we’ll
establish contact with them. It’ll probably be a few years before we’ve found a way to create a
more friendly way of life on our Earth and show goodwill toward us all cooperating and
becoming more loving to each other. In the same way, I believe that we’ll establish contact with
a subterranean society. Because I believe that they exist.
Adam Grydehøj: From your own experience?
MN: People, they laugh at it, and a girl came – it sounds completely insane –, a girl came to our
door. She looked about 17, right? On Bornholm. Rikke [Mette’s daughter.] has, you know,
known her well. She came and said she was from Uranus. OK. We looked at her. So, my exhusband interested himself in spiritual-scientific research and that sort of thing at that time,
right?, and number-symbols and all of that sort of thing. He took her aside and talked with her,
and then they came back, and we weren’t allowed to touch her. I mean, she said, “You mustn’t
touch me.” It took two days. We didn’t either. And she stayed with us over a long, long period.
And she was really strange. I believe that she was one of those beings. So, she shed that form of
being and became acclimatized like the rest of us others were over the course of a number of
years, right? So, today, I don’t know who Maja is. But it’s been very, very fantastic. But we
have many connections with people who’ve experienced that sort of thing. And to me, it’s
natural, just as natural as the fact that we’re sitting here and drinking coffee, and you come in
my door, and I speak with you. It’s just as real to me that humanoid beings exist. It’s not certain
that they resemble us across the entire universe. Why should they?
Mette’s experience with Maja does, indeed, seem to have been an unusual one. Although
Mette simply connects aliens with fairies on account of their both being spiritual or
psychological beings, the folkloric similarities between the two are substantial, and indeed,
the Maja story somewhat resemblances the fairy legend of the Green Children, which we
looked at earlier.
As Peter M. Rojcewicz has already paid considerable attention to this subject, I will give
just a brief overview of it here. Rojcewicz notes from the outset that traditional social fairies
and today’s aliens sometime resemble one another from a belief standpoint and not merely
from an experiential one and that some believers hold that the fairies themselves are
extraterrestrial.474 Since, however, this cannot be taken to be one of the more common
opinions on the matter of fairy origins, we should be wary of pushing it too far. On an
experiential level, Rojcewicz focuses on three major points of physical similarity between
aliens and fairies: Both can have “subtle” or aerial bodies, have the ability to shape-shift, and
can appear as “shining, luminous entities.”475
Rojcewicz also shows resemblances between fairy and alien legends, and since
supernatural physiology is far less consistent than supernatural narrative, we shall consider
these similarities as the most important. Like aliens, social fairies are often seen as more
advanced than humans. Even the roughest, most uncouth trolls are typically superior to
mankind in terms of knowledge of magical abilities, and even among the humanoid solitary
fairies, it is really only some brownies and goblins who are less gifted than men. Perhaps as a
result, both aliens and fairies are known to impart “special skills and gifts” to their friends.476
Just as spiritualists like Mette look forward to mankind learning new abilities and ways of
thought from extraterrestrials, fairies can offer the gift of musicianship, of healing, of
strength, and of many other things besides. By the same token, negative experiences with
fairies seem very close to those with aliens: Both types of beings can cripple invisibly, can
replace human babies with their own, can have either consensual or non-consensual sexual
relations with humans, and can steal people away. Interestingly, Rojcewicz also mentions the
tendency of those who have had relations with aliens to “become ‘puppets,’ either of their
own little understood psychic processes or some diabolical external agency. This ruin of
contactees occurs so frequently that pioneer UFO researcher John A. Keel coined the term
‘used person.’”477 We have seen how, time and again, temporary contact with the fairies
causes either madness or a debilitating longing to return to fairy society. Finally, Rojcewicz
notes that fairies and aliens share a curious dependence on humans, sometimes needing
humans for the sake of reproduction and often subsequently requiring human assistance – in
the form of nurse or midwife work – when human-fairy/alien hybrids are born.478
This, mind you, is no more than a comparison between social fairies and aliens. When
other types of traditional supernatural beings are added to the mix, we get a rather complete
picture of alien lore. UFOlogists also sometimes hold that past folklore provides many
examples of non-human aircraft, and indeed, it does. Consider this report from Gervase of
Tilbury in 1215:
A strange event in our own time, which is widely known but none the less a cause of wonder,
provides proof of the existence of an upper sea overhead. It occurred on a feast day in Great
Britain, while the people were straggling out of their parish church after hearing high mass. The
day was very overcast and quite dark on account of the thick clouds. To the people’s
amazement, a ship’s anchor was seen caught on a tombstone within the churchyard wall, with
its rope stretching up and hanging in the air. They were advancing various opinions on the
matter to each other, when after a time they saw the rope move as if being worked to pull up the
anchor. Since, being caught fast, it would not give way, a sound was heard in the humid air as of
sailors struggling to recover the anchor they had cast down. Soon, when their efforts proved
vain, the sailors sent one of their number down; using the same technique as our sailors here
below, he gripped the anchor-rope and climbed down it, swinging one hand over the other. He
had already pulled the anchor free, when he was seized by the bystanders. He then expired in
the hands of his captors, suffocated by the humidity of our dense air as if he were drowning in
the sea. The sailors up above waited an hour, but then, concluding that their companion had
drowned, they cut the rope and sailed away, leaving the anchor behind. And so in memory of
this event it was fittingly decided that that anchor should be used to make ironwork for the
church door, and it is still there for all to see.479
This story reveals an unexplained human tendency to experience flying craft, but it can scarcely be
taken as evidence of 13th Century belief in flying saucers or anything resembling them. If these are
aliens, are we really to assume that they travelled to Earth on a sailing ship? This is obviously
untenable, causing us to assume that when people – even masses of people, as in Gervase’s example
– experience a strange, flying object and its inhabitants, they experience it in terms that are familiar.
Although man had already invented the sailing ship in Gervase’s time whereas we have not yet
invented the flying saucer, the potential technology of a flying saucer is at least comprehensible to
us, which it would not have been in the 1200s. This is, nonetheless, a troublesome aspect of the
experience-centred theory, for if we are to hold that people have, for some unknown reason,
experienced the same things throughout the ages, we would expect only the explanations and not
the experiences themselves to change over time, unless the experiences are dictated, in part, by
contemporary circumstances.
Mette Nyborg mentioned her daughter, Rikke, in our discussion, and I was lucky enough to also
have the chance to speak with her. Rikke Doller is 55-years-old and, like her mother, now lives in
Marstal. Her testimony revealed more about her family’s life, for example, that until the family
settled on Ærø when she was 16, they had moved camp 37 times during her youth, living in various
places in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Although Rikke is a spiritualist, she is of a slightly
different mould than her mother. Rikke is retired now, but she still works as an artist, and her house
by the sea is profoundly decorated with beautiful paintings by herself and her father. Rikke’s lifechanging mystical experience came when she was 18-years-old. She had what might be called an
out-of-body experience or a soul-wandering, and she connects this with her having just read The
Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist spiritual text first translated to English by the great fairy
folklorist, W.Y. Evans-Wentz.
Concerning ghosts, Rikke says:
Rikke Doller: I believe in ghosts, but in a strange way, you understand, because I’m a religious
mystic. [...] Therefore, I believe that ghosts are spirits who are, in their own way, more real than
we are materially. They are, as a rule, spirits who haven’t found peace or haven’t found out that
they’re dead. They are, actually, many people who don’t – if they die suddenly – find out that
they’re dead. I haven’t seen a ghost myself, but I believe in them very much [...].
Adam Grydehøj: If you haven’t seen them yourself, why do you believe?
RD: Again, it’s my parents, you know, who were so strange. They played with talking boards
every night. So, they spoke with various spirits, deceased people, and most of my knowledge
comes from this, right? There were some people who didn’t know they were dead, and we had
to tell them that. [...] There were many different spirits there. Deceased. We had a boy, for
example, who sat trapped inside a little bathroom, right? And it was purely symbolic too. He’d
made his world so little – I mean, he was dead – that it was like he was trapped, right? And
then, there was a girl who couldn’t have children and that sort of thing, and it was because, in
another life, she’d treated them badly or killed them or whatever it was. There were many
stories... I can still remember the names, Gerthe and that sort of thing. Many stories made an
impression on me because they were... So, we also talked with one to whom Mother and Father
said, “Can you give us some proof?” So, [the spirit said that] there was something lying in a box
in my aunt’s cellar. In that cellar, there was this or that. And it was true too and that kind of
thing, right? My mother and father were a bit too... They were too engaged in it, or they were
too... I’m a bit sceptical because it was a bit too much. So, a spirit there says once that
“Tomorrow, flying saucers will land on Svaneke Square [on Bornholm], and we lived in
Svaneke, right? And so, I was sent around the entire town to knock on all the doors and say,
“Tomorrow, flying saucers will land. You must come and look,” right? Yes, it was a bit much.
It was like that a lot. So, I became a bit more sceptical, you can say, right? But therefore, you
can say that I believe in ghosts because of the soul or that part of us which makes us alive,
right? […] And it can certainly have trouble finding out that it’s dead.
The term I have translated as talking board here and elsewhere in this book is ånden i glasset
[literally, “the spirit in the glass”]. Technically speaking, a talking board is a piece of séance
paraphernalia best known in English under the Parker Brothers trademark, Ouija. Although this
precise piece of equipment is not always implied by the Danish term, the concept remains the same.
Rikke doubts some of her parents’ results with the talking board, such as that involving flying
saucers, yet she nevertheless uses her talking board experiences in order to justify her general
belief. Rikke does not disbelieve that her parents spoke with the dead: She just thinks that they were
too caught up in the occult.
When I asked Rikke whether she had heard of the black dog, she said no but recalled something
she had experienced 13 or 14 years earlier:
Rikke Doller: There was a time, actually, when I ran into a big, black dog when I was out
walking once. I don’t believe in it, but I saw it.
Adam Grydehøj: Does that show that you knew what a black dog is?
RD: No, actually, I didn’t know it, but I fooled myself into seeing and then into being scared.
[...] I was out walking in Skovbymark [Skovby Field]. We lived in Sækmose, and so one walks
down to look at the water. It’s a very, very pretty walk down to Skovby, Skovbymark, and
around there. It was an immense, black dog, and it ran and then hid itself or ran away. It was
daytime. I always reckon that all of the things we see outside of ourselves are projections of
something inside of us, namely, angst. Angst over something or other. And so, it gets projected
as a black dog.
This account contains no plot whatsoever, and if the black dog served as an ill omen, we are not
told of it. Nevertheless, despite having no knowledge of the tradition, Rikke experienced something
that she, at the time, considered supernatural and that is present in folklore across Northern Europe.
There may well be a naturalistic explanation for black dog sightings; it is, after all, easy enough to
say that people who see supernatural black dogs are, actually, just seeing everyday black dogs. We
must, however, grant witnesses some degree of logical aptitude, especially in this day and age when
there is little or no oral tradition concerning black dogs. If there had been any chance of the black
dog that Rikke saw having been an ordinary dog, she certainly would have said so rather than
holding that the vision was a projection of her angst. Besides, it is curious that she saw a black dog
in particular. Indeed, the only two instances of first-hand experiences with supernatural animals that
I encountered during my interviews are of large, black dogs, something that is at least a big
coincidence but more likely to be another a piece of evidence for the experience-centred theory. As
it is, it seems as though folkloric black dog experiences continue to occur long after the folklore
surrounding them has ceased to be current. We will have more to say on the issue of present-day
black dog experiences later.
My spiritualist contributors tend to assume that most people believe in ghosts but are unwilling
to talk about it. Rikke, for example, thinks that Danish belief stands at 85%. This is probably too
high of a figure, but her implicit rejection of the word ghost [spøgelse] in favour of spirit [ånd] is
significant. Since, as we shall see, belief in some non-religious supernatural realm is far higher than
belief in ghosts – defined here as any spirit of the dead – in particular, some negative responses to
my questioning might come from people believing in spirits of dead humans but not considering
these spirits to be ghosts. For Rikke, who has obviously devoted considerable thought to the
subject, there can be no easy description of the supernatural. After I have spoken with her about
ghosts and gone through the whole list of supernatural beings in my survey, she says:
Rikke Doller: Actually, everything that’s on the list is a form of interpretation. We interpret our
world, we interpret everything, right? We form our beliefs ourselves and answer our own
questions. We ask questions – if we ask questions – and come up with the answer ourselves,
right? We’re duping ourselves if we say that we believe in a Death-horse. It’s a form of support
because we can’t find anything else, because we can’t figure out how to ask inside, “Who am
I?” So, we ask about something else. A lot of these things, they’re getting a renaissance now.
[...] Now, we believe in spirits again, and it goes very up and down in folklore. In the ’50s, ’60s,
then people said, “That’s a load of nonsense. Get out of here,” right? But now, it’s coming
again, and now, there’s a lot. You can easily permit yourself to say that you believe in ghosts
and that sort of thing. […] Now, we just call things something else. Now, people go to crystal
healing, right? Just as in old days, you said, “He’s crazy,” today, you say, “It’s schizophrenia.”
It’s just gotten another name. But the entire time, we need an explanation, and now, you can’t
say, “He’s crazy.” Now, you have to have a diagnosis and this and that. But it’s the same. It’s
just called something else. It’s the same with all of these things people believed in before, right?
Now, people don’t believe in the Death-horse or brownie [gubber] or in anything. But now,
people go to crystal healing and believe in something else and to aura reading and to…
Adam Grydehøj: What about people who believe in these beings from the old times, but when
you ask for descriptions, they’re not correct in the sense that people long ago believed in these
things?
RD: That’s what’s tough about New Age over the past few years. They give everything a light
meaning, and that’s why I speak so well with my father, for example. We’re the same religious
mystics, both of us. And now, he’s dead. My mother, I’ve never been able to talk to her so well
because she always gets so excited about some good thing or other. I believe that she’s very
much that kind of New Age, very much a bit superficial with... It’s too much, “It’s perfect,
everything.” […] It’s correct that the whole New Age movement is contriving to take the teeth
out of everything. Toothless. It’s a lot of, “Yes, brownies, they’re sweet, and everything’s just
so lovely.” But that’s not how it was for them back then. It was more serious, right?
Those who would pigeon-hole all spiritualists into the happy hippy stereotype would do well to
listen to Rikke Doller, if for no other reason that her analysis of belief today is broadly correct. We
have seen that ghosts and aliens can be fairies, that experiences often remain the same even as
explanations for these experiences change. The point is not, of course, that aliens actually are fairies
or the other way around, just that the experiences that produce belief in these beings seem to be
largely the same. This is why, contrary to popular opinion, the study of fairies is still relevant today.
Chapter 20: Omens and the Varieties of Present-Day Belief
In the previous chapter, we met six spiritualists, and it may be noted that a number of them are
evidently of very high intelligence, among the most deep-thinking and insightful of all the people I
interviewed. This makes a great deal of sense. However one feels about the actual correctness or
incorrectness of spiritualism, it is a philosophy, and philosophies are the preserve of people who are
willing to spend a great deal of time and mental energy on them. One might also have noticed that
no two of these six spiritualists hold precisely the same philosophy. There is no mass agreement on
the meaning of spiritualism even if a number of specific ideas are recurrent.
It is no surprise that spiritualists believe in the supernatural, but what about average, everyday
people? I asked this question to my contributors. Or rather, I asked, “What percentage of Danes do
you think believe in ghosts today?” I chose to ask about ghosts in particular rather than the
supernatural in general because, even though people have very divergent ideas of what ghosts are,
the supernatural or, worse, the non-religious supernatural are simply too broad and complex of
categories for people to get a handle on. In any case, the results of my asking this question are
interesting: The average guess is that about 31% of all Danes today believe in ghosts.480 This
number does not, however, tell the whole story.
We must first understand that, when asked this question, people have a tendency to give a nice,
round a number (like 5%, 40%, or 80%) or an easy mathematical value (like, ¼, 1/3, or ½), and my
statistical rendering of the latter means that, for example, four people give the answer of 33%,
making this the most common “non-round” number in the total of responses. That 33% is also quite
close to the set’s average, 31% is rather satisfying since no one, of course, has to courage to say,
“I’d guess that 31% of all Danes believe in ghosts,” and only one person guesses 30%. Despite this,
just five of the 43 respondents offer answers within a range of 5% of the set’s average or mean.
Instead, responses at the set’s extremes greatly skew the average. On the extremes, for example,
three people guess that 1%-4% of all Danes believe in ghosts481 while three others think that 80%90% believe482.
These sets of extremes do not quite cancel one another out, however, for the extremes on the
lower end of the spectrum are far more extreme than those on the upper end. Not even the most
strident of spiritualists says that more than 90% of Danes believe in ghosts, and indeed, only nine
contributors in total give guesses of over 60% belief. Meanwhile, no one whatsoever guesses over
50% but under 60%, cutting away the middle ground entirely. On average, the nine contributors
who make the highest guesses, posit 72% belief. But what about the contributors on the other side?
The nine lowest guesses give us an average of around 4% belief, and a total of 14 out of 43
contributors place belief at 10% or below. So, where does belief really stand?
Of the 55 contributors who tell me whether or not they believe in ghosts, 31 of them – or about
56% – are believers.483 Furthermore, the definition of ghost is quite fluid, and I suspect that some of
my contributors believe in what I would consider a ghost but call it something else instead. Indeed,
in a small number of cases, I have marked contributors down as believers despite their having
replied in the negative because an in-depth discussion of the subject found that our problem was
one of semantics. Regardless, even the gap between 31% perceived belief in ghosts and 56% actual
belief is a wide one, one that cannot be explained by my sample being skewed towards people who
I knew ahead of time to be believers. Although I spoke with seven people who I knew to be
believers from the start,484 I also went out of my way to speak with historians (seven) and pastors
(six), who are popularly thought to be apt to disbelieve. If the statistics are skewed, they are
probably skewed in the direction of disbelief.
One of the more surprising results is that the difference in perceived ghost belief among
believers and nonbelievers is less significant than one might suspect: Believers guess that 39% of
Danes believe in ghosts485 whereas nonbelievers guess 24%486. It is worrisome to see that even
though believers are slightly less likely than nonbelievers to give extremely low guesses, there are
still four believers who guess 5% or below.487 Believers who guess that there is very little belief in
Danish society suffer socially from their misconceptions, and as we shall see, just about everyone
views belief as a sensitive subject and rarely talks about it.
We have limited our inquiry here to ghosts, but in the course of conversation, even when it is
not possible to precisely delineate a contributor’s beliefs, it is always possible to find out whether or
not a contributor believes in the supernatural in some sense. There is a sort of spectrum of
supernatural belief that we can set out in a superficial way:
Least Believing
No Belief
Christian Belief
More between
Heaven and Earth
Ghosts
Most Believing
Fairies and Other
Spirits
To use the terms most believing and least believing here is somewhat misleading since many people
who have strong religious belief are far more extreme in their beliefs than people who have, say, a
casual belief in ghosts. However, because Christian religious belief is socially acceptable in
Denmark today, it is helpful to use it as a baseline. It must simply be remembered that belief in
ghosts, fairies, or what have you is not dependent upon religious belief.
“More between Heaven and Earth” [mere mellem himmel og jord] is, of course, an Englishlanguage expression, but its Danish equivalent is in far more general and common use. Both
religious and non-religious people use the expression to mean the non-religious supernatural realm,
yet we will limit its meaning somewhat here and exclude from it belief in ghosts, fairies, and other
spirits; under this title, we include non-personalized beliefs, such as belief in fate, omens, prophesy,
and the like. We have already defined a ghost as the spirit of a dead person residing on earth. By
now, the definition of belief in fairies and other spirits ought to be straightforward. Although ghost
belief and fairy belief do not depend on Christian belief, fairy belief is never, in my fieldwork,
present without accompanying ghost and “more between Heaven and Earth” belief, and ghost belief
is likewise dependent on “more between Heaven and Earth” belief.
The spectrum should, then, be read from left to right. When we categorize someone as having
one sort of belief or another, what we really mean is that the person holds the beliefs under which
she is categorized as well as the beliefs to the left of this category, excepting, of course, No Belief
and Christian Belief. The results of my fieldwork are inserted in the spectrum below:
No Belief
Christian Belief
6
11
More between
Heaven and Earth
8
Ghosts
18
Fairies and other
Spirits
13
On the basis of my fieldwork, the reality of belief far exceeds perception of belief. My contributors
guess, on average, that 31% of Danes believe in ghosts. I did not ask them similar questions
regarding fairies, “more between Heaven and Earth,” or anything else. Despite the popular
perception, we do not get the impression of a society ruled by pure science and completely lacking
in belief. In fact, about 70% of contributors believe in some kind of non-religious supernatural
realm, and only about 11% hold no supernatural beliefs whatsoever.
Despite the great breadth of ghost belief, those who do not believe in ghosts tend to be
disdainful of believers. A typical view is expressed by a rationalistic, 42-year-old school teacher,
Peder Binderup Larsen, who guesses that 10% of Danes believe and classifies them as “A bunch of
weird folks. These people who believe in ghosts always have to prove it to the rest of us. I don’t
take it seriously.” Naturally, the very structure of Peder’s statement reveals just how much he
underestimates belief; in fact, “the rest of us” is a minority, and Peder’s claim that believers are
always talking about belief is self-negating in light of my findings. Similarly, 42-year-old Karin
Groth,488 originally of Dunkær but now living in Marstal and working as a janitor, is positive that
belief lies under 10% since society is too educated today, and the more people read, they less they
believe.
An exception to this tendency to believe that others do not believe is Finn Møller Madsen, who
“believes, actually, that the Danes are quite superstitious. […] One can easily be superstitious and
believe in supernatural beings without having very concrete knowledge of it. I mean, without
concerning oneself much with it.” Finn guesses that about 65% of Danes believe in ghosts, and he
counts himself in this figure despite never having experienced anything supernatural. He does not
feel that people are embarrassed about their beliefs, and does not think that there is any social
stigma attached to it.489
Finn’s opinion, however, is not a popular one. Ulla Graham, a 59-year-old museum worker
living in Ærøskøbing, possessed ideas to similar to those of Karin Groth until just recently. Now,
she guesses that between 15%-20% of Danes believe in ghosts, which although considerably higher
than her previous perception, is nevertheless far lower than it ought to be. She says:
If you’d asked me a week ago, then I’d have said, “Not very many.” But over the course of 14
days, there’ve been both someone here in the house [Ærø Museum.] who’s noticed ghosts up
here, up in the section where there are some clothes. There was also, really, an American
woman. But then, a couple of weeks ago, up in Hammerich’s House [Another local museum.], a
young man came, a completely normal young man – he was there with his mother and brother –,
and it made me wonder right from the start when I asked them if they wanted a map. No, they’d
go and explore, says the mother. And I thought to myself, it’s fine because there are so many
things in Hammerich’s House, and one can go and look at all sorts of things. It [The map.]
doesn’t help much with it either. But then, suddenly, one of the young men comes in to me in
that room and says, “I think you have a ghost here.” And [he] was Danish and must’ve been 16,
18 years old. And I asked, “How can you do it? How can you feel it?” “Well, I mean, it was
totally clear, inside an alcove inside one of the rooms.” When he went in there, then he can feel
it completely, but he felt that it was a good – a friendly – ghost, a protecting ghost who watched
over us. And then, he explained to me all sorts of things about ghosts, why they haunt, if there
was a task in life they hadn’t managed to fulfil, so that if you fulfil it – if the family solves the
problem – , then he wouldn’t haunt any more. And he said how they’d had a ghost in his family.
I mean, another woman who works here – she lives over in Leby – she’s my age. They also
have… But she didn’t know it, it was her father. But I mean, he isn’t there any more. […] So, I
mean, that happened within a week or two. It leads me to believe that it’s much more
widespread.
Ulla’s encounters with belief have left her puzzled. Unlike many nonbelievers, however, she does
not make harsh judgements as to the rationality of believers.
One of the more informative conversations I had about ghosts involved 49-year-old Karsten
Landro, former mayor of Marstal Kommune and current vice headmaster of Marstal School, and his
wife, 38-year-old Dorete Seier Landro. Dorete was born in Marstal, but both she and her husband
now live in Karsten’s childhood home in Ommel. Karsten sees himself as a logical thinker,
commenting that:
I mean, my problem is that I’m not terribly believing in that way, superstitious. I’m much more
rational-thinking, and I don’t believe in... I have a hard time understanding how people three or
four hundred years ago thought about that. Right now, we’re talking about mermaids. I mean,
all superstition has, really, probably been – what can one say? – characterized by mystery.
Something interesting occurs, however, when I ask Karsten and Dorete about their own
experiences:
Adam Grydehøj: I know, Karsten, that you’re very rational, but have you two had any
experiences that you regarded as supernatural?
Karsten Landro: Yes.
Dorete Seier Landro: Yes, we have it here in the house.
KL: We have a completely special situation where we’re going to—.
DSL: It’s not just one. It’s been here multiple times.
KL: Well. You’d better talk about it then.
DSL: Yes, it concerns, basically, some lights that are shut off in the attic. And when we then
leave the house and look down [the road], then they’re lit again.
AG: That’s pretty strange. And it’s happened many times?
DSL: It’s happened a few times.
KL: Twice.
DSL: Twice, at least. […]
KL: I remember clearly one time where I was around and shut off the lights in the entire house
before we drove off. It was dark when we drove, and we have, actually, two windows up there
[in the attic]. And we were positive that—. It’s easy to see up on the road when we’ve driven
that the house is totally dark. When we came home, there was light in the two windows up
there. But well! As I say, it could’ve been that there was someone in to say hello to us. We
never lock the doors, so... I choose to believe that it has some natural explanation or other – as
we spoke about before – that we aren’t quite in the position to explain today. I may well meet a
man in three years time who was in the house to see if we were home and forgot to turn off the
lights.
AG: [To Dorete.] But you have, maybe, different ideas about it?
DSL: No… I mean… I still feel that it’s odd because it’s happened more than one or two times.
The one time, I was inside, and it was turned-off and locked. And when we then came up the
road and looked down at the house, then it was lit again. And I’d just shut it off. And why
would it be lit again then? It can’t… There wasn’t time for it to have been someone… Then,
there would’ve been someone standing around the corner—.
KL: It could’ve been that the light switch that had just been turned off fell back again.
DSL: Heh! Heh, no! Heh, no! [Laughing.] But it’s neither here nor there. I mean, it’s not like...
It’s not a problem.
AG: It’s not something you think about.
DSL: Definitely not.
KL: I mean, we definitely aren’t surrounded by supernatural experiences.
DSL: It’s the only thing we can sort of say, “That was strange though” with those lights there.
The conflict between Karsten and Dorete is evident here, with Karsten struggling to come up with
naturalistic explanations, regardless of how absurd some of them may be. Karsten prides himself on
his rationality, but to what does this rationality amount? Saying that what we call supernatural
events are really just things that are still unexplained is simply begging the question, for if
everything that exists is natural, then supernatural is merely shorthand for that which is still
unexplained.490 This is made abundantly clear when the discussion turns to other matters:
Karsten Landro: I’ve heard about events, been told by very serious people. I don’t know if
you’ve experienced it. I mean, people feel, for example, that at Ærøskøbing Hostel, that demons
have lived out there, but now, they’re driven away then because... And people maintain that –
there are witnesses to it – that people have been sitting down inside the dining hall and seen
how water gushes down in the corner. And when they so go upstairs, then it’s completely dry.
And people have been watching, and all of a sudden, then water began to rain out of the tap and
that sort of thing. And to that, I have to say, if it’s correct, then I’ll also begin to say to myself,
“What’s going on there?”
Adam Grydehøj: How long ago?
KL: It’s two, three years ago.
Dorete Seier Landro: I haven’t heard about that [...]
KL: But people have another example, which can, I feel, really, seem... And it’s the most
concrete I can think of just now. There are people who can cut a divining rod, a bough from a
tree, and go with it in their hands, and if they then go over some water, then the divining rod
bends down, right? [To Dorete.] I think your mother can too.
DSL: Yes. But she wishes she couldn’t do what she can do.
KL: And you can’t explain it. I mean, it’s one of those things that I say that it may be that we
can explain them in 100 years or 50 years, but today, we can’t explain it in any case. It’s
strange. It’s if I take my mother-in-law by the hand, and she holds the one end and I hold the
other, then the divining rod goes, damn it, and I can feel it in my hand. You can’t explain that.
And there are many people who can [use the divining rod].
AG: OK.
KL: But it doesn’t, in my eyes, have to be supernatural. Again, we’ll be able to explain that in a
number of years, right? It’s a bit the same as when they discovered x-rays, right? It killed
people, really, when people had played with it long enough. People couldn’t understand that
either. People also believed it was some strange, supernatural thing. But today, people are
entirely sure as to why people did it and why people died from it. I mean, that’s how I believe in
it. Eventually, most of these supernatural phenomena are explained. It’s my rational approach to
this.
The use of a divining rod, mentioned to me by a number of contributors, is difficult to see as
anything besides a supernatural event. There is no lack of folkloric evidence for the divining rod’s
efficacy, yet since the use of forked sticks to find water cannot be adequately explained by science,
we are forced, for the moment, to assume that either the event is objectively supernatural or that
people have experiences that are not objectively true. In any event, if the divining rod does work on
some scientific level, this represents a magnificent coincidence since some aspects of divining rod
use are highly suggestive of magical thinking. It is surely not a matter of mere chance that, in
Denmark, most divining rods are made of willow branches. Willows not only grow in wet places
but are also notoriously weepy. This would be what James Frazer terms sympathetic magic: The
magical practitioner goes about her task – in this case, finding water – by imitating the end result.
Magical reasoning might state that, if you walk around with a willow branch, either the willow will
find water, or water will find the willow. A further interesting point is that Dorete’s cryptic
comment that her mother “wishes she couldn’t do what she can do,” wishes she did not have special
powers. This might at first seem odd since it surely cannot be a bad thing to be able to find
underground water, but this emotion is, as we shall see, extremely common among holders of
supernatural abilities.
Karsten and Dorete tell me an even more impressive story, this time involving another family
living in Ommel:
Karsten Landro: Now that you’re saying this, I’m just getting an association because Merete
Flindt’s husband, who lived just up here... She’s not very old. How old is she?
Dorete Seier Landro: Are you thinking of the butterfly?
KL: Yes. There’s a very young girl up there, in her mid-30s.
DSL: No, she’s over 40...
KL: It doesn’t matter. He was also just about 40. He got very incurable pancreatic cancer.
Incurable cancer. He was told by the doctors that he had only two months left. And they
managed, of course, to talk a lot about things because he was completely aware that he was
going to die. One of the last things that Merete says to him, it’s that “When you’re standing out
in the church in the coffin, then you have to give me a sign.” And this— It was during the fall,
right?
DSL: No, he died just after New Year’s.
KL: He died right after New Year’s. And when we sat out in the church, we had to admit, really,
that there, we saw that a butterfly flew up from the coffin.
Adam Grydehøj: From inside?
DSL: We didn’t see where it came from whatsoever. All of a sudden, a butterfly flew up just
around the coffin. The type that’s called an admiral [“Vanessa atalanta”; the red admiral
butterfly].
KL: It’s clear that she interpreted it as a sign from the husband.
DSL: Yes.
KL: And it’s very, very unnatural to experience a butterfly in the middle of winter.
DSL: The month of January.
AG: What was his name?
KL: He was named Ole, right?
DSL: Ole Larsen.
KL: And Merete Flindt Larsen.
AG: Is it Kenn’s [Kenn Flindt Larsen, a local teenager.] mother?
KL: Yes. And it’s her who told it herself because even though we others saw the butterfly, we
weren’t exactly certain what she thought of it.
DSL: But it was strange because some people say that it was because the church had been cold
and was then suddenly warmed up. But that doesn’t really make sense because in the month of
December, there’d been many services in the church. There were many times, just precisely at
that time of year, and it was just in the start of January that he was buried, right? So, it was sort
of a bit... It was strange. [...]
KL: It’s absolutely certain that she felt that that was a sign. Whereas I, of course, believe in that
which you, Dorete, say, that it may well have been that the church had been warmed up five
times, but it’s the sixth time that the butterfly came, right?
DSL: But it’s so strange that it came right there.
KL: Yes, but that’s how life is, you know?
I would later have the opportunity to speak with 38-year-old Merete Flindt Larsen about this same
event. She adds a number of significant details to the story. Because her husband, Ole, had wanted
to have a church funeral but had never been baptised, he received adult baptism. Not long before his
death, he had a conversation with his wife and son. Merete and Ken asked him to give them two
signs after he had died: One to tell them that he had arrived at a better place and another to show
them that he was present at his own funeral. Ole asked what kind of presence he could take at the
funeral, and somewhat randomly, Merete and Ken suggested, for example, a butterfly, a bee, or a
mouse. They had received permission from the Marstal pastor, Sophie Elisabeth Seidelin, to have
the funeral at Ommel Church even though it was the middle of winter and most services of this type
at this time of year are held in Marstal Church. The coffin was kept in the outhouse at Ommel
Church prior to the funeral. As Ken and Merete approached the church on the day of the service, the
clouds parted, and the sun shone down. Ken told his mother that this was his father’s first sign, and
Merete told Ken that she knew it herself. At the funeral, an amazing thing happened: Out of
nowhere, a highly-unseasonable red admiral butterfly appeared above the coffin. This represented
the second sign.
The story of the butterfly above the coffin is interesting for a number of reasons. Sceptics might
say that, having anticipated a sign, Merete and Ken simply saw a sign in the random butterfly. This
is fair enough, but there is more to the experience than that. Past folklore contains a number of
widespread legends concerning wandering souls, souls that leave their corporeal abodes in the form
of a small animal, and the forms of bees, mice, and butterflies are among the most common.
Merete, despite her occasional interest in the occult, is definitely unaware of this tradition. This
does not necessarily mean that the butterfly in the church was her husband, but it does show how
traditional folklore persists even absent cultural transmission. Whatever the reality or unreality of
wandering souls, there is something within humans that suggests to people that, when envisaging
the soul, they ought to see it in the form of a small animal even when, as in this case, small size is
not necessitated by the legend’s plot. Merete was a believer in the supernatural beforehand, and this
event has reinforced her faith.
There are, of course, some people who do not believe in anything whatsoever. One such person
is the bright, folklorically-knowledgeable youth, Niels Condrup. Niels thinks that 60% of all Danes
believe in ghosts, a rather high guess for a nonbeliever but an accurate one nonetheless. It may be
that his social circle – made up, as it is, of other youths – is more open to talk of the supernatural:
Niels Condrup: As a child, I was afraid of ghosts. Pretty much all children are afraid of ghosts.
I’d think that in any case.
Adam Grydehøj: What about adults?
NC: Adults, they can also, you know, be—. Or I don’t know if they’re scared, but I think, in any
case, that there are many who believe they exist. […]
AG: Have you heard about the White Lady at Søbygård?
NC: The White Lady, she […] was the daughter of the guy who had the castle – her father had
the castle –, and she got together with a peasant, a peasant-lad. They couldn’t do that because
she was, you know, too fine for him. And so, they walled her up inside in—. People have also
done that in other castles, walled them up, simply walled them living inside so that they died of
hunger and everything in there, inside that wall. She wandered around the castle. […]
AG: Your friends: Do you think that any of them believe in ghosts?
NC: A whole bunch of them. I mean, there’re a lot. I’m not afraid of going out in a graveyard
alone. […] That’s how I’ve always looked at it. I was also very frightened of werewolves once,
but that doesn’t amount to anything any more either. Werewolves, they’re also something
American, and then that movie hullabaloo came along.
Niels is not entirely sympathetic toward believers since he must surely be aware that, while his
friends may believe in ghosts, they are unlikely to be overly concerned by horror movie clichés like
haunted graveyards and werewolves.
Another strong rationalist is the Skovby local historian, Palle Abramsson. We had gotten to
talking about ghosts, in which he definitely does not believe. Then, Palle changed the topic:
Now, you have to think though that Ærø’s a maritime island. Everywhere where people
travelled the seas, they were both very religious, very faithful, and they’d a lot of superstition.
They believed in almost everything. Omens and so on. I can remember, out in Søby… The old
harbour master out there, Jørgen Kristiansen, who’s still alive, his father […] – I’ve never
known him –, he went down by Læsø [A small, nearby island.] with one of his ships there. And
there was someone from Søby who drowned, of course, who was named Hans Hansen. And in
that moment he drowned, his mother and father, they sat in the living room. And then, they
could hear something like some oilskins that slid alongside the wall of the house.491 And so,
they then found out that he’d drowned at that same moment. It must’ve been in the ’30s or
something like that of course. I can tell you that my grandmother… I’d an uncle who was
named Arnold, and he was on a ship across the North Sea during the start of World War II. The
ship hit a mine, and he drowned of course. And my grandmother, she sat at home and heard a
bang and then heard him shout, “Mother!” Then, she said to my mother and father, “Arnold is
dead!” But she perceived it. You can believe it or not. I think that we can— In any case, over a
short distance, if we sit here and look at one another—. Yes, we don’t even need to look at one
another… My wife, she knows what it is, if I go in, and I think, “What was it that I needed
now?” Then, she knows it. But I think that comes more from living with one another. You
could, maybe, imagine some form or other of electric impulses in one way or another. But OK,
omens, it’s something that… Ghosts, people have come away from them more quickly than they
have from omens.
Like Karsten Landro, Palle seeks naturalistic explanations. Nevertheless, Palle more or less admits
to belief in omens while disparaging belief in ghosts, saying that belief in ghosts hardly even exists
any more. It is intriguing that Palle gives the mine incident as an example of omens since this
particular type of legend actually lies halfway between a ghost narrative and a pure omen narrative.
The sliding of the oilskins along the wall suggests the work of what folklorists might call a wraith,
that is, the spirit or doppelgänger of a man that briefly appears to friends or relatives at the time of
the man’s death. So, while the wraith certainly acts as an omen, it is also sometimes viewed as a
sort of ghost.
There is a tendency to differentiate between one’s own beliefs and those of others, often taking
the form of a sceptical approach to other people’s experiences while believing in those with which
one is personally associated.492 Palle does not go this far, for he never makes absolutely clear his
thoughts on omens. Another historian, however, has no doubts about the issue. He wishes to remain
anonymous though, and we shall call him Per. Per guesses that around 10% of Danes believe in
ghosts and says:
Per: In the population, there’re a lot of old people. I also know people who are completely
open, “No, I don’t believe in that. But you shouldn’t do this or that.” I mean, I got to talking
with some people not too long ago, and so I [asked them] if they knew anything about
superstition, precisely because I was going to speak with you. And so, they said, “No...” They
didn’t know that, they didn’t know anything about superstition. They knew that you shouldn’t
walk under a ladder, you shouldn’t seat 13 people at a table, and that sort of thing. “No, I’m not
superstitious,” one of them said. “But 13 at a table, I don’t get involved in that.”
Adam Grydehøj: I’d say that about 50% of people believe in ghosts.
P: 50%.
AG: And when it comes down to “more between Heaven and Earth,” then it’s maybe nine out of
ten. […]
P: But I can tell you... It’s maybe incorrect. I know that a man from Danmarksgade [A street in
Marstal.], he says that they can—. When they lie in their beds in the attic, then they can hear
how they walk in and out of the door down below. I mean, it’s [happening] right now. And I
know some people who moved into a house 30, 35 years ago here in Marstal, and twice there,
one of them saw a man walk through the house. And it turned out that he was identical to the
man who’d lived there before. When my grandfather died, it was in a very dramatic way. He
was blown up by a mine during the war because he had to – what’s it called – defuse mines.
And it so happened that – I mean, shortly before – one of his brothers had a dream. [...] He had
a dream where he saw my grandmother standing out by the water and looking up at precisely
that spot where her husband was, you know, going to die quite shortly afterwards. There she
stood in black clothing, I mean, dressed in black and looked up at it. And when a few days had
passed or something, then he simply knew when the telephone rang that it rang concerning him.
I mean, he knew immediately. He wrote it in a letter from back then, “I knew it immediately,
was sure about what it was, that my brother was dead.” And my great-grandfather, I mean, this
man’s own father, he was subjected to a mutiny, I mean, a revolution on-board the ship. And
then it was, you know, a man who’d gone crazy, a sailor. And he was on the way across the
deck with a knife and wanted to cut him down. He was, you know, the ship’s master, the
captain. He woke up that instant and was sure that there was something wrong because he’d just
dreamed about that. And so, he comes up on deck, and then the other sailors are about to oust
him. So, I mean, in that way, there is something between heaven and earth.
AG: So, that’s how you explain those things that don’t involve ghosts but that involve what we
could call second sight in English.
P: Yes. But I mean, I think I also believe in it. Yes.
AG: I’m not trying to say anything bad here, but how does one differentiate that type of belief
from belief in ghosts or fairies?
Per: Eh… All right. All right, it’s different in that fairies and ghosts and that kind of thing, they
have, in a way, their own stories. These things, they’re all something that crop up in connection
with… Now, in this case, then it’s my family’s history, right? There’ve been strange incidents. I
have, as I said, some letters where it’s described, you know, where there’s someone who
described it in advance. And it’s because of that that it’s difficult, I think at least, to say—. It’s
difficult for me to dismiss that sort of accurate account and say, “Yes, it’s just a coincidence,”
right? Of course, if there hadn’t happened anything, then he [Per’s grandfather’s brother.]
would’ve forgotten that story. Now, something happened, and so he remembers it. […] And I
also probably think that… I mean, I also think about how you can’t really... You can’t get
around the fact that, for example, that people who’ve had near-death experiences, that the things
they often meet on the other side, right?, that it also turns out that there is something between
heaven and earth besides what we can see.
AG: But if we have thousands – just from the 1800s – of descriptions of people’s own
experiences with fairies, which we are sure don’t exist, have never existed… […] Almost
everyone believes in this about seeing the future, so it isn’t strange. But I have trouble with…
Maybe, it’s more that people can say, “I know these people who’ve had these particular
experiences, and I can trust them. But these other people—.”
P: “—I didn’t know, so I don’t believe them.”
AG: And then, it sounds a bit harsh, but if it is, in any case, about… Because it’s not as if we
don’t have enough sources that talk about fairies and brownies. There are just so many of them.
P: No… But still… I mean, you’ve really backed me into a corner now.
AG: No, no…
P: Yes, you have. I still feel that that stuff about the fairies and the brownies and the kelpie and
the Klabauterman and whatever else you’ve talked about, that they, to some extent or other,
have attached themselves to [the fact that] some things have occurred for which people have
used them as an explanation. And the things that I tell you about, they’re not anything that
requires an explanation because it’s just something that’s actually happened afterwards, right?
So, in reality, then you can say that they’ve been prophetic, right? That they could predict some
things or read some signs. And I believe, in the end, that we all experience it. I don’t, in the end,
believe that it’s so supernatural because, many times then, for example in this case with
predicting wars or this mine accident—. [...] Nothing comes in between [us and the event].
Amazingly, Per’s great family experience with omens is very close to Palle Abramsson’s, both of
these involving mines. As a historian, Per has a sophisticated view of history and can speak at great
length and ability about Ærø’s past, but as he realizes himself, his arguments falter when presented
with the contradiction between his opinion of past fairy and ghost belief and his own belief in
prophecies and omens. Per is uniquely willing to speak with me about the issue, but his
contradiction is by no means unusual. Clearly, as Per holds, fairies were used at times to explain
mysterious happenings, such as the death of livestock or a person’s sudden descent into madness,
but when we have first-hand accounts of encounters with fairies, then it is not simply that fairies
have become attached to an independent story by way of explanation. These sorts of experiences are
just as direct and clear as those prophecies in which Per firmly believes.
Few people, however, would fault Per’s belief in omens since this belief crosses all boundaries
of age and social situation. For example, 66-year-old Tove Pedersen, whose son died in a car
accident, tells me a brief but heart-rending account of her encounter with the supernatural when she
interjects into our interview, “It was now – two years ago to the day – that we lost our son out on
Drejet. I’d dreamt 14 days before that he lay on an incline and was dead. It was out on Drejet, on
the incline [at the side of the road] that it happened.”
Belief in prophesy is not, of course, a new phenomenon, as proved by the ample cache of
Biblical prophets. Prophesy has excited interest on the popular level throughout the world for as far
as our written evidence goes back. In the Medieval and Early Modern periods, most of our evidence
of prophesying regards cases that interested the elites, and these cases were usually religious or
martial in nature. So far as the Northern European past is concerned, we can differentiate between
two different means of predicting the future: Some people have foresight because they are inspired
while others make predictions on a scientific basis. We have seen that spiritualism was by no means
divorced from Early Modern science, and as Charles Webster argues,493 historians are all too apt to
ease the task of studying the past by setting people and periods into illusorily-distinct categories, by
separating scientists from occultists at all costs. Thus, Paracelsus – a controversial figure but also
undeniably one of the most important doctors in history – is today commonly ranked among the
superstitious occultists and alchemists of the pre-Enlightenment period. Meanwhile our historical
memory of Bacon, Newton, Copernicus, and other “enlightened” thinkers is studiously cleared of
the occultist debris that exerted great influence on their research.
Once clued in on what to look for, one need not be an expert in folklore in order to note the
myriad of supernatural ideas in the writings of the Enlightenment’s great scientists, yet there is a
tendency to either make excuses for past scientists’ apparent lapses in judgement, treat their
supernatural beliefs as some kind of aberration in otherwise brilliant minds, or pretend not to notice
that anything is amiss whatsoever. If a respected astronomer today went about holding the occult
views of Kepler, he might well be deemed insane, but unless we are willing to consider the vast
majority of people who lived prior to the 1900 insane, this would be a grave error.
Webster does a fine job of placing Enlightenment-era occultism in context. One of his interests
is millennialism, belief in an imminent Christian apocalypse, something that was general among
academics in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Take, for example, Webster’s analysis of the great Danish
astronomer, Tycho Brahe:
Closer inspection demonstrates that Tycho Brahe was by no means alienated by the speculations
of the earlier period. His tract containing an account of the new star of 1572 briefly concluded
that this remarkable event presaged disturbances in the north of Europe which would spread
elsewhere and prepare the way for a new secular and religious order. The appearance of what
seemed to be the first new star since the star of Bethlehem gave considerable grounds for
reflection. Among the more ingenious observations, it was pointed out that the nova had blazed
for seventeen lunar months and then vanished twice seven years before the first lunar eclipse
predicted for the fateful year of 1588 (as well as 171 lunar months 111 days before the second
eclipse), when Saturn, Jupiter and Mars would meet in the moon’s house. Such observations
could be tied up with a parallel series of calculations based on apocalyptic numbers in the
prophetic books, which also pointed to the significance of 1588. [...]
In 1577, more than in 1572, Tycho drew astrological conclusions from his observations,
predicting “great alteration and reformation, both in the spiritual and secular regimes.” In
particular he was struck by the observation that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Aries
expected in 1603 was an event occurring once every 800 years, and therefore had happened
only seven times since the beginning of the world [This is significant because history was
thought to be divided into eight eras]. It could therefore be presumed that “the eternal Sabbath
of all Creation is at hand in this maximum conjunction”. The comet of 1577 accordingly led to
Tycho’s first serious commitment to the reform of the world system, and it alerted him to the
idea that the end of the world and establishment of a Golden Age could not be far distant.494
Brahe was not alone in all this, with men like Paracelsus also using astrology to plot the future, and
spirit-summoners taking active measures to gain information from celestial and damned beings.
For the Northern European common folk, however, matters were different. When a farmhand
possessed psychic powers, it was rarely because he had mapped out the stars, and if he possessed a
spirit familiar, the rituals he undertook to gain possession of the spirit were usually different than
those of the alchemists. As we noted when looking at Robert Kirk’s Secret Common-Wealth,
interest by the British upper-classes – that is, those who were literate and could write the books that
we use as evidence today – in the supernatural beliefs of the lower-classes did not really begin in
earnest until the latter half of the 17th Century. By this point, the heyday of alchemy and spiritsummoning had passed. Nonetheless, and perhaps ironically by modern standards, those who had
the most sustained interest in the supernatural were, once again, scientists.
Today, it may be difficult to imagine the mass of preachers and scientists working together, but
in the late 1600s, these two most educated strata of British society were united by the fear that faith
in Christianity was under threat. In retrospect, “under threat” seems like an exaggeration, yet it was
at this time that the first glimmerings of atheism appeared in England, and while atheism could not
be said to have been widespread, it was hip among the young, influential literary types. This
eventually led to the study of the Scottish phenomenon of second sight.495
Second sight, or seership, was not unknown in England, but it was better known north of the
border. Unlike the aristocratic spirit manipulators of the previous century and the lower-class
witches who had practised their trade for time immemorial, those with second sight often received
no benefit from their gifts. Indeed, they usually believed themselves cursed. Scottish second sight –
the type of seership for which we have, thanks to the likes of Kirk, the best historical evidence – can
generally be described in the following manner: The seer sees physical realities from the future
intruding into the present, either symbolically or concretely. For example, if a sailor is going to
drown in the future, the seer will often see him not as he is in the present but as he will be, dripping
wet.496 Usually, a seer cannot see into his or her own future and can do nothing to prevent the
experiencing of these sometimes-grisly prophecies. Some seers claim only to prophesize sad and
unfortunate events while others witness both the sad and the glad.497
Scottish faith in seership was once nearly universal. Lord Reay, writing to the famous diarist,
Samuel Pepys, says of second sight in 1699, “The people are so much perswaded of the trueth of it
in the highlands and Isles That one would be More Laught at, for not believing it there Than
affirmeing it elsewhere.” As far as scientists were concerned, one of the advantages to researching
second sight over witchcraft and fairies was that whereas both witches were primarily commoners,
second sight was status-blind: Anyone could have second sight. Also, when a rich, respected man’s
servant saw a fairy, the gentleman had no proof of it, but when a servant had second sight, the
gentleman could judge for himself on the basis of the accuracy of the seer’s predictions.
There was much debate as to how second sight was obtained, but many gave it a demonic
origin. As George Sinclair writes in 1685, “It is not improbable that such preternatural knowledge
comes first by a compact with the Devil and is derived downward by succession to their posterity,
many of such I suppose, are innocent, and have this Sight against their will and inclination.”498
Regardless of how second sight came about, the phenomenon became a popular field of study. This
interest was initially spurred by a conversation between Robert Boyle, a Royal Society founder, and
George Mackenzie, Lord Tarbat, who was then the Scottish Lord Justice General and would later
become the first Earl of Cromartie. Lord Tarbat, being widely respected, was Boyle’s perfect
witness to the supernatural, and he was able to offer the scientist a few first-hand encounters with
second-sighted individuals. Among these is a striking experience in which a second-sighted stranger
informs Lord Tarbat that a bloody corpse in reclining in the chair next to him. Not long after, a
group of English soldiers enter the house with a severely-wounded comrade who they place on this
same chair.499
The line of inquiry begun by Boyle did not end with Lord Tarbat and Robert Kirk. John
Aubrey, an early antiquarian, also worked on the issue. Aubrey was aided in this by Dr.
Garden of King’s College in Aberdeen, who, in 1694, sent out surveys regarding second sight.
The use of surveys in sociological research was pioneered by Boyle, and Aubrey’s efforts
represent their first documented use in folklore studies. What follows in an excerpt from one
response to Aubrey’s and Garden’s survey:
Qu[estion]. 3. If the objects of this knowledge be sad & dismall events only, such as deaths and
murders? Or joyfull and prosperous also? Answer. Sad and dismall events, are the objects of
this knowledge: as sudden deaths, dismall accidents: That they are prosperous or joyfull I
cannot learn. Only on instance I had from a person worthie of credit and therby judge of the
joyfulness or prosperity of it and it is this: Neer 40 years ago Mackleud and his Lady sister to
my Lord Sea-forth, were fetching a walk about their owne house; and in their return both came
into the Nurses chamber, where their young son was on the breast: at their coming in to the
room the nurse falls a weeping. They asked the cause, dreading the child was sick or that shee
was scarce of milk. The Nurse replied the child was well, and had abundance of milk, yet shee
still weeped, & being pressed to tell what ailed her; shee at last said, Mackleud would die, and
the lady would be married shortly to another man. Being enquired how she knew that event, she
told them plainly, that as they came both into the room, shee saw a man with a scarlet cloak and
a white hat betwixt them, giving the lady a kiss over her shoulder, and this was the cause of her
weeping. All which came to pass after Mackleud’s death; the tutor of Lovat married the Lady in
that same habit the woman did see him.500 Now by this instance judge if it be prosperous to one,
it is as dismall to another. [...]
Qu. 5. If the 2nd sight be a thing that is troublesome and uneasie to those that have it? and
such as they would gladly be rid off? Answer. It is commonly talked by all I spoke with that it is
troublesome: and they would gladly be freed from it; but cannot: Only I heard lately of a man
very much troubled in his soule therwith; and by serious begging of God deliverance from it; at
length lost the faculty of the 2nd sight.
Qu. 6. If any person or persons truly godly, or who may be justly presumed to be such; have
been known to have had this gift or faculty? An. Negatively, not any godly but such as are
virtuous.
Qu. 7. If it descends by succession from parents to children? or, if not, whether those that
have it, can tell how they came by it? An. That it is by succession I cannot learn. how they come
by it, its hard to know, neither will they tell: which if they did, they are sure of their stroakes
from an invisible hand. On instance I heard of one Allen Miller, being in company with some
gentlemen, having gotten a little more than ordinary of that strong liquor they were drinking;
began to tell stories strange passages he had been att: But the said Allen was suddenly removed
to the farther end of the [room] and was there almost strangled: recovering a litle & coming to
the place where he was before, they asked him what it was that troubled him so. He answered he
durst not tell: for he had too much already. How they come by it? An. some say by compact
with the devil: some say by converse with those Demons, we call Fairies.501
It is interesting to note that the response to Question 7 not only offers outright the possibility that
second sight is related to fairies but also implies as much in the description of the drunken seer’s
rough treatment since fairies set great store in the preservation of their secrets. So, while Per, the
sceptical believer, may steadfastly differentiate between fairy stories and second sight stories, Lord
Tarbat, Aubrey, and Kirk all make the connection with varying levels of explicitness. Our
perceptions of supernatural experiences change alongside society, and once belief in fairies ceased,
for whatever reason, to be widespread in Northern Europe, experiences that were once related with
them acquired new interpretations.
Chapter 21: A Ghost by Any Other Name...
50-year-old Poul Erik Jensen owns the small grill-bar on the corner of Marstal’s main square. Since
the day I spoke with him, in mid-August 2006, he has expanded his business into The Little Café
down the street, one of Marstal’s most prominent restaurants. Poul Erik and his wife moved from
the city to the Rise Mark region of Ærø in 1997, and in contrast to what they had expected, this
change of scene resulted in anything but peace and serenity.
Poul Erik is a quiet, serious man, and as he leans over the round, metal table inside the grill-bar,
the sun glinting off his glasses, one gets the impression of someone who has accepted the rules of
the game of life and decided that this game must be won at all costs. He is, in many ways, a hard
man. Poul Erik tells me:
I’d think 5% [of Danes believe in ghosts] because it’s five out of a hundred people who I’ve
spoken with who don’t laugh [at my experiences]. [...] I’m educated as an engineer, and
regarding the concrete issue that we’ll talk about, I have to say that, until I came to Ærø, I’d
never had any thoughts, belief in any of those things one heard about occult things, weird
occurrences and so on. But that’s changed, you know. And the reason you’re sitting here today
is because you’ve heard something about it. I don’t “believe.” I’m convinced of it, that there’s
something that most normal people can’t understand or have control over. Briefly stated, our
experiences started a number of years ago. I’d just like to say one thing. My wife, Karen
Margrethe502, has once – many years ago, I mean, but a while back – had a particular ability, not
to see what would happen, but to foresee a thing in rough outline, something or other
indeterminate. It happened all the time back then. It’s 25 years ago. My wife and I and our
children had been in a summerhouse up in north Jutland and had arranged that we would drive
over to my mother-in-law, who was a widow, on the way home from that summerhouse
experience. And we would turn south towards Herning [in mid-Jutland] at a town that was
called Arnborg and then drive to Horsens [in east Jutland]. When we come to the crossroad in
the town of Arnborg and were going to turn toward Horsens, then my wife says suddenly, “Do
you know what? We’ll continue home to Sønderborg [in southern Jutland]. I have a bad feeling
about my mother.” It wasn’t elaborated in any way, but she has the feeling that she’s probably
cross or in a bad mood today. When we get to Sønderborg, then she calls home to her mother to
say why we didn’t come. No one answers the telephone. And a short while afterwards, we’re
rung up and told that my mother-in-law is dead, had committed suicide at just about that
moment. That set, you know, some thoughts moving in our heads back then. How was that she –
just right on the way to the place – says, “I have a bad feeling about my mother. And let’s not
drive there because now we have two little children with us”?
Poul Erik’s wife experienced a type of premonition. It is not an omen but a simple feeling, a hint of
something amiss. Only a very few of my contributors claim the ability to see concrete omens of the
sort described by Lord Tarbat and Aubrey’s and Garden’s contributor. Most people’s link to the
supernatural realm never rises above vague feelings. One will note the intricate scene-setting Poul
Erik provides, complete with detailed driving directions, a classic method narrators have of making
their supernatural stories more believable in case of sceptical listeners. In the words of the ghost
scholar, Gillian Bennett, “The storyteller behaves as if she were a witness in a court of law, whose
reliability will be assessed by the completeness and accuracy of her memory of the circumstances.
So the story is ‘flooded’ with scene-setting to deter challenges to the narrator’s role of
remembrancer and interpreter.”503 We noticed earlier that the Ærøskøbing storyteller, Jan Pedersen,
used this method in what was probably a conscious rhetorical technique in order to achieve the
same effect of truthfulness even though he was recounting what was, to him, obvious fiction.
Poul Erik and his wife were unable to interpret their encounter with foreknowledge at the time,
yet it came into a kind of context years later when they began having other uncanny experiences.
This is also a known reaction to supernatural experiences.504 Although it is clear that Poul’s wife’s
vague prophesy confused them from the start, Poul links it to later events despite the fact that the
only thing they share is a supernatural explanation. By telling me about this previous encounter
with the supernatural realm, Poul Erik is also buttressing his logical highground, reinforcing the
idea that, even though he is a rational person, he has had multiple proofs of the supernatural.
Poul Erik moves on to discussing his time on Ærø:
Poul Erik Jensen: But when we then come to Ærø and rebuild our property, there are a whole
lot of sounds in the house. And we always say, “Yeah, it’s because we’ve just put up a new
roof.” We live over in Rise Mark. And there, we sort of have some experiences that we don’t
speak with each other about. But one day, when I drove my wife to work early, already 5:30 in
the morning, I have to empty the dishwasher. And we have some unbreakable china from off
our boat in there, and when I knocked those together [...], when I take five, six plates and press
them together to pull them out of the dishwasher, it makes noise. And just when it happens, then
it sounds like this [Poul Erik bangs four times of the table.] down here in the attic. Four times.
Hard knocks. Fifty centimetres over my head. There’s nothing up there. There, where our
kitchen is underneath, there’s a hollow space. After the insulation has come up to 70 centimetres
in height, there’s a sort of three-cornered room under the roof. No one could be there. I looked
once and my hair rose up. It was totally, totally concrete: Something or other was there. And it
wasn’t something with wood shifting itself in the house or anything else.
Adam Grydehøj: Or mice?
PEJ: Mice? It was louder than you heard there. It was such that you get surprised, frightened. I
became, actually, frightened the first time. And I thought over it a bit. I went around a bit and
looked. Where I stood, I could stand and look out onto the courtyard. There wasn’t anyone who
knocked on the door. I could look at our front door and back door as well. There were no
people. Well, my wife comes home from work that day then, and so I say to her, “Now, hear
this, honey. You’ve got to hear a funny experience I had this morning.” And so I tell her what
happened. So, she becomes completely white as a corpse. So, she says, “Do you know what? I
actually daren’t go out into our stables.” When we rebuilt, we built in the stables, so there’s a
piece of ceiling missing. It’s not really necessary there. You can stand and look up at the entire
ceiling there. She has her washing machine and dryer out there. “One day, I was emptying it
there,” she says, “I heard someone who walked the whole way up over the ceiling there.
Nothing with a little *donk* or anything. Totally clear steps, a bit slow-moving steps the whole
way over the ceiling.” And since then, she hasn’t dared go out there. It was, in a way, the run-up
to our beginning to talk about our experiences. We’d insulated the house fantastically well. That
is to say that we hardly register a sound from outside. When our friends come to visit, they
throw little stones at the living room window because otherwise, we don’t come out to the front
door. But we’ve gotten up hundreds of times and thought that there was someone at the door
because we heard something out there knocking. It could be creaking from construction in the
house and so on, but not hundreds of times. [...] And there are other occurrences that I’ve later
had confirmed. One winter evening, we were sitting in the living room. The wood oven is two
meters from me. It’s 28° Celsius, and suddenly, I feel a clump of cold air go past me, and the
hair rises on my arm. In 28° heat. And I say, “There was a cold puff there.” And my wife can’t
feel anything even though we’re sitting less than a meter from each other.
When I hear Poul Erik say that he was frightened, I cannot help but be surprised, for his demeanour
is anything but meek. It is interesting that, although the period in which his experiences occurred
was long-lasting and the experiences themselves were consistent, none of the events he describes
are particularly dramatic. Even if he finds the phantom noises inexplicable from the start, none of
them are individually significant enough for his belief to be confirmed until experience piles upon
experience and he finally – as a feigned joke – divulges his worries to his wife. It is only then, when
he hears that his wife has been similarly perplexed and frightened, that he is convinced that he is
experiencing something supernatural. Once again, as proof of his rationality, Poul Erik goes into
great detail in his descriptions. He tells me the number of knocks he heard above his head, the shape
of the hollow space beneath the roof, the precise thickness of the insulation over the ceiling, the
exact temperature in the fire-heated room. Moreover, his digression regarding the extent to which
his house is sound-proofed, how his friends are forced to throw pebbles at the window in order to
get his attention, serves to allay concerns as to the logic of his supernatural interpretation.
So, Poul Erik and his wife are confused and do not know the cause of their experiences. They
probably already suspect that a ghost is involved, but these are rational individuals, so they seek a
more specific explanation:
Poul Erik Jensen: The result of all these things was that we got to work and investigated what’s
happening. The first story I hear, it’s supposed to have happened around 1827. A farmer dies on
a farm closer to the water. I’m not sure which farm it is because when I got the story, it wasn’t
specified, but in a way, it’s unimportant. There’s a place on Rise Mark’s Road. It’s at a strange
swing in the road. In the old days, then it was straight. I’ve had it confirmed by looking at some
old land register maps, and people have simply made a bend in the road. That stretch right there,
where the road from there and up to [where] the man who was sheriff was, it seems that the
farm was named Ballegaard. It lay up in Rise Town. The sheriff back then, if there were any
dispute between two farmers, then he was the one who decided what’s right and what’s wrong.
He had to also register deaths and all that sort of thing as well. And one didn’t just drive up and
say that the master was dead; he threw him in the back of the wagon – the horse wagon – and
drove up to him. When he [The man transporting the farmer’s body.] comes up to the farm, then
the body’s missing from the back of the wagon. So, he turns the horse and drives back. He’s
fallen off. On a bump on the gravel road, he’s fallen off. And they never find him. We heard
sort of that he’d fallen off near where our property’s built today. It was first built in 1905, you
know, the property. And so, he walked around there, lost. But Jesper Groth, do you know him?
Adam Grydehøj: Yes, but he didn’t say anything about this.
PEJ: No, but you can certainly ask him about it because now, it’s actually his story that’s
coming. So, he laughs to me one evening when we’re sitting together. He says, “No, Poul Erik,
that’s not how it is.” In 1772, a servant was murdered up in Rise. And people allege that it’s the
married couple who’ve done it, where he was employed, where he worked. And the mood is
that they’ll be convicted. People are in agreement that it’s them, and they should hang. At this
time, it was a winter, autumn, 1772. There’s historical evidence that there was very bad
weather. And the beadle lived back then at Nordborg Castle on Als [An island off the East coast
of southern Jutland.], but there was no way he could come over here and be in charge of the
execution. But he had a right-hand man, and that’s the skinner. He’s normally a weaklyendowed man. He personally skins dead animals and burns them up and that sort of thing. And
he lived, after this matter was revealed, precisely there – where our property lies – with his skin
shop and all of that. He’s like the beadle’s assistant then. He’s used to being there when people
are hanged. So, people press him into hanging these two people in 1772. By the way, it actually
turns out that they’re the last two people who were hung on Rise Gallows Hill. The most special
part is that the gallows were first pulled down in 1910. 120 years [sic] after the last hanging, the
gallows still stood there. And there’s the story, then, that a while afterwards – not a day or a
month, but you know, eventually –, people find out that they weren’t the ones who were guilty,
who’d murdered him. So, those two are the ones who visited our property. That’s why we hear
people. There, on that property where we live today, it’s supposed to be this married couple who
were killed. When you tell this [story] here, then you know full well that there are many people
who laugh at it. And I’ve heard many a funny comment, but I’ve also heard many comments
from people – I mean, as close together as we’re sitting now – who’ve replied that yes, they’ve
also had experiences. I believe, maybe, that people over here [on Ærø] have had more of these
experiences on account of the peace and quiet. Where we lived in Sønderborg, it would’ve been
nothing whatsoever. We lived right on the battlefield from 1864 [From the second war between
Denmark and the German states over Schleswig-Holstein.]. Out in our yard lay a buried soldier
from 1864. There was a little gravestone for him, and there are many places in southern Jutland
where the soldiers were buried. But you know, there was always the roar of the traffic, there
were always lots of things. We were younger. Really, we did more things. We didn’t sit back
and relax then. We hadn’t the time to sit listening to music nice and quietly for three hours
during the evening or reading a book or being calm in other ways. Then, we had children and a
life. That’s the difference, and therefore, I think one doesn’t, you know, register some of these
things.
Poul Erik’s reaction to these stories is unusual. Although many people have told me about their own
experiences with ghosts, Poul Erik is the only non-historian to seek or accept a historical
explanation for a haunting. Most people either do very little theoretical thinking about their
experiences, and when they do think theoretically, they never begin considering historical ghosts.
Partially, this is a result of the mindset we saw at work in Per’s testimony concerning omens: Some
people believe in their own experiences but disbelieve almost everyone else’s, and from this point
of view, hoary ghost tales are of little relevance. Of course, while we can see this idea as logicallyflawed, assuming that ghosts are not wholly extraordinary, there is no reason why people should
assume that their ghost is an ancient rather than a modern one. It may even be that Poul Erik went
through this thought process himself since he does, after all, make a point of the fact that his house
was first built in 1905. If Poul Erik knows that there were no unusual deaths in the house in the
intervening 90 years between its construction and his purchase of it, he might be on sure enough
ground to assume that the hauntings have pre-20th-Century origins.
Poul Erik moves away from his phenomenological and historical descriptions and speaks of his
feelings about ghosts in general:
Ghosts have been made laughable in Denmark today. It’s also a strange word, “a ghost.” But the
energy is definitely there, so after all of this, we’ve seen many films about it and read about it. I
mean, there’s been a series on Danish television about this sort of thing. [...] We’ve had some
people staying with us. It was a couple of years ago, when there weren’t extra sleeping places
on Ærø. So, they ring us up from Vindeballe Inn, “I have a couple. Could they stay out there [in
your house]?” “Yes, yes, yes. Come right on out. We have plenty of room.” So, in the morning,
we’re drinking morning coffee with them. Suddenly, someone walks across the ceiling. And so,
the couple who’re sitting across from us, who don’t know anything about us, say, “Oh, are there
other people in the house?” I look at my wife and say, “No.” And so, I explain how it is, that we
experience that sort of thing. It’s nothing with *gonk, gonk*. It’s [Poul Erik motions a series of
loud footsteps.]. Most of the times, the number of steps reaches seven. Sort of slow steps, you’d
say. Not someone who’s running. Another occurrence that’s also confirmed by other people:
We hosted St Hans Night [The festival of St John, at mid-summer.] two, three years ago. In our
utility room, we have a dishwasher. Standing on the other side – I can’t name names –, but a [...]
woman is standing there, and she’s 15 years older than me. We’re standing with this distance
[Poul Erik measures out about a meter and half with his arms.] between us, both loading the
dishwasher. All of a sudden, she straightens herself up, and then she says to me [...],“You didn’t
touch my bottom?” “No,” I say, “I haven’t.” She’s felt a clap on the behind. And there weren’t
any other people in the room, and all the others sat out in a tent out in the garden. So, I say,
“What can you smell now?” She sniffs a bit. “It’s lavender,” she says. Totally correct. We’ve
experienced that many times we’ve had these experiences. Even when the pig farmer’s
spreading out shit, we’ve had experiences where it smelled like lavender. We don’t own
lavender at home or perfume with lavender in it. Therefore, it’s very peculiar. And so, I say, “I
think you should go and say to Karen Margrethe that you’ve smelled lavender.” “Oh!” she
[Karen Margrethe.] says, “now it’s that again!” Because she could smell it too. She could also
smell it. […] We once had, after a television broadcast, where we had a whole lot of cold air
that came through the house, we were supposed to request in for directions for it to go back,
[say] that it didn’t have any business here. I stood up and said it in the living room in four
directions. Maybe laughable, maybe not, because we haven’t registered anything whatsoever
afterwards, in the last year and a half. But we haven’t been much at home either after I took
over this shop. We first come home at 9:30 at night, and so we may not register this or that
because we’re too tired and go to bed earlier and that kind of thing. I don’t know. But we don’t
say that it isn’t true because of it. And remember that I’m a technocrat. I’m educated in
something where there’s the technical method and explanations for everything. Why a bridge
doesn’t fall down, we know that. I’d have – five, ten years ago – denied acquaintance with this
and said, “Nah, stop it now. Stop it.” […] My son turned 30 on 20 March 2005. We celebrated
his birthday with him. One of his childhood friends came as well, and his girlfriend. She’s from
Iran. She claims she can see things. And we didn’t have alcohol or anything at all. So, I sat
down on the sofa with her, and then I said to her, “Can you tell me what we’re experiencing at
home?” She didn’t know a thing about it because it was the first time we’d met her. “Yes,” she
said, “there are four people living in your house.” “Nah, there aren’t,” I said, “there aren’t nay
others.” “There are four people living in your house. Both you and your wife and another
couple.” She could do that without knowing anything about us.
By presenting independent confirmations, Poul Erik is doing yet more to prove his ghostly
explanation for his experiences. Again, neither the incident with the visitors hearing footsteps
upstairs nor the party guest’s humorous encounter with the ghost are terribly dramatic. This ghost
has made its presence known by subtle means alone. Poul Erik seems to see the Iranian woman’s
claim that another couple is living in the house as evidence for Jesper Groth’s theory.
Poul Erik feels that others find his belief in ghosts laughable, yet such is his personality and
inner strength that he tells other people about it regardless. It is not reassuring to recall that he
estimates that only 5% of all of his listeners fail to act amused since we can be almost positive that
far more than 5% of them believe in the supernatural themselves. Even worse, Poul Erik disrespects
celebrity spiritualists like Marion Dampier-Jeans, the very people who we would expect him to turn
for help and advice. Very few of my non-spiritualist-leaning contributors have any confidence in
television clairvoyants since experiences with the supernatural do not lead people uniformly to
spiritualism. Nonetheless, Poul Erik is sometimes willing to take spiritualist counsel – say,
addressing the ghost in the cardinal directions and asking it to leave – simply because there is no
other counsel available. It is difficult for me to imagine a proud, strong man like Poul Erik
ritualistically turning north, east, south, and west while asking a ghost to depart. In our society,
however, in which belief is enormously underestimated and people feel the need to hide their
convictions, extremists – and I do not use this term negatively – like the spiritualists will necessarily
be the most accessible option, no matter that their views are unpalatable to people like Poul Erik:
Afterwards, my wife got in contact with some of those clairvoyants who’ve worked with it.
There are a lot of people who claim that they’re clairvoyant, but it’s as if everything that can’t
be explained is incorrect, and everything that can be explained, it’s true. So, my technocratic
personality rises up again. It’s a question of, “With all of these people who’ve lived in the
world, do all of these people have their own spirits, and if so, where are they now?” Because
otherwise, there’d be a surplus of them, you know. There’d be more spirits than people. And
therefore, everyone ought to feel it, really. But of course, it’s like the clairvoyants on television
said that they send them back to some place or other, as if there’s a plane or place where people
hide them or something. I don’t know. I don’t speculate about it all that much either. I just know
personally that these experiences we’ve had, they can’t be explained any other way.
Poul Erik concludes his story by reiterating his basic rationality. He even makes arguments against
the existence of ghosts prior to concluding that, despite all this, he has no other explanation for his
experiences.
The making of contrary arguments is what Gillian Bennett calls the internal dialectic of firsthand supernatural narratives. She explains:
Those who bring their private experience into the public domain by presenting it as a story in
defence of traditions of belief are acutely aware that their audience may interrupt or challenge
them using familiar arguments drawn from the rationalist world view. So they tell the story in
ways designed to prevent this happening. If they anticipate an adversarial response, they try to
disarm the expected criticisms before they are uttered. Though the story is full of debate, the
speaker conducts much of that discussion alone.505
It is not only in his closing statements that Poul Erik engages in internal dialectic. When he
describes hearing the ghostly knocking above his head, he states that he looked around and he
argues that the noises “could be creaking from construction in the house and so on, but not
hundreds of times.” As Bennett describes, he makes the sceptic’s argument and then gives his own
response. Nor is this meaningless behaviour. After all, in order to prod him into expanding his
narrative, I ask that arch-nonbeliever question, “Are you sure it wasn’t mice?” This question might
look silly on paper, but Poul Erik reacts to it seriously enough. While it is clear that mice do not
make loud knocking sounds on the ceiling, it is equally clear that most nonbelievers suggest similar
explanations to Poul Erik.
It is necessary to mention here that Poul Erik believes that ghosts are “unhappy spirits”. We have
noted that Poul Erik’s ghost is rather subtle. The frightening aspect of these experiences is that they
prove to Poul Erik the existence of ghosts, not that the inexplicable noises are, in themselves, scary.
We also heard that this particular ghost sometimes produces a certain odour, that of lavender. That a
ghost should smell or communicate via smells might sound strange, but it is not
phenomenologically unusual. Indeed, other contributors tell me of similar instances.
In one interesting example, 47-year-old Poul Edvard Andersen explains how, some time ago,
his girlfriend’s father was on the brink of death and asked Poul Edvard to visit him. Unfortunately,
Poul Edvard had to take care of his girlfriend’s children that day, so he did not get the chance to
fulfil this wish. The dying father said that, if he could not see Poul Edvard in life, he would see him
afterwards. The father died, and at the funeral, his family began fighting over the inheritance, a
conflict to which Poul Edvard reacted with disgust, this issue eventually leading to the dissolution
of his relationship with his girlfriend. When he came home from the funeral, he noticed a strange,
smoky smell, and although he searched and searched, he could not discover the source of it. This
odour remained for several weeks, and guests at Poul Edvard’s house could smell it as well. Finally,
when Poul Edvard split up with his girlfriend, the smell stopped. All of a sudden, it disappeared: He
had come home one day, smelled it, and an instant later, the odour was gone. Just a few days prior
to my speaking with Poul Edvard, however, the smell returned while Poul was breaking down an
old cabinet.
Sceptics might simply say that this smoky odour has something to do with the now-dismantled
cabinet. Poul Edvard, however, associates it with the ghost of his ex-girlfriend’s father, believing
that the ghost came around to give him advice and support during the time of his break-up with the
spirit’s daughter.
More intense than this is the experience told to me by 14-year-old Karoline Strand:
Karoline Strand: I’d been to my brother’s confirmation, where the party ended around two
o’clock, I think. And so, there were some people who decided that they’d go over to someone
who’d been to the party and party on. And so, my uncle went home because he’d had a bit to
drink, so he left from Ommel – we live in Græsvænge –, and then he came home, and then he
wanted – instead of going up to our own toilet – to go out behind the hedge. And so, he’s
standing there, and all of a sudden, then he can smell something that really smells. And so he
turns around, and then there’s a sort of greenish shadow and [this shadow] breathes on his head.
He gets really, really scared because he’d never believed in anything before. And so, he wanted
to talk with this spirit because it’d really scared him. He’d never before been so scared in his
life. And all of his hair on his body rose. But just as soon as he turns around and wants to talk to
him, then he [The spirit.] runs away, and then he can’t see him. And he comes in, and my aunt
had never seen a man so scared before. He didn’t dare come to the island any more. It’s two
years ago. And my father, he’s sat there and waited for that spirit many times, but he’s never
come back, so he’s probably scared him away.
Adam Grydehøj: So, you believe in it too?
Karoline Strand: There was a time when I believed it was because he’d had a bit to drink. But I
mean, it began to get more and more clear to me, but I’d like to forget to believe in it because
I’ve always believed that if you don’t believe in it, then you won’t experience anything.
We do not, unfortunately, learn what this spirit smelled like, only that it smelled.
One final contributor has had two personal experiences with odoriferous ghosts. This
contributor is an irrepressibly-peppy woman in her 40s who wishes to remain anonymous and who
we will call Birgithe. Birgithe has had a long series of supernatural experiences although their
occurrence has lessened considerably over the past year. Birgithe only gained firm belief in
adulthood when a string of experiences forced her into it, yet she recalls some awareness of the
supernatural even in her youth:
The house that I lived in as a child [in Copenhagen] was also haunted. There was once someone
who’d gassed himself there. Even though it was many years before we moved into that house, it
still often smelled of gas. All of a sudden, there’d be this gas smell. And my mother and father,
they thought, actually, that it was my little brother and I, that we’d turned on the gas, right? And
it didn’t stop until the entire kitchen was renovated.
Birgithe has also experienced a ghostly odour in her current home. In order to preserve her
anonymity, we will call her husband Mikkel:
Mikkel’s grandmother, she used a lot of perfume. I didn’t know that. So, once, because instead
of running up to the toilet upstairs – I’m sitting down here and watching television –, so I run
out through the living room and then out to [the toilet] where you were, right? I go around that
sliding door there, then it just stank of perfume. I stood there and thought, “What the devil is
it?” Out in the bathroom and out again, and so I say to Mikkel, “Oh, how strange! When I went
around the sliding door, it just stank of perfume.” Then, he just laughed. “It’s grandmother,” he
says. “She loved to use perfume.” I didn’t know her because she died […] years before we
began to get to know one another, Mikkel and I.
This experience is comparable to Poul Erik’s in the sense that both lavender and perfume are
pleasant smells, at least in moderation. Interestingly, Birgithe is able to recognize the perfume
as Charlie [A perfume made by Revlon in the early 1970s.] and realizes that it would have
been an odd scent for Mikkel’s grandmother to wear since she had been an old woman, and
the perfume “was made for young people.”
With the exception of Karoline’s uncle’s experience, all of these are, like Poul Erik’s
narrative, rather uneventful ghost encounters. The smell of gas in Birgithe’s childhood home
is of, perhaps, a different nature than the other ghostly odours in the sense that it is a piece of
easy symbolism for the ghost of someone who killed himself with gas. The other smells,
however, seem rather random, even to the extent that Birgithe, in her present-day house, goes
through a period of smelling someone smoking a pipe, and her husband has to dig deep into
his family history in order to identify the ghost by figuring out who smoked a pipe while
alive.
Birgithe has experienced a wide range of ghostly doings, and as it will become important
for our point, we will excerpt some of them here. She is, in fact, something of a low-level
spiritualist. Unlike Marijanne Meyer, Elenna Christensen, and Birthe Henriksen, Birgithe
does not make spiritualism a part of her daily life but has simply read some popular books on
the subject as a result of her own experiences. This means that she does not have the
philosophical background of most spiritualists, and perhaps because of this, she does not think
that supernatural activity occurs all that frequently and therefore guesses that just 25% of
Danes believe in ghosts. Still, like Poul Erik, Birgithe feels that ghosts are no more common
on Ærø than in Copenhagen; it is simply that people do not notice them as much in the city.
She is, in any case, aware that there is some stigma attached to ghost belief:
Adam Grydehøj: Does Mikkel believe in the things that have happened here?
Birgithe: I don’t actually know. You must understand: If it were ten years ago, and you’d asked
me the same question, for example, […] if I believe in ghosts, then I’d maybe have thought
back then, “No, I won’t say anything because it’s maybe a bit too much if I come out and say
that I believe in that kind of thing.” Today, I don’t care. Because I believe in what I believe in,
and there’s no one who can take it from me, right? So, – what’s it called? – there’s a difference
between ten years ago and then today. Today, it’s all right, as far as I’m concerned, to say
entirely normally and naturally, “Yes, but I believe in that.” Job’s done.
Nowadays, Birgithe might be a bit of a spiritualist, but her experiences are certainly mainstream.
In another house in which she lived, she heard voices occasionally, had a radio that would randomly
turn its volume up to blasting point, had a heating system that broke down at the same time every
year, felt and heard a presence in the bedroom one night, and even once saw ghostly images. After
she moved to Ærø, however, she began to have supernatural experiences very frequently. For
example, a number of lamps on the ground floor of the house had the habit of turning themselves on
and off. Mikkel insists that these lights did not start blinking until Birgithe moved in. What is more,
Birgithe once angrily commanded the lights to stop blinking, and they complied. Birgithe has had
other supernatural experiences in her house on Ærø as well:
Birgithe: We had a bedroom up here, on the upper floor, Adam. And in the start, we slept there
in the room that faces the farm. But then, when I was lying with my head facing north, then I
could hear human voices. If you come into a room, then you can’t follow the conversation, can’t
hear what people are saying if there are a lot of people. But you can hear a sort of hum of
human speech. That’s what I could hear it in the [north] end of the house; it came from down
there. So, I was very excited, since it was the summer – because it’s coolest facing north – sort
of that it would get to be fall, so we could go and sleep in another room, right? Because then,
the temperature’s more comfortable. So, I could hear that hum of human speech again, and now
I’m lying with my head facing south, and it was down [to the north], in totally the same
direction. Regardless of whether I lay in the one direction or the other, of how my head was,
then the sound came from below [to the north]. I thought, “That’s damned weird. Wonder what
it could be.” […] But it reached a point where I’d had it up to here with the light, and there was
knocking too, this sort of sound, right? And I thought, “Oh, no. If this keeps up, I’m not going
along with it. Now, it has to stop,” and also because [my daughter], she was sick once up in her
room, and so I thought, all the way down here [on the ground floor] and a bit scared because
we’d just moved over here, and she wasn’t secure living here. […] So, I couldn’t sit up in her
room because she was sick and needed peace and quiet, you know, right? So, I go down here
and leave the door open. And I went and took care of some little things. I could hear if she
called me. Maybe, I could hear it. So, once, I crept upstairs and thought, “Wonder if she’s
sleeping.” So, I come up, and she’s lying awake, and I say, “Hello. How’s it going?” “It’s going
better. You played the piano,” she says. “Piano?” I say. “I haven’t played the piano.” “Yes, I
could hear you playing the piano,” she says. Well. “No,” I say, “it’s— It’s the radio. You’ve
heard the radio from down below.” And I didn’t have the radio on. So, she’d heard some things,
and I didn’t want to say it to her. No. Because I don’t think she could stand it, actually. […]
Because after a year went by, then it happened less and less. It’s simply over. There’s nothing…
The lights don’t blink any more. There aren’t any knocking sounds. […]
Adam Grydehøj: Did you do anything particular to get rid of the ghost, or did it just wind down
by itself?
B: It wound down by itself. I have to say that what I sometimes did was to say, “I’m the one
who lives here now. Be so good as to disappear.” I could find it in myself to say that.
Sometimes, I said very loudly, “Now, go away. I’m the one who lives here now.” And
sometimes, I’ve said to Mikkel, “I wonder if it’s your grandmother?” Even though she didn’t
live here at the time she died. It could also be someone earlier who thinks, “Who’s she? Who’s
coming in and messing around in this house?”
Although speaking with Birgithe turned out to be one of my more enjoyable interviews, I had
been somewhat dreading it since the whole matter had been draped in sorrow even before we
started. A few years earlier, Birgithe had mentioned some ghosts to me, so I called her up to set a
date for meeting her. Later in the day on which we had made these arrangements, one of her
relatives died quite suddenly and unexpectedly. One might have imagined that this would have
made ghosts a somewhat inappropriate matter for discussion, but Birgithe did not feel this way
herself, and during out conversation, we came to speaking about her recently-deceased relative:
Birgithe: You can bet that I thought a lot about [the fact that you called on the same day he
died] afterwards. I also said, “It’s strange.” Because I said to you, “Hey, give me your telephone
number in case something happens.” I said that to you, and I still have it in the bedroom because
we talked together on the telephone that’s up there. And afterwards, I thought, “It was damned
lucky that I did that because, normally, I would’ve just said, “That’s fine. Just come over.” And
precisely about spirits and ghosts, and then [my relative] dies. Strange. But it was hard. I felt,
actually, that I’d nearly had my heart pulled out of me when I got the telephone call that
afternoon. […] As far as spirits and life after death are concerned, I’m not at all doubtful about
it even though I was sad that day that [the relative] died. I mean, he was taken away. […]
[At this point, the piano in the other room makes a noise as if one of its strings has been
plucked. Both Birgithe and Adam are silent for a moment then laugh softly.]
B: No, how strange, Adam!
Adam Grydehøj: [Jokingly.] Was that something you set up?
B: Didn’t you hear that there was something there, like [it’s] been in the piano? Wow, how
strange!
AG: Has it happened before?
B: No. And you know what? I sort of had a feeling that something would happen when you
came, something or other would be guaranteed to do something in the house.
AG: But don’t you think that, if I hadn’t been here, you would be thinking, “No, it was just
something with the piano and the moisture and all of that,” but it’s just because we’re talking
about it…?
B: I damned well believe that it’s because we’re talking about it. I believe it. And maybe
because we’re talking about [the relative]. I sort of have a bit of a feeling that it’s, “Now, it’s
enough. You shouldn’t talk about me any more,” I think. But I don’t know. Or else, he wants to
tell us something or other. I think it’s that… It’s damn funny, this! […] Sorry, I just think that
this is too strange. Now, you’ve… I’m glad that something strange like this happens while
you’re here, right? Wow, it sounded like there was something that did something, tapped
something inside the piano, aren’t I right? […] It was definitely strange. And at the same time, it
isn’t. I think that it’s damned peculiar that it happens just precisely now. But it… I’m always
being surprised, Adam, but I think anyway, “Why, I knew it well enough.”
Although we may have no explanation for the sound made by the piano, it is clear that the
sound only gained significance because of its context, because we were speaking about ghosts
and someone who had died recently. Taken individually, most of Birgithe’s experiences are fairly
mundane, but like Poul Erik, the accumulation of these small occurrences has convinced her of the
supernatural. In fact, almost none of the ghost experiences we have considered in the chapter
amount to anything more than – loosely speaking – poltergeist events. Like will-o’-the-wisp,
poltergeist is a functional name rather than the name of any particular type of being.
Perhaps, it is true that people “just hear things.” The trouble is, even though little abnormalities
like piano twangs, blinking lights, and even mistaken vision and hearing happen frequently enough
to explain some ghost belief, in cases such as Birgithe’s, the experiences themselves are only part of
the phenomenon. For it is not simply that Birgithe and those people whose houses have been
“cleansed” by Elenna Christensen sense things that are not truly there; they also stop sensing things
and believe that the spirit in question has either “come up” or been placated. Birgithe’s supernatural
experiences decreased gradually. I am well aware of the fact that many psychoanalytic scholars
would be willing to pick up hints in her testimony and suggest that she was suffering anxiety about
moving into her husband’s house and supplanting the women who lived there previously. What,
however, about people who have been aided by exorcists? For these individuals, the supernatural
activity’s cessation is often sudden. Are we to assume that exorcism can be a useful placebo that
corrects whatever is temporarily wrong with the person having experiences? Or do ghosts actually
exist? Or are some strings of apparently-supernatural events by nature temporary rather than lifelong? Are some of them bound to come to an end, perhaps even ending in one of a number of
folklorically-recognizable ways?
A second ghost narrative from Poul Edvard Andersen highlights some of these problems:
Poul Edvard Andersen: I don’t believe in ghosts in the present-day way, but I’ve personally
experienced some things that I can’t explain. But it’s tough to say what they’ve been. I can, I
suppose, give you an example. I lived in Tranderup [on West Ærø] many years ago, had a
girlfriend up there. And so, we rented a house. So, we rented that, and prior to our moving in,
it’d stood empty for about a year’s time, and back then, her grandfather had been over to turn
off the lights, and then there were lights lit in all of the plugs in the entire house. And the
house’s [electricity] had been cancelled. [So, my girlfriend’s grandfather,] just went in and shut
off the lights. So, we moved in there, and when we’d lived there for two, three years, my
girlfriend has a friend over visiting one day. And my girlfriend goes in and turns on the radio in
the living room, and then there’s a big, wet spot on the floor. We had a wooden floor, but there
was a rug under the sofa-table. A very old rug that was clipped out, right? It was in the rug. In
the hairs of the rug, there’s just this wet spot. And we couldn’t immediately find out how it’d
come, but I think, “It’s maybe because the friend has a dog with her. The dog’s probably peed
on the floor.” But it didn’t smell like that, but we didn’t think any more about it. But it repeated
itself, this spot. It came. It came many times. And we found out that it only came when we had
guests. And it didn’t come from the ceiling. There was plaster on the ceiling. There were no wet
spots on the ceiling. And it didn’t come from the wall, not from the radiator. I tried to lift the
carpet, to look under it, so I thought, “It’s coming from the floor, you know?” But there was
rubber under the rug, and the floor was dry. Then, there was a day when we knew we were
going to have guests over to eat. So, I said, “Now, I’m going to stay sitting here in the living
room because I’d like to see how it gets there.” Then, she shouts to me –my girlfriend – out
from the toilet, if I’d go out and open the front door. It was locked. I rush out and meet my
guests. They’d seen the wet spot a few times. We go into the living room immediately. “We’ll
see how it gets there.” When we came in there, it was there. As if a litre of water had been
poured over the rug. And I tried to lay my hand in it, and it was lukewarm. After that, we took a
bowl and placed it there. Then, we’d capture some of it and find out what sort of fluid it was.
Then, it never came again. So, it disappeared. And it was over the course of a half a year’s time.
That’s what I’m saying: What are we dealing with there? Is it supernatural, then?
Adam Grydehøj: You tried, I don’t doubt, to find an explanation.
PEA: Of course. But there was no explanation. So, there are some people who maintain, “Yes,
it’s because it’s a revenant [genfærd], right? A ghost [spøgelse].” [...] I’ve also had other
experiences, and I simply have to think them through. So, yeah, I believe that there’s something
or other more.
AG: Could you try to be more concrete about what “something or other” is?
PEA: No, in the end, I can’t because I feel it’s tough to make it concrete because one has, you
know, nothing concrete with which to relate it. I don’t know if people live multiple times or if
there are spirits who’re made evil by it. I could make an assumption on it because I’ve
experienced some things in my life, am I right? But is it my fantasy that’s playing me a fool?
But I’m also so down-to-earth that I know well enough that people shouldn’t go along with just
anything, right? But yeah, I believe that there’s more between Heaven and the Earth. I supposed
I’d call that belief in ghosts.
Poul Edvard is not essentially a rationalist like Poul Erik Jensen, but the former has made his
level-headedness – his earthiness – a defining personality trait. Poul Edvard’s stories of the
supernatural might not sound too significant, but he would be loathe to be seen as irrational,
and if he has accepted belief, then this acceptance did not come lightly.
Similar to Poul Edvard’s experiences are those of 77-year-old Klaus Jørgen Petersen, who lives
in Lille Rise. We have had occasion to quote Klaus Jørgen before, and this is hardly surprising since
Klaus Jørgen is brimming with stories and could easily fill a book on his own. I originally came to
see Klaus Jørgen because I had heard that Klaus Jørgen had once seen a UFO near the hill of
Grydehøj.506 This turned out to be a false lead on account of the fact that the UFO, which was
sighted in 1962, had not been anywhere near the burial mound. Besides this, Klaus Jørgen tells me
about his household ghost:
Ghosts, they’re, well, revenants, right? A ghost is, you know, someone who returns after they’re
dead. People get to talking about the cold paralysis. We have a spot in the living room here that
we sort of make light of by saying, “It’s the cold paralysis.” That is to say that it gets so cold on
the legs, and it’s something that most people have, but only in old houses. You should never say
never, really. You know, there’s more between Heaven and Earth than we’d just believe, really.
And old houses there. For example, we go to bed, right?, a quite ordinary evening, and it’s a bit
after twelve, and then we have an old antique, like a chest of drawers. Then suddenly, it says
*knær*, *knær*, *knær*. It makes some sounds. Not violently, just some sounds, right? And I
can’t understand why it makes sounds like that, but it does it, you know. It could be that there’s
a problem with the heating, and the wood could move itself. I don’t know.
Surprisingly, considering his own sightly-hesitant belief, Klaus Jørgen guesses that just 5% of
Danes believe in ghosts, and most of these people are “a bit weak,” a euphemism for having
mental problems. When I tell him that, perhaps, 40% are believers, he is surprised but adds,
“There may well be many more people who have it [Belief.]. It’s not something people talk
about. They’re ashamed of it, really.” Klaus Jørgen tells me that there are some people who
get someone – a clairvoyant, presumably – to rid themselves of ghosts and that this is said to
help. He has not, however, ever considered this option himself. Nevertheless, he suggests that
cold paralyses might be “those who walk again. Have you ever felt that you’ve lived before? I
have, really.” When I ask whether he has any idea who this ghost causing his cold spot might
be, he replies, “It could be someone who’s lived here, really. That’s the usual opinion. And
many generations have lived in this house, really.”
Another contributor, the anonymous man in his 30s who we have called Lauritz, has also
experienced ghosts:
Lauritz: While I lived in Odense [Denmark’s third-largest city.], I constantly had the feeling
that there was someone else in the house. I didn’t see anything concrete, just shadows, but I had
a feeling.
Adam Grydehøj: What was there in the house?
L: I don’t know. Remains [rester] of people who’d been there before maybe.
AG: How could you feel them?
L: If I had to try to explain it: Maybe, I was in a period of my life when I could sense things. Or
maybe, it’s just pressure on a nerve or a vein that makes it so that you see something in a flash
of light. And then, there’s also something with my great-grandmother. She could sense some
things... When I was a child, I heard a story about my grandmother. She sat on the sofa in the
apartment in Copenhagen and a big painting that was hanging behind her fell down. My greatgrandmother says that it was an omen [forvarsel] that something ugly would happen. The day
after, it was 9 April, 1940 [The day the Germans invaded Denmark.]. I’ve heard about other
people who experienced similar omens that day. I once lived with my grandfather and
grandmother in Copenhagen. One night, I had a nightmare about death and darkness, and within
24 hours, my grandfather died. He had asthma but wasn’t really sick. The dream wasn’t
concrete, just a feeling of death.
AG: Do you wish you had the ability to sense things all the time and not just some places?
L: No. You get paranoid. You can have other feelings – maybe, you get dizzy in the heat one
day –, and you don’t know if it’s normal or a sign of something. You don’t know what it is.
When you think of animals... Dogs sense a lot of things. I’ve often experienced, in relation to
girlfriends, that I could sense unfaithfulness. There’s a tendency that when you believe the
worst, it turns out to be true. You read, maybe, teensy-weensy signs. It’s possible that you
always have the ability but that you don’t always notice the signs. But I neither want to be
occult nor 100% rational. I’d rather be both. [...] I occasionally have dreams before people die.
Many times, it’s while I’m watching television that I feel that something’s going to happen. It’s
never more than that someone contacts me at a certain moment, but it’s always one of two dead
relatives, and they try to warn me that someone will die. I also have other experiences with the
dead. Sometimes, while I sleep, I hear someone knocking twice, and then I wake up. But they’re
the unauthorized dead. Every time it happens, and I hear someone knocking while I sleep, I
force myself to wake up. I tend to have problems sleeping, so I’m never happy about it when it
happens. But there can be some months between experiences even though I can’t remember the
particular periods when I’ve had them. In any case, it’s happened within the past year, and more
often in another place.
AG: In new or old buildings?
L: That’s a good question. Surely in old buildings. Let me just think... I’m not sure that it
happens in new buildings. Maybe just in the old ones.
AG: Why do the dead want to communicate with you?
L: I don’t reject anyone, so I’m able to offer company.
AG: When you hear the knocking, do you have problems moving?
L: No. I turn around in bed and go to sleep again.
AG: Do you think it’s the same being who’s knocking in all of the different places?
L: The same phenomenon in any case. Maybe not the same person. It’s interesting that my
experiences only happen when I’m completely fresh. If I’ve had any alcohol, then I don’t dream
of anything. And I can’t be irritated about anything in the family. I have to be relaxed. And I
always sleep well afterwards.
As with Dorete Seier Landro’s mother and the second-sighted Scots of the 17th Century, Lauritz is
not entirely grateful for his supernatural abilities. Lauritz also never refers to the knocking beings as
ghosts, a common enough tendency. One imagines that there might be some unconscious taboo at
work here, and Gillian Bennett notes that “Only evil manifestations were called ‘ghosts’ by the
Manchester women [who I interviewed], and that they seldom used the word ‘spirit’ except in the
context of ‘evil spirits’”.507 I have not found any particular avoidance of spirit [ånde] myself, but it
is possible that the Danish word has slightly different connotations. It is also possible that, since I
asked people about ghosts [spøgelser], they primarily told me what they consider to be ghost
stories, not the sort of calming “visitations” from loved ones that most of Bennett’s elderly, female
contributors described. This may very well be the case since such visitations are relatively rare in
my interviews.
As Klaus Jørgen remarks, it is the usual opinion that ghosts are a house’s former inhabitants,
and this holds true both in past and present folklore. Like fairies, some form of ghosts or other have,
since the start of our written record, played a role in people’s systems of belief. Most Northern
Europeans living even a century and a half ago would have seen the existence of ghosts, like fairies,
to be a simple fact of life, not a matter of debate. Analysing present ghost lore in the light of past
belief presents, however, several problems. For one thing, while no one today attributes
supernatural occurrences to fairies unless they have very strong, preexisting feelings about fairies,
ghosts have never ceased to be a part of popular belief. Even if fairy enthusiasts are reading flawed
sources – say, flower-fairy books – when studying fairies, the process of studying is still the basis of
their conceptions. Ghosts, meanwhile, are usually haphazardly attached to supernatural experiences
by people who have never gone out of their way to read anything about ghosts. It is only after
someone becomes convinced that his house is haunted by a ghost that research into ghost lore
typically begins. This is the case with contributors like Poul Erik Jensen and Birgithe: By the time
they start looking for a supernatural explanation for their problems, all they are really looking for is
confirmation that it is, in fact, a ghost that is causing trouble. And if it is confirmation that they
want, there are many people willing to give it to them.
Chapter 22: Seeking Resolution
One thing that stands out when comparing past and present-day ghost narratives is that past
narratives are usually much more full-bodied, and not just in the sense that they tend to be better
plotted. Past accounts of ghosts are more likely to contain visual and voice elements. This might
partially be because the best-remembered ghost stories also happen to be the best ghost stories.
Today, for example, most people on Ærø know of the spectral White Lady of the Søbygård but very
few are familiar with, say, the cold spot in Klaus Jørgen Petersen’s living room. If one reads a book
like Katherine Briggs’ Dictionary of British Folk-Tales, one will only rarely encounter “lowquality” ghost stories like the ones we have heard from my contributors. Even Evald Tang
Kristensen – who was not making a compendium of “the best of” fairy and ghost folklore but
merely recording everything he was told, whether or not it was remarkable –, even he does not offer
these sorts of phenomenologically-minor stories. The sum of Kristensen’s ghost legends reaches
600-odd pages, yet although he breaks these stories down into 109 different categories, these
categories all have names like Black Figures, Hanged Ghosts (Women), and Murdered Servants,
not names like Knocking on the Ceiling, Wet Spot on the Carpet, and Smell from the Wardrobe.
Why not? Well, if you see a phantom figure that looks like a ghost, there is a good chance that it is,
indeed, a ghost. Some ghosts do knock about, make wet spots, and smell, but the fact is, everything
from a fairy, to a dog, to a baby could do the same thing, and while someone living 200 years ago
might have been able to quickly rule dogs and babies out of contention, it would not necessarily
have been easy to decide whether a ghost or a fairy was at fault. So, in the absence of more
definitive evidence, vague poltergeist experiences – as we have loosely defined it, experiences
involving a disembodied, apparently-noncorporeal being – would never be deemed worthy of
placement by someone like Evald Tang Kristensen in a book about ghosts.508
We return to the old question: What is a ghost? Conceptions concerning ghosts have not
changed over time to the same extent as have those regarding the various types of fairies. We will
confine our discussion here to Christian opinions on ghosts, not because theories in other traditions
are any less interesting but because today’s Western ghost belief possesses Christian foundations.
As we have seen, at the time of the Reformation, Catholics typically saw ghosts as spirits suffering
in Purgatory or otherwise unable to enter Heaven or Hell. Orthodox Protestants, however, needed to
come up with explanations for the rampant apparent ghost sightings and attributed these to demons.
It does not seem that average farm labourer – possibly not even the average land-owner – ever truly
accepted the Protestant hardline though,509 and ghost stories did not change much on a popular level
post-Reformation. At this point in similar discussions by other authors, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is
usually brought up, and for good reason too: Written at the dawn of the new religious era, as the
fresh ideology was just sinking in, Hamlet depicts a society in theological conflict. As Gillian
Bennett shows, the title character’s reaction to his father’s “ghost” is anything but stable, and he
seems torn between accepting that this spirit truly is his Purgatory-suffering father and believing
that it is a Hell-sent demon.510
Demon and resident of Purgatory were, after all, the only two options available. It never seems
to have even been fleetingly considered that ghosts might haunt a place because they would rather
stay in the world of men than go elsewhere, an idea that enjoys some popularity today. The demon
theory of ghosts is not too relevant to us since relatively-few residents of Scandinavia and the
British Isles blame their supernatural experiences on demons nowadays. Assuming though that
ghosts really are the spirits of dead people who are stuck somewhere between Heaven and Hell (or
in the current spiritualist conception, between Heaven and Earth), why are they stuck? The theory
that ghosts linger because they are not aware that they are dead is a new one and not too prevalent
outside of spiritualist circles. If one analyses traditional folklore, there are only three reasons for the
existence of ghosts: Either the ghost died in sin, has some piece of unfinished business to attend to,
or died unnaturally. These divisions are overly complex, however, since having died in sin and/or
died unnaturally are both merely reasons for someone having unfinished business. This unfinished
business is usually a form of penance or suffering for one’s sins.
This suggests that being a ghost is always a negative experience. If a ghost is the spirit of a dead
sinner, then the sinner is either seeking repentance or just continuing to sin, even in death, the latter
habit being akin to suffering Hell on Earth.511 If a ghost has left unfinished business, it is haunting
in an attempt to finish this business, often a trickier matter, as we shall see, than Hollywood films
make out. If a ghost is the spirit of someone who died suddenly, it is usually either because the
sudden death did not give it a chance to confess to or right its sins; because it was murdered and its
body buried in unhallowed earth; or because it was murdered and seeks revenge on its killer, either
by identifying its murderer to others or by tormenting its murderer directly. In all of these cases, the
ghost is on Earth in a search for resolution.
Often, dead sinners are doomed to re-enact their crimes after death, as in the following example
from Kristensen:
There was a great knave in Åsted [in western Jutland] in the old times who tricked people in the
extreme. Once, he cheated his neighbour out of a pair of white horses, and he afterwards used
them to drive his plough. After he died, he kept on driving on his field and ploughing with the
white horses. It’s a big, flat field, and many people have had accidents there. Either they’ve
gotten lost, or they’ve driven into a furrow and couldn’t come out from there.512
This ghost is still malicious, but often, such spirits are genuinely repentant and just need a helping
hand. One widespread ghost legend – though not one that, in this day and age, people hear much of
any more – concerns a boundary ghost, the spirit of a man who steals land from his neighbour by
moving the boundary posts or stones:
It was back when the field lines were redrawn that a man named Knud lived in Skindbjærg [in
mid-Jutland], and he gave his farmhand a piece of silver to move the boundary post [marking
where one field ended and the other began] down on his neighbour’s land. The farmhand was to
move the post six ells [An ell is about four meters.], that was an acre, and the neighbour was
named Mads Sörensen. He [The farmhand.] moved, then, from Knud in November and moved
to Horsens [in east Jutland], and the next summer, he caught typhus fever and died up there.
After he was buried, then he came back to Knud’s. When Knud came out in the evening, there
he stood outside the door, just as white as chalk. Knud knew what it meant, and he shut the door
again. But since that time, every time they watered the horses at night, they saw that he walked
up again just as white as chalk, and the people became quite frightened of him. Knud had to go
to see the pastor and bring him down to the farm. They called parish clerk Gregers Grey, and he
drove the pastor down to Skindbjærg. After they had been there for a bit, then the ghost came.
This Mads Sörensen was ordered to show up with a wooden plank because he had to be there to
move the boundary post back. After the revenant showed up, then the parish clerk asks the
pastor if he wanted to go out to him [The ghost.]. Yes, he wasn’t incredibly eager to do it. Yes,
so he’d do it, said the clerk, and then he went out to him. After they’d spoken together, the clerk
says to Mads Sörensen and Knud that they could come now. The clerk thereafter follows the
dead over to that place where he had dug the hole and then over to the place from which he had
moved the post. They carried on in this way until they had gone all the way along the boundary
line. Then, when they came to the end of the line, the ghost says: “If you will forgive me, so
will God and I forgive you.” Mads said yes, and then instantly, the other man disappeared.513
Frequently, a lone ghost-helper is enough, and anyone sufficiently brave to aid a boundary ghost in
moving back the posts will annul this ghost’s curse, but understandably, not everyone is willing to
take this risk. Encounters with such ghosts can have deadly results.
Ærø also had its share of boundary ghosts, one of which Hübertz describes in some detail:
In a house in Vrå [to the West of Ærøskøbing], there is something amiss. The man there has
sometimes heard the doors open and shut throughout the entire house, and he’s driven his
curiosity so far that he’s followed it from the one room to the other until coming to a little
chamber at the end of the house, where he has his wrecking tools. There, he has heard it rush
over the saw blade with a whining sound and disappear. Numerous crashes and noises up in the
attic not withstanding. In the winter of 1829-30, which was very long and hard, another man had
rented his house. One evening, that man sat with his family in the living room and heard
[something] like a heavily-loaded wagon roll toward the house down the stone road, after which
he heard as if it cast large pieces of firewood into the entrance hall. When it ceased, the man
said in exasperation: “Oh, come on, one more piece!” after which a great tumult followed that
set him in such a frightened state that he remained confined to his bed there for many days. The
house’s owner had a row with his neighbour, Mikkel, over a strip of land and claimed that
Mikkel had removed the boundary stone. In the meantime, Mikkel died, and a half a year later,
it so happened one evening in the twilight that our man had to go past this strip, alongside which
there was a pond. When he heard splashes in the water three times although he saw nothing, he
was subsequently troubled because of it; however, he clearly heard Mikkel’s voice saying: “The
boundary stone is back now, and beyond it, you can take anything that you want.” Immediately
thereafter, it was as if a hectic wind ran through the trees even though it was entirely still.
[Hübertz asks:] “Well, did the boundary stone stand in the right place?” [His farmer
contributor replies:] “Oh, doubtful, it wasn’t anything but one of his pranks.”514
This second-hand narrative is terribly useful for our purposes. This farmer is experiencing an
irritating – and potentially dangerous – poltergeist, but Hübertz says nothing about this poltergeist
being a ghost until the end of the narrative, until the hearing of Mikkel’s voice makes it clear that it
is a ghost.
When we, think of ghostly sinners today, we usually think of particularly-dramatic cases, of
murderers and other violent souls forced to wander after death in the world of men. These sorts of
stories were not lacking in traditional belief either. For example, Walter Map, writing at the close of
the 12th Century, relates:
William Laudun, an English knight, strong of body and of proved valour came to Gilbert Foliot,
then bishop of Hereford [1148-1163], now of London, and said: ‘My Lord, I come to you for
advice. A Welshman of evil life died of late unchristianly enough in my village, and straightway
after four nights took to coming back every night to the village, and will not desist from
summoning singly and by name his fellow-villagers, who upon being called at once fall sick and
die within three days, so that now there are very few of them left.’ The bishop, marvelling, said:
‘Peradventure the Lord has given power to the evil angel of that lost soul to move about in the
dead corpse. However, let the body be exhumed, cut the neck through with a spade, and sprinkle
the body and the grave well with holy water, and replace it.’ When this was done, the survivors
were none the less plagued by the former illusion. So one night when the summoner had now
left but few alive, he called William himself, citing him thrice. He, however, bold and quick as
he was, and awake to the situation, darted out with his sword drawn, and chased the demon,
who fled, up to the grave, and there, as he fell into it, clave his head to the neck. From that hour
the ravages of that wandering pestilence ceased, and did no more hurt either to William himself
or to anyone else.515
This ghost is exceptionally brutal, and even as far as very evil men are concerned, they rarely go
around slaughtering whole districts after death.
Like fairy tales, legends occasionally feature wicked stepmothers who deprive their stepchildren
of wealth and all but the most necessary means of living. The result of this is sometimes that the
ghost of the dead mother comes back to plead her childrens’ case, a terrifying ploy that tends to
soften the heart of at least one of the parents. It is some proof, however, of the essentially-historical
nature of legends that the haunting does not always work out, as shown by this narrative from
Kristensen:
In Torup [on the island of Samsø], a wife died, she said to her husband that he should give the
crucifix that they had, with silver plating, to their daughter. He promised this too, but he didn’t
hold it, for when he married again, his new wife didn’t want to give it up. Now, the deceased
wife began to walk again every night; first, she went to the head of the table, where the cross in
question hung, and clattered with the cover. Thereafter, she went over and pinched the new wife
on the arm, and then she disappeared again. The people were very unhappy about this disruption
every night and directed themselves to Provost Wellejus in Besser, who promised them to lay
the ghost. He came during the night multiple times but could never meet it. One day, he came
down there in the morning, just when the people were inside to eat breakfast, and now he met it
in among them. Even though they couldn’t see or feel it, the provost could anyway, and he
forced the ghost to walk in front of him to Besser Church, where he then laid it in the graveyard,
and since then, the people on the farm have had peace.516
This legend shows some of the problems ghosts have. It is a pity that they are often unable to speak
since hauntings like this could be resolved quite simply if only people knew what the ghost wanted.
It seems that the people of Torup figured this out after the fact, but by then, it was too late for the
ghost.
Why too late? There is a difference between laying – or binding – a ghost and resolving the
issue that causes a ghost to haunt. The difference might appear insignificant, but assuming that
ghosts exist, it is quite important. A ghost who is laid – usually by a churchman – is, in a sense,
imprisoned, and like all imprisonments, the ghost’s captivity is conditional. Sometimes, the terms of
the laying will, for unexplained reasons, limit this imprisonment to a specific length of time, for
example, a hundred years. Laying can also be achieved by giving a ghost an extremely difficult –
preferably, impossible – task, like forcing it to make ropes out of the sand, the hope being that this
will engage the spirit until doomsday. It is also possible to confine a ghost, say, in a sealed room, a
bottle, or an iron box; one must simply hope that the seal is never breached, the bottle never broken,
or the box never opened. The point is, all layings are merely a form of temporary relief for the
humans and are no sort of relief at all for the ghosts. So, when the ghost of the dead wife in the
above legend is laid, this means that she is compelled, for an unstated period of time, to exist as a
ghost beneath the soil in the graveyard. Her sufferings have not been allayed, and even if the silverplated crucifix is later given to its rightful owner, it is not at all clear that the ghost – which has,
after all, been bound to the spot by the provost – will be able to find her rest in Heaven.
A rather touching example of this ghostly problem, printed as a pamphlet in 1675, concerns a
spirit that troubled a Northamptonshire farmhand, Richard Clarke. When Clarke confronted the
spirit, the ghost told him that he had been murdered 267 years, nine months, and two days
previously and his body buried in an orchard. Sadly, his family never discovered what had become
of him, and the dead man had the bad luck of dying in sin, of not having had the opportunity while
alive to reveal that he had hidden valuable treasures and papers in a London cellar. Having hoarded
money is, in fact, a common reason for haunting. In any case, the ghost asked Clarke to help him
retrieve the treasure and deliver it to the spirit’s descendents, at which the ghost would depart and
cease haunting the farmhand. This object might have been achieved earlier if not for the fact that the
ghost had been laid by a friar 250 earlier and had just recently been released from his bonds. Clarke
took the ghost’s side and travelled to London, meeting the spirit there and being directed as to the
whereabouts of the treasure and the ghost’s family. When the spirit’s task was resolved, the ghost
took his leave, but not before he “lookt cheerfully upon him [Clarke.], and gave him thankes, and
said now he should be at rest, and spoke to those other persons which were of his generation,
relations, but they had not the courage to answer, but Clarke talkt for them.” As Kathrine Briggs
notes, this narrative “shows the inhumanity of these arbitrary exorcisms”.517 The ghost’s long
suffering was simply the result of no one having been brave enough to speak to it.
With this in mind, one can better understand the pride taken by spiritualists like Elenna
Christensen, people who have not only gotten rid of ghosts but have also made them happy. In both
traditional folklore and today’s spiritualism, the state of ghosthood is defined by a lack. Exorcisms
and layings may at times be arbitrary, but the ghosts themselves never are. Some people who die in
sin become ghosts not because of any particular sins they have committed – such as moving
boundary markers, murdering people, or hiding treasure – but simply because they died outside of
Christianity. This is the reason why suicides and people lost at sea have the tendency to “walk
again.” Since they cannot be buried in a churchyard and/or do not have the chance to confess their
sins, they find no peace in death. Until 1823, “English law required that suicides be buried in a
roadway, where a stake was often driven through the body; its top was sometimes left visible, as a
deterrent.”518 It is even theorised that Denmark’s Iron Age bog bodies – like the 4th Century BCE
Tollund Man – may have been buried in so strange and violent a manner in order to prevent their
resurrection.519 From a different perspective, it is the importance of the final confession that stops
Shakespeare’s Hamlet from killing King Claudius while he prays: Hamlet would like his foe to die
without confession, and murdering Claudius in the midst of his prayers nearly guarantees his enemy
entrance to Heaven. Far better, thinks Hamlet, to slaughter him later so “that his heels may kick at
heaven, / And that his soul may be as damn’d and black / As hell, whereto it goes.”520
A similar fate awaits those who never had the chance to become Christians at all, as happens to
the children in an international ballad, here in Scottish form as The Cruel Mother:
She leaned her back unto a thorn
Three, three, and three by three
And there she has her two babes born.
Three, three, and thirty-three.
She took frae ’bout her ribbon-belt,
And there she bound them hand and foot.
She has taen out her wee pen-knife,
And there she ended baith their life.
She has howked a hole baith deep and wide,
She has put them in baith side by side.
She has covered them oer wi a marble stane,
Thinking she would gang [walk] a maiden hame.
As she was walking by her father’s castle wa,
She saw twa pretty babes playing at the ba.
“O bonnie babes, gin ye were mine,
I would dress you up in satin fine.
“O I would dress you in the silk,
And wash you ay in morning milk.”
“O cruel mother, we were thine,
And thou made us to wear the twine.
“O cursed mother, heaven’s high,
And that’s where thou will neer win nigh.
“O cursed mother, hell is deep,
Three, three, and three by three
And there thou’ll enter step by step.”
Three, three, and thirty-three.521
Children who died unchristened and unbaptized were, according to some Catholic theologians, left
to the mercy of God since, despite having committed no sins, the debt of their original sin was
never paid. That is to say, God either had no set policy on the matter or he set aside a spiritual realm
between Heaven and Hell for the unbaptised. This latter idea is popularly called limbo. As the
arguments for limbo were non-scriptural and not even all that prevalent among the clergy, the
common folk never stood a chance, and it does not seem as if any understanding of limbo
penetrated the theology of the masses. Unfortunately, considering the importance of baptism and
christening, it was fairly clear to even the most unlettered of Catholics that immediate entrance to
Heaven was not a realistic goal for stillborn and short-lived babies, leaving Purgatory and Hell as
the only possible destinations.
Many people today see limbo and Purgatory are synonymous, yet while these are both realms
between Heaven and Hell, the former is not typically seen as being terribly unpleasant whereas the
latter is a stopping off point before one reaches Heaven. That is to say, Purgatory purges souls of
sin so that they are prepared for Heaven, and this purging is achieved by means of fire and agony.
The Vatican dropped limbo from its teachings entirely in 2006, which is rather mixed news for
unbaptised babies. First of all, the cancellation of limbo is only debatably a positive development
for the unbaptised dead since limbo was not, after all, such a bad place, and no one is able to
categorically state that God permits children blemished by original sin into Heaven without the aid
of Purgatory. More worrisome, however, is that as potentially brutal as Catholic theology may
appear, most forms of Protestantism are even more disciplinarian in this regard. Baptism is still a
central tenet in the religion of the majority of Protestants, yet in Protestantism, the unbaptised dead
do not even have Purgatory to fall back on, and there is no broad agreement among theologians that
such dead souls go directly to Heaven. Martin Luther never fully committed himself to whether
these souls were damned or saved, but in the reformer’s own words, baptism offers “forgiveness of
sins, delivers from death and the devil, and grants eternal salvation to all who believe.”522 The
debate was less difficult for the Calvinists, believing as they did in predetermined justification and
salvation, but this theology – based as it is on the existence of a minority of “elects”,523 of people
destined to be saved – was not necessarily the ideal foundation for a religion that could help
mourning parents recover from their tragedies. Certainly, many Early Modern Protestant
commonfolk and churchmen believed that unbaptised, dead children went to Hell. Of course, under
orthodox Protestantism, babies confined to Hell had no business on Earth anyway, so we must
recall that, when dealing with religious folklore of this sort, there is a gap of some sort between
popular and elite belief.
Since baptism after death is not always seen as useful, there tends not to be much one can do for
ghosts of unbaptised children besides to bury the body on Christian soil and hope for the best. Even
this is problematic since, as with The Cruel Mother’s murdered and exposed babies, corpses may be
difficult to come by.
The following ghost child narratives from Kristensen are quite typical:
On Sødal [in mid-Jutland], the screams of a child were often heard, and the farmer, Bay, could
never discover where the screams came from; one moment it would seem to be somewhere in
one room and the next moment in another. Bay’s successor was named Bjerregård, and when he
wanted to have some rooms changed, he found under the plaster the corpse of a child that lay as
fresh as if it had been killed yesterday. When it was buried, no one heard any more screams of
children.524
and
There was once a big stone in Gundestrup Field [in mid-Jutland], and a girl was supposed to
have abandoned her child there. People could constantly hear that there was a sort of crying in
that place. So, they went ahead and broke up the stone and used a piece in the wall of an
outhouse at Gundestrup House, and even now, at certain times of the night, it sounds as though
something is crying in the wall.525
The former of the above legends ends happily for the ghost while the latter does not. That any such
babies – technically, heathens – were buried in churchyards is surprising enough in itself, but with
baptism being at least as vital as Christian burial, re-interment was not necessarily sufficient to save
souls. This was probably the opinion of the stone masons responsible for the second legend; it
seems that the community just decided to attempt to lay the ghost – unsuccessfully, as it turned out
– by placing it inside a wall rather than work at resolving its problem.
The dead infants in The Cruel Mother are not quite as infantile as these auditory ghosts
described in Kristensen. Some such baby ghosts returned from the dead for the sake of revenge, just
like adult murder victims. The most common type of such legends in Scandinavia goes along the
lines of this Swedish story:
There was a girl who killed a child in secret and stuffed the body into a bucket. Eventually the
girl got married. But during her wedding night, when the dance was well under way, they heard
a child speaking from the cellar beneath the floor:
The bones are long
The bucket is tight.
Let me come up and dance with the bride!
When they looked they found the dead body of the child.526
We never find out here whether the child is saved, but at least, it gets its revenge. Even
though all of the unbaptised dead are in more or less the same plight, the murdered and
exposed unbaptised dead make a great deal of fuss about it. This might in part be because
such ghosts did not receive attention and comfort immediately after death, but it is also likely
that such legends played a social role in convincing women not to kill their children.
Although the assigning of a social role to legends is often taken as a sign of their not having
been believed in, this stance is logically flawed since even nowadays, we tell stories that are
not only moral in nature but also historically true, as when newspapers run reports of current
murders and infanticide cases.
As if lacking baptism were not bad enough, some child ghosts also lack christening as the
following Scottish legend shows:
It is supposed to be not yet a century since the good people of Whittinghame got happily quit of
a ghost, which, in the shape of an “unchristened wean”, had annoyed them for many years. An
unnatural mother having murdered her child at a large tree, not far from the village, the ghost of
the deceased was afterwards seen, on dark nights, running in a distracted manner between the
said tree and the churchyard, and was occasionally heard crying. The villagers believe that it
was obliged to take the air, and bewail itself, on account of wanting a name— No anonymous
person, it seems, being able to get a proper footing in the other world. Nobody durst speak to the
unhappy little spirit, for a superstitious dread of dying immediately after […]. At length it
fortunately happened that a drunkard, one night on reeling home, encountered the spirit, and,
being fearless in the strength of John Barleycorn, did not hesitate to address it in the […]
familiar style […].
“How’s a’ wi’ ye this morning, Short-Hoggers?” cried the courageous villager; when the
ghost immediately ran away, joyfully exclaiming:
“O weel’s me noo, I’ve gotten a name:
They ca’ me Short-Hoggers o’ Whittinghame.”
And since that time it has never been either seen or heard of. The name which the drunkard
applied to it denotes that the ghost wore short stockings without feet […].527
This ghost achieved its goal.
We cannot be surprised that so little is heard about infant ghosts these days. For one thing,
both natural and unnatural infant mortality is significantly lower than it once was, and for
another, Westerners are now less concerned about religion than they once were. Nevertheless,
when we consider the likes of Poul Erik Jensen and Birgithe, who go to some effort to use
historical analysis for the sake of finding out who is behind their hauntings, we realize just
how much is lost by this lack of knowledge. Neither of these once-ghost-plagued individuals
would ever begin to consider that their poltergeists were, in fact, the spirits of babies. This is
not necessarily problematic; after all, even in the traditional mindset, it would have been
unlikely that dead babies would have been seen to have caused their supernatural experiences.
Still, the pool of potential explanations for supernatural events has shrunken considerably
over the past century, and as long as we are going to posit supernatural explanations for
uncanny events, it is difficult to see how this can be a good thing.
Let us consider just one more historical ghost, England’s Cauld Lad o’ Hylton:
The Cauld Lad of Hylton was said to be the ghost of a stable boy, killed by one of the lords of
Hilton in a fit of passion. He worked like a Brownie, tidying everything that was left untidy, but
flinging everything about, if the place was left in order. He used to be heard singing:
“Wae’s me, wae’s me,
The acorn’s not yet
Fallen from the tree,
That’s to grow the wood,
That’s to make the cradle,
That’s to rock the bairn,
That’s to grow to a man,
That’s to lay me.”
He was wrong, however, for the servants laid him, like any other brownie, by the simple
expedient of leaving him a cloak and a hood. He put them on, and sang:
“Here’s a cloak and here’s a hood,
The Cauld Lad o’ Hylton’ll dae nae mair good.”
With that he vanished from mortal knowledge.528
We are told from the start that the Cauld Lad is a ghost, and it is fitting enough the he should
haunt the place where he was killed. Why, however, does he haunt like a brownie? Ghosts
occasionally do good deeds out of gratitude or penance, but it is difficult to see why the Cauld
Lad ought to work for his household. We are told elsewhere of this ghost that “the merry
pranks of the goblin […] became wearisome to the servants, and they determined upon
banishing him.”529 While this is an explanation of sorts, showing that living alongside this
ghost was not always easy, we will recall that even non-ghostly brownies have a tendency for
“merry pranks”; indeed, the entire narrative has been dressed up in brownie terminology.
Significantly, unlike most brownies but like most ghosts, the Cauld Lad wants to be laid, the
word meaning resolved, rather than exorcized, here. Why a gift of clothes should accomplish
this resolution is not clear however, for this ghost was, surely, not haunting all this time just in
order to get a cloak and a hood. Brownies are driven away by gifts of clothing either because
they are loathe to accept payment for work or because, upon receiving clothes to cover their
nakedness, they feel themselves too fine to work any longer. Neither of these issues should
concern a ghost.
We have seen elsewhere that ghosts and fairies were often consciously linked by their past
believers. Dion Abrahamsen, the Ærøese folklorist, even thinks that a brownie is a family’s
ancestral spirit. This, he holds, is why there are no brownies on Ærø since, until relatively
recently, most of the farmers on the island worked on the duke’s land and did not have farms
of their own.
Let us recall the passages we looked at when examining brownie and goblin folklore, the
passages that showed how even the best of brownies enjoyed pranks and how angered
brownies could be harmful to one’s economic wellbeing or even deadly. Now, consider this
short, mysterious legend from Hübertz:
In multiple houses, during the summer, about that time when one buys firewood, people hear a
great tumult in the woodshed, as if pieces of firewood are being thrown about, and in one place,
there is a being that calls upon the farmhand at night when he neglects to get up and feed the
animals.530
Hübertz places this legend as the last in a list of ghost stories, but there is something special about
it. First of all, Hübertz simply calls the haunter a being, never specifying that it is a ghost. After all,
the text provides no proof that it is a ghost. This might appear overly cautious, but Hübertz’s
instincts are probably correct. Remember that it has become a folkloric commonplace to claim that
there was no brownie belief on Ærø, with both Dion Abrahamsen and Tove Kjærboe531 taking this
line, in the latter’s case presumably because Hübertz does not mention the beings. This is hardly a
shock since most amateur folklorists would, alongside those with no interest in folklore, assume
that the being in question in the above legend is a ghost simply because it is not identified as
anything else. Whereas, to men like Gervase of Tilbury and even the amateurish Hübertz, the
decision to avoid identification is made in order to avoid being incorrect, in today’s world, ghosts
are the supernatural standard, the spiritual catch-all creatures. It is, nevertheless, odd that Hübertz
does not positively identify the being in this case, for a brownie is the only being likely to both
engage in poltergeist activity and to take care of farm animals. Indeed, the idea that brownies get
annoyed at lazy farmhands is an international motif unto itself. At least two generations of Ærøese
have – if they have researched the subject at all – been taught by the local experts that brownies
were never a part of local folklore merely because these experts fell into the same trap as complete
novices and, failing to read into Hübertz’s cautiousness, have attributed to ghosts everything that
was not attributed to something else.
This is significant enough in a merely historical sense, yet belief in the supernatural is not
exclusively historical. We have seen that many people today feel they have had ghost
experiences, and 56% of my Ærøese contributors believe in ghosts. The recent Ærøese
examples we looked at above are primarily poltergeist experiences rather than out-and-out
ghost sightings. Poltergeists may well be figments of the imagination, but it must be admitted
that the human imagination is remarkably consistent. In the present-day examples we looked
at in the last chapter alone, we found four people who have experienced supernatural
knocking532 and four people who have noted supernatural odours533. What is more, most of
these contributors have had these experiences multiple times. Blinking or unpredictable lights
are also a common phenomenon. Only one of the experiences that involved knocking, an
odour, or blinking lights also included a visual, apparently-ghostly manifestation.534 That is to
say, nearly all of these people experienced nothing more than poltergeists, and in traditional
belief, poltergeists are not necessarily ghosts.
Ghosts exist because they seek resolution. They remain on Earth rather than go to Heaven,
limbo, Purgatory, Hell, or wherever because there is something they must do first, a caveat
being that, sometimes, Earthly existence is a form of purgatorial penance or damnation in
itself. The fact remains that a ghost is a ghost for a reason. Ghosts undergoing penance or
trying to fulfil some other task usually need human help in order to achieve resolution. Ghosts
who suffer Earthly torment – worldly Hell – are also seeking resolution, but they are on a
much slower track towards it since they often must await the Day of Judgment. However
absurd past belief may appear to us, all legends – inasmuch as they are legendary – are logical
if one accepts the worldview out of which they arose. Aimless ghosts are the stuff of folktales
and fairy tales, not folk belief.
But tradition can change, can it not? It surely can— And does. As far as ghosts are
concerned though, tradition has not changed considerably. Northern Europeans may no longer
be informed by church interpretations of ghosts, but they receive their conceptions of ghosts
from spiritualists. As we have seen, despite the vast differences between the spiritualist and
Christian cosmologies, today’s spiritualists still tend to believe in two afterlife alternatives, a
heavenly one and a hellish one. Hell for spirits, say the spiritualists, is located on Earth, and
Heaven is a place into which one may pass if he or she is prepared for it. Heaven, therefore,
has remained stable while Hell has just become a bit less fiery. In any case, the man who is
doomed to ride stolen horses or shift boundary posts until his task is resolved is not essentially
different than the woman who cannot reach Heaven because she has failed to come to terms
with her fate. This failure is a failure of faith, and lack of faith is at the heart of every sin. The
spiritualists with whom I spoke seem to understand that – assuming the existence of Heaven –
ghosts only make sense if there is something amiss with them. Therefore, when someone like
Elenna Christensen goes to houses to rid them of ghosts, she always finds ghosts of unhappy
and unresolved souls, notwithstanding the fact that the people who own these haunted houses
usually experience nothing more than unexplained poltergeist activity or a sense of “a
presence in the room.”
The experiences of the present-day haunted and those of present-day spiritualists seem to
differ, the latter having much fuller and more complete stories to tell. Doubtless, if Elenna had
gone to Poul Erik Jensen’s house, she would have met a traditional ghost or two even though
Poul Erik sensed only poltergeist activity. We must, however, ignore the testimony of those
like Elenna for a moment. When we read traditional legends, we find that it is not usually
only the priest or pastor who senses a ghost as a ghost. When there is a ghost around, it tends
to manifest itself in distinctly-ghostly ways. Why is that? Well, why else would a ghost haunt
someone? Ghosts seek resolution, and given that they seem to have so much trouble
communicating with people to begin with, they have to do the best they can. What good is it
to make lights blink, to knock on the wall, to walk across the ceiling, to smell of smoke or
lavender if you never show yourself?
Poul Erik’s favoured theory for his ghosts comes from the historian, Jesper Groth, but this
story is precisely an example of something that would not cause ghosts, at least not in the
present day. Sure, a wrongly-hanged couple is likely to walk again for a little while, but in
this case, the community found out only a short time after they were hanged that someone
else was, in fact, guilty of murdering the farmhand. Thus, the hanged couple should have
found resolution, should have had no reason to haunt the weak-minded skinner. Looking at it
from a traditional perspective, the first possible explanation Poul Erik offers me is much more
probable in that it concerns a body that is not buried in Christian soil, and there is no reason to
believe that this problem was ever resolved. I am not suggesting that Poul Erik was actually
haunted by the ghost of a man whose corpse rolled out of the back of a wagon, only that –
even within Poul Erik’s own conception of what a ghost is – this is the option that he has
considered that makes sense. Poul Erik, however, has been fooling himself. Despite the fact
that his very reliance on historical stories to explain his supernatural experiences shows that
he accepts the traditional theory as to why ghosts exist, he claims to sometimes think about
the issue logically: “So, my technocratic personality rises up again. It’s a question of, “With
all of these people who’ve lived in the world, do all of these people have their own spirits, and
if so, where are they now?” [...] There’d be more spirits than people.” This apparent logic
only makes sense if we stop looking at ghosts logically, if they become some kind of pointless
spiritual manifestation, an obscene “luck-of-the-draw” sort of fate in which some spirits
ascend directly to Heaven while others have to linger in a worldly Hell, making nuisances of
themselves.
Of course, belief is belief and cannot be argued against, but beliefs today tend to be just as
much beliefs that we have learned from others as were beliefs 200 years ago. When you speak
to people about the nature of ghosts, they will give you a description very much matching the
Medieval Catholic one. Then, when you ask them to recount their own ghost experiences,
they will frequently tell you stories that no one in their right mind living in the Middle Ages
would have attributed to ghosts. In the absence of further evidence, the poltergeist
experiences of Poul Erik, Poul Edvard Andersen, Dorete Seier and Karsten Landro, and
Lauritz would usually have been either blamed on boggarts, brownies, or social fairies or
classified under no heading whatsoever on account of being hitherto inexplicable phenomena.
It is not that ghost belief is, on the face of it, any less “correct” than fairy belief or honest-togoodness naturalism. It is just that we make a mockery of our own cultural development when
we turn supernatural experiences in which we sincerely believe into stories that are
intellectually untenable as a result of their lacking internal logic.
Has Birgithe ever asked herself why her husband’s perfume-wearing grandmother has not
reached Heaven? Or why his great-grandfather is still wandering about the house, smoking
pipes? There are, perhaps, logical explanations within ghost folklore for why these ancestors
should be there, but if there are, then Birgithe has simply gotten lucky in her guesses since she
knows of no such explanation herself. Poul Edvard, in any case, has an idea as to why his exgirlfriend’s father haunts him: It is in order to advise Poul Edvard and keep him company, a
pair of very strange urges when one considers that Poul Edvard, like most people, also accepts
the traditional conception of ghosts. It is true that some ghosts – for example, dead mothers
whose children are mistreated by stepmothers – come back from the grave for their families’
sakes, but Poul Edvard is no mistreated stepchild.
Whenever someone suspects she is dealing with a ghost, she has to ask herself, “What sort
of resolution is this ghost seeking?” If she can figure out what problem the ghost needs to
have resolved, then she is halfway there, and if – being fortunate not to be afflicted by an
eternally-damned inveterate sinner – she knows how to resolve the problem, then she should
have little trouble being rid of her ghost. So speaks the voice of traditional folkloric
experience. Even if ghosts do not objectively exist, someone who believes in ghosts is still
likely to be helped by thinking through these questions. After all, we know from our folkloric
evidence that, phenomenologically-speaking, hauntings usually end with either laying or
resolution and not with the haunted individual sitting around and doing nothing. Someone
might not be overly bothered by her ghost, but if she does, indeed, believe that it is a ghost,
she might be forgiven for doing her best to relieve the ghost’s torments. If, however, she finds
that she cannot figure out what problem the ghost needs to have resolved, she is advised to
consider other explanations – even other supernatural ones – for her experiences.
If spiritualists are often the butt of jokes, it is a result of our culture’s unwillingness to
speak about the supernatural, not of spiritualists holding strange ideas. The overwhelming
majority of believers are not spiritualists, and the one great advantage that spiritualists have
over these others is that, whereas the others are haunted and do not know what to do or how to
interpret hauntings, spiritualists have worked their beliefs into their worldviews. I may not,
personally, agree with the objective reality of the spiritualist worldview, but this is, surely,
beside the point. How much more balanced must a believer be if her theory of existence
reflects her beliefs rather than contradicts them? It is worrisome that belief in Christian ghosts
does not always coincide with belief in Christianity or even Christian cosmology, and for
people who live with contradictions like this, ghost experiences cannot help but be
perplexing.
One young contributor, 13-year-old Jens Kristian Bech, who we shall hear more from
shortly, certainly sums up most youths’ – and surely, in a more naïve sense, many adults’ –
views on religion when he tells me about his uncertain belief in God, how science sometimes
makes him doubt his Christian belief:
Adam Grydehøj: But you believe more than you disbelieve?
Jens Kristian Bech: Yes, I think so. Because I mean, there’s all of that stuff written about that
Jesus guy, and so it has to be true in some way or other.
AG: But there’s a lot written about fairies too.
JKB: Yes, but it’s not the same, I don’t feel. Because Jesus is just a symbol... Or God is Jesus,
really, in a way, and so he comes down to explain instead of God doing it. And so, I feel it’s
something different than fairies and that sort of thing.
AG: How do ghosts fit into Christianity? Is there Heaven and Hell?
JKB: It’s more that people say that everyone goes up to Heaven, especially small children. They
don’t say that they go down to Hell and that sort of thing. People don’t talk too much about that.
AG: But does everyone go to Heaven then?
JKB: I think so, in its own way. Sure, there are some people who haven’t been so good, but they
go up anyway. But maybe, they’re not so well off...
AG: So, there’re different levels...
JKB: Yes, in a way. Because if... Or I mean, there aren’t any levels. It depends on if there are
feelings of guilt because they have to have a great feeling of guilt.
The much-derided peace and love worldview of the spiritualists differs little from this
cosmology, excluding, perhaps, the ideas on guiltiness. What is all the more striking is that,
when one compares Jens Kristian’s theories to those of other local youths, it is evident that
these are, to some extent, results of the teachings that the youths receive from the Church in
the run-up to their confirmations. The great irony, of course, is that from a traditional outlook,
small children are, actually, the ones who have the most to fear. Jens Kristian’s theory on
everyone going to Heaven clashes severely with his theory, which we shall hear later, that
ghosts are often people who were murdered or unhappy in life. Surely, precisely these people
– those who have suffered the most – deserve entrance into Heaven.
We should recall The Unquiet Grave, the old ballad used to introduce this book. In it, a
young man who has lost his lover vows to “do as much for my true-love / As any young man
may; / I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave / For a twelvemonth and a day.” The result is not as
the young man intended, for after this period has passed, his dead lover tells him
sympathetically but firmly that not only will their love for one another someday decay, but if
the man continues to try to revive her, he will die. By his very act of mourning, he is
preventing her from resting in peace and is causing her to suffer on Earth.535
On this point, traditional folklore – the folklore on which current ghost belief is based – is
consistent: The dead are not meant to reside in the world of men.
Chapter 23: The White Lady of Søbygård
Just because many of the experiences that people put down to ghosts do not fit the phenomenology
of what would have, in the past, been considered ghost experiences, this does not mean that
traditional ghost experiences have ceased to occur. One need only ask those who have encountered
the White Lady of Søbygård. Søbygård, built in the 1580s by Duke Hans the Younger, is the only
surviving manor house on Ærø. In 1729, Ærø came under the control of the Danish crown, and the
estate was eventually parcelled out. As the White Lady is, uniquely in my interviews, a specific
ghost mentioned by multiple people, it might be best to begin our consideration of White Lady
experiences by looking at the phenomenon from the outside.
When I spoke with the Skovby historian, Palle Abramsson, I asked him, as I ask most people,
how long ago he thinks “the old belief” disappeared in the area. He replies:
Yes, well, it’s tough to say with the old belief because the man I lived with [in my childhood],
the old Palle, he’d worked over at Søbygård, you know. And he’d told him [Albert Jensen, a
farmer.] how, when he’d worked over there, he came driving out from Søby one evening with
horse and wagon. And saw, up from the mill, there was sort of a white stallion haunting there,
and it came tearing along down across the fields. And he gave the horses the whip, you know,
right? And came round and into Søbygård and just managed to slam the gate after him. And so,
it stood out there and kicked and reared. And the hinges, they were on the verge of breaking,
you know, right? And it was, of course, a story, a goodnight story. But that guy up there, he
believed it, that it was true. And it’s haunted at Søbygård. And here, a few years ago... We have
the White Lady. That horse, it’s the only time I’ve heard the story. One of the sons from over
there [by Søbygård] – Kresten, who lives up in Bregninge –, he told me that one day he’d gone
over to Søbygård, and there was, of course, a big, black dog that haunted over there. And this
big, black dog, you know, right? When he [Kresten] came just round the corner of the building,
it stood there right before him, you know, right? When he then blinked his eyes, then it was
gone of course. This story, I told it to his brother, who’s older. “Oh, that’s ours, the old, black
dog he’s talking about,” he said. “That’s what it is.” People have a tendency to, in one way or
another, dress something up, and in the end, then they believe that it’s true of course.
Palle Abramsson feels that all ghost and fairy stories have always been “goodnight stories,” but
our interpretation of this statement is complicated by his treatment of these two accounts, both of
which were believed by their protagonists. In the black dog story, Palle takes a partially naturalistic
approach, saying that the dog was the family dog, but he also hints that, in the beginning, this was a
“goodnight story” as well, which only gradually came to be believed by its first-hand-experienced
teller. Although we should always be wary of disagreeing with Palle, who has a true sense for local
tradition, his arguments here are unconvincing. What sort of mental process is Palle imposing on
Kresten, the man who saw the black dog? Palle believes that 1) Kresten has a briefly frightening
encounter with the family dog. 2) It takes Kresten a moment to recognize the dog. 3) When he does,
he realizes that the story might make for some fine entertainment if he simply neglects to tell the
audience that the dog in question is just an ordinary dog. 4) Kresten, however, does not count on the
effect storytelling has on people, and before he knows it, he has become convinced of the truth of
his own piece of fictional entertainment. This explanation is too clever by half, primarily because,
despite Palle’s own deep respect for Kresten, Palle seems to think that – when it comes to black
dogs and storytelling – Kresten is incapable of logical thought. This is, after all, no mere matter of
coming to believe in one’s own adornments to a story; Kresten’s altered consciousness implies that
he has forgotten the whole reality of his experience.
We will, in any case, continue with Palle’s description of uncanny events at Søbygård:
And if you take her, the White Lady, we’ve had two people who’ve seen her over at Søbygård
while we restored it. One of them is Sven Jørgen Karlsen out from Ommel. And he was a mason
over there, of course, and laid these boulders up. And one morning, he was standing in the yard
and looked out over it. He saw – it was foggy –, he sort of saw this figure come out up from the
castle and go over to the corner of the boulder. There used to be a toilet there in the old days.
And then, there was this carpenter over there, [Name withheld.]. He came one day, and he set
his toolbox down and went and opened the door and placed the toolbox on the stairs. And then,
he turned around to take the toolbox. And then, he got such a kick in the arse, and he flew out
onto the boulder. It’s not more than four years ago. But of course, he’s—. When he bent down –
the door consists of two half-doors –, and when he bent down [to pick up the toolbox], then his
buttocks hit one of the half-doors and [he was] knocked over of course.
Again, Palle stretches after naturalism. The fact that it seems unlikely that the carpenter was,
indeed, kicked by the White Lady in no way makes it more likely that a grown man – a carpenter,
no less – would hit his buttocks on a half-door and believe that a ghost was responsible.
I continue by asking Palle about the identity of the White Lady:
Palle Abramsson: There’s no one who can give any explanation. I’ll tell you that Peder
Knudsen, from whom we bought the farm [Søbygård.] over there in order to get property
rights—. Down in the cellar, we actually found some stairs – no one knew they were there – that
went upstairs, with wooden steps that were almost rotted away of course. And he [Peder
Knudsen.] was so furious about the fact that we opened them up because, inside, there was –
you have to keep in mind that when he’s talking, well, he doesn’t have so much historical
understanding – one of the duke’s daughters. So, she’d been walled-in there. But not completely
closed-off. It was such that they could stick food in to her of course. But from where Peder got
this story, I don’t know. I’d never heard it before.
Adam Grydehøj: How far back does belief in the White Lady go?
PA: I don’t think that it goes further back than Peder Knudsen’s father, Kresten Knudsen. He’s
born about 1880 or something like that, and he claims to have seen her. A man like his son,
Peder, he doesn’t believe in the White Lady; he’s just seen a light.
AG: I’ve spoken with quite a few people who believe in the White Lady today.
PA: Yes, yes, yes! But we [who work at Søbygård] also market it, of course!
AG: But it’s odd that even though people must know that you’re just marketing it, these adults
believe in it anyway,
PA: I don’t think so, deep inside. I don’t think that there’s anyone who believes in ghosts in
reality. But it gives a sort of secretive joy to think to oneself that there could be something. […]
All Danes have, of course, learned about in their childhood. Especially before electric lights in
the house and so on. It was a bit frightening, and then, of course, people told these stories. And
of course, people have really seen them because there wasn’t any light, so it must’ve been
something or other. And that strengthens things of course. And I think that, today, after the
introduction of lights, these things really disappear.
Palle does not explain legend’s explanation for walling in of the duke’s daughter though he
must be aware of the various stories. The discovery of the secret passageway is an example of
archaeology reinforcing folk belief; the traditional belief itself, meanwhile, might partially be
founded on some sort of folk memory of the passageway, on the persistence of an oral
tradition of something being inside Søbygård’s walls. It is interesting that Palle dates the legend
to such recent times – to the days of the Kresten Knudsen, the man who saw the apparentlyspectral black dog – because I have not been able to find any early printed sources of the
White Lady story either. We should, however, take care with Palle’s attribution since he does
not, after all, feel that ghost stories were ever very much believed in and explains those that
were treated as factual as little more than tricks of the light. Even more strangely, after having
told me about Peder Knudsen’s fury at the opening up of the secret stairway, Palle dismisses
the idea that Peder believes in the White Lady, rather mysteriously following this up with the
statement that “he’s just seen a light.”
Palle mentions Sven Jørgen Karlsen as someone who claims to have seen the ghost. Sven
Jørgen is a retired, 65-year-old stone mason now living in the minuscule fishing village of Strandby
on the outskirts of Ommel:
Sven Jørgen Karlsen: I’ve worked at Søbygård. And there was a rumour circulating there about
a White Lady of course, and I met her one morning. But I didn’t communicate with her. It’s the
only thing I can say about ghosts. It was seven, eight years ago. It was a misty morning. I came
with the bus from out here [in Ommel]; I rode back here by bus too. Do you know Søbygård?
We drive through one of the gates over by the moat, and then we go and work on the stone
laying. And then, we have lunch over at the castle. And on the way over, she was walking in the
mist, in the fog. I think she had to use the toilet. It was in the morning. There’d been an old
toilet over to the left. And so, I just saw her pass over there. I shouted, “Good morning,” but she
didn’t answer.
Adam Grydehøj: You saw her as if she were a real woman?
SJK: Yes.
AG: How have other people reacted when you’ve told them the story?
SJK: I told the people I worked with and said, “This morning, I met the White Lady.” And so,
that was that. One of them laughed, and then it was, “Is that so?” I personally don’t think they
believed it, but… And it might’ve been something else too, but really…
AG: Is it something you’re afraid to tell people?
SJK: No. No, I joke about it a bit, but I’m not afraid to talk about it. No, there were, at the same
time, some [school] classes that came up there, and so, they’d heard about how I’d met the
White Lady. And then, you came over here and wanted to hear it [The story.], and so I could
only say the same thing, that in the morning, I met the White Lady because she had to go to the
toilet, and then she disappeared again in the fog.
Sven Jørgen’s and Palle Abramsson’s versions of these events do not differ essentially though Sven
Jørgen can, predictably, offer more detail. The White Lady looks to him like an actual woman, as
something corporeal; most nonbelievers – and perhaps, many believers as well – think that the vast
majority of ghost sightings are fluid and ethereal. Traditional folklore is ambivalent on the subject,
presenting both corporeal and ethereal ghosts though – without my having done any sort of
statistical analysis – I would say that there is a tendency towards the former, towards ghosts who,
like so many fairies, can be mistaken for living humans. Sven Jørgen thinks that between 1% and
2% of Danes believe in ghosts, and I can do nothing to convince him otherwise.
Karen Margrethe Fabricius, Director of Museums in the former Ærøskøbing Kommune, strikes
me as a rationalist, and like most historians, she does not care to discuss folklore. However, she
gives me a surprising answer when I ask her about the state of Danish ghost belief:
Karen Margrethe Fabricius: I do [believe] a little bit, personally, maybe. Now, it’s because I
also have something to do with Søbygård. We have the White Lady of Søbygård there. My
common sense probably forbids me, of course, to believe in it. But on the other hand, in one
way or another, I probably believe that there is, despite everything, something that we humans
can’t explain and that sort of thing, right? And sometimes, things happen of course. […] Out at
Søbygård, we have this White Lady who, just through the generations, people have talked about
how there’s the White Lady of Søbygård. Someone who used to live there, he’s told me that he
met her. He’s completely serious about that. But I’ve asked him, “Where did you meet her?
Where did you see her?” And he came walking home from the country road and neared
Søbygård, and he could see a sort of big, white figure in the distance. And eventually, as he
came closer and closer, then this white figure become more and more indistinct. And when he
came all the way over, then the figure was gone. But it was there before, perfectly clearly. It’s
now… He’s about 75-years-old when he told it to me, and it’s something that he’d experienced
earlier. But then, it’s a matter of our having encouraged the White Lady a bit at Søbygård. For
example, we sold an event to a school class that was based around the idea that they’d meet the
White Lady. And it was supposed to be creepy and that sort of thing, and they were supposed to
spend the night out at Søbygård. And so, in the evening, we made a fire in the fire pit, and we
got food, and then were supposed to have a tour up in the castle in the dark. And it was dark
there, right? It was dark there, it was sort of a warm, summer evening, and we just had
flashlights to light with. And the idea was to make it a bit creepy with this White Lady ghost at
Søbygård and that sort of thing, right? And it was a 4th grade class, and we pushed it a bit with
that creepiness and that sort of thing. And so, I can tell you, so we went around on the ground
floor, the first floor, and then we had to go down in the cellar and say hello to the White Lady, I
said, because she lives in the cellar. “Aiigh! We don’t dare!” “Oh, leave off,” right? “Will you
go first?” “Yes, yes, sure, I’ll go first,” and that sort of thing. And we went down in the cellar,
in the utter darkness, and I can tell you, I could feel it in these youths, how intensely they
accepted this stuff about this ghost. I told these stories I’d heard about ghosts, and they believed
– guaranteed – in it during that moment they stood there. I couldn’t move. They stood pressed
up against me almost, really. So, you have to hear that then they go up and go out of the castle
and are going to go over the bridge [over the moat]. When they were half-way across the bridge,
then the White Lady comes right out in front of them, right in the gate. Something light comes
up, and then they see the White Lady. It was something we’d made, a rough display. Those
children began to scream, and they screamed and they scream and they screamed simply such a
long time. It was a real climax. They believed in the White Lady in that instant, I guarantee it,
but it’s not certain that they did the next day.
Adam Grydehøj: What’s the story about the White Lady?
KMF: The story about her, the one I tell when I tell it – Dion [Abrahamsen] has a different story
–, but the one I tell is the one I heard from him, Peder Knudsen, who’s lived there and had seen
her. He says that it’s a young noblewoman who had a child with someone she wasn’t allowed to
have a child with, and so as punishment, they walled her in inside the cellar, imprisoned her in
the cellar and only gave [her] permission to come out every once in a while. And she’s the one,
then, who can’t find peace in the grave, and that’s why she walks again. It’s the story I usually
tell when I talk about the White Lady of Søbygård.
Karen Margrethe’s experience with these youths probably explains her thought that more children
believe in ghosts than adults, a statement that is – however incorrectly founded – most likely true. It
is intriguing that people who believe in this ghost even to a small extent are willing to use it, in
Palle’s words, to “market” the manor house. This points, again, to the lack of connection people
make between their beliefs about the nature of ghosts and their reactions to ghosts. Even if it is
uncertain to what extent Karen Margrethe trusts Peder Knudsen’s precise narrative about this ghost,
if she in any way assumes that the White Lady both exists and is a woman’s tormented spirit, it is
strange that she uses the story to frighten children rather than, say, tries to help the spirit find rest.
It is fascinating to see how a difference in perspective can so thoroughly the outcome of a story.
Palle Abramsson describes Peder Knudsen’s anger at the opening of the secret passageway in the
cellar, but he later downplays Peder’s sighting of the White Lady, saying: “A man like [...] Peder,
he doesn’t believe in the White Lady; he’s just seen a light.” Karen Margrethe, however, who lacks
Palle’s willingness to discuss the nature of belief, has gained her own partial belief in the White
Lady from this same sighting. Based on Karen Margrethe’s description, Peder had a complex
supernatural experience. Palle, Karen Margrethe, and Per, who we met earlier, are all historians
who are, at first glance, unyieldingly sceptical, but close questioning reveals that even these people
who pride themselves on “common sense” and “rationality” believe in something that they
personally feel is supernatural.
The now-deceased local historian and folklore expert, Dion Abrahamsen, also weighed in on the
White Lady and Peder’s experience. Dion, who denied belief in the supernatural but who, in my
strong opinion, was a believer despite it all, said:
It’s a bit funny with this White Lady. She’s seen by each generation that’s lived up there. But I
mean, the neighbour, the guy who’s head of the organization [Friends of Søbygård; Dion has
gotten confused though, for Peder Knudsen is not its director], experienced [something] one
day when he went for a walk with his dog. Then, he suddenly saw a sort of glowing
figure. And the dog, it got so scared, so frightened. And its hair rose up. They had to
leave again. And it was the dog that reacted.
In a sign of how deeply ingrained the naturalistic theory is even among believers, Dion continues by
explaining that “There was a tree stump where there was a species of fungus that was
phosphorescent at night.” He says that the last two generations at Søbygård have seen her and that
she is always standing by the road. Unlike Palle and Karen Margrethe, Dion gives Peder’s dog a
major role in the story though it is unclear whether this means that Dion remembers the story
exceptionally well or exceptionally badly.
40-year-old Jan Pedersen, a Leby native and Ærøskøbing’s independent tour guide, has also
done tours at Søbygård:
The White Lady is, according to the tradition, a woman who was walled-in inside the cellar. I
maintain that it had something to do with the duke. Maybe a noblewoman. I think, actually, that
the deceased had been one of the servant girls from Skovby who’d bragged that she’d gone to
bed with the duke and presumably had also gotten pregnant from him, and presumably, people
hid her in the cellar until it was time for her to give birth, right? But [she] dies at some point.
And so, people have walled the body in and found it later of course. People found it, it was
removed, the bones were removed and laid in an unknown grave in Søby, but [the ghost] still
haunts there. And her ghost, it walks again, of course, right?, as the White Lady. You usually
meet her on the drawbridge or up the road when you come driving. There’s also a bridge,
actually, there where you drive up, in front of the castle. You meet her there as well. She’s a
very upright ghost. She’s very God-fearing. If you curse inside the castle, if you make too much
noise, then she pushes you. She can simply move herself, and people know that she’s pushed
multiple people down the stairs to punish them because they’ve been full of too many bad
habits, as people say. There are only a handful of people who’ve seen her, but on the other hand,
I believe that she really was there and that she really was a ghost who was a bit active, a bit
nearby, and a bit cold. Very cold, right? People usually probably say, when the cold air goes
through the living room, “So, there’s an angel coming through,” people say. People use that
[expression] of course. […] I’m one of those people who’s met the White Lady, and in a bit of a
violent way. I’ve had that alarm watch at Søbygård Castle, and the alarm goes off once at 3:30
in the morning. The alarm centre called up, and I’d had a long day already, and I was
thoroughly tired and unhappy that I had to go up there and check the alarm. And I come up
there and get the doors unlocked and get the alarm turned off, and then I have to go around and
check the house. It could be that I was a bit noisy going up the stairs, “Hello! Is anybody here?”
right? When I was on the way down the stairs again, then I see something white on the landing,
where you come from up in the attic and the stairs turn. Something white’s standing there, and I
stop up on the steps there. And then, I have a feeling that it passes by me. And then, I fall down
the stairs. The next step I take, from there, I fall the rest of the way down the stairs. And I can’t
explain it today. It was as though my feet were pushed off of the step. Yes, but was it the White
Lady who pushed me? Have I met her? I can’t explain it today. I was completely, 100% sure
that I was alone. It was a morning in June. It was light. What irritated me was that all of the
doors had been left open in the house. All of the doors. And we tend to close them. Because if
the light comes up in the morning and sort of wanders in through the living room, and we have
motion sensors, then it can do enough to set off the alarm, but that’s why we close the door, and
then we’ve limited how much it can move. So, therefore, I was, “It must’ve caused the alarm.
It’d been set off.” Yes, I have to admit today that I’m probably convinced that it was the White
Lady who’d set it off. And that when I’m last on the list of those people who have to check the
alarm there, then there must be a reason why I was the only one who was called to come up
there. There must’ve been some reason or other. I’d probably been very rude in the house. I’d
probably been the type who laughed a bit at everything, made it into a bit of a joke, and in the
way that I told stories there, then it was almost in order to draw them [The listeners.] into a bit
of doubt, right? And used at one time – let’s say – self-invented stories that I sort of added on.
I’m known for my anecdotes when I tell stories. I really aim for that level where I say, “It could
also have happened this way. It could also have happened this other way.” But in order to make
the stories fun and exciting. But I’ve stopped doing it because it’s as if I were taught a lesson for
that. […] Really, we’re only five, six folks who’ve met her though. It’s not as if I go around and
say I’ve met her because if I say that, then people shake their heads.
As we shall see later, Jan, who says that he encountered the ghost about five years previously,
views himself as an entertainer and a storyteller and is known by others as an untrustworthy source
of historical information. It is ironic – and perhaps consciously so? – that Jan’s narrative about
being kicked by the White Lady for making up stories about her is itself judged fictional by many
other people. Whether or not Jan believes, however, is perhaps less relevant than his description of
his encounter, which included a visual presence. The back-story he gives her is altogether fitting,
for Jan’s White Lady has numerous reasons for being a ghost: She is a sinner, is abandoned by her
lover, and is tortured in life. Nevertheless, this is not Jan at his tale-spinning best, for he begins by
saying that the ghost is probably that of a noblewoman and then changes his mind, saying that she
had likely been a servant from Skovby. But how in the world would anyone know that she came
from the Skovby? However, Jan quickly recovers, and he is soon providing confirmation for his
story by explaining that the girl’s bones were found years later but are now lost.
Jan’s experience with the ghost was not incredibly intense, but the same cannot be said for the
time when the ghost came to Birthe Henriksen, one our spiritualist contributors. Surprisingly, Birthe
has not only met the White Lady; she has also ended her torment:
I’d always heard about her, starting from when I was little, some cruel stories about how she
had to be hidden from the enemy [Probably the Swedes.] and was walled-in. And there was only
one person who knew about it, and she never came out. It was nine or ten years ago that we did
a festival play at Søbygård, outdoors acting. I’d heard about her all of my life. Back then, I
worked a lot with these things, so I was very open to it. And so, she came. Then, I become sort
of tongue-tied. It was like she went inside me. She simply went inside my body. So, I couldn’t
really do that much, couldn’t really say anything, right? It didn’t last long. So, I’d arranged a
course for all of the girls there with my friend over from Lolland at precisely this time. And it
was sort of like all of these things, they’ve often come together when something big was going
to happen, so they’ve often been connected with something where there were going to be a lot
of people gathered together. Where there are a lot of people gathered together, there’s also more
energy. And my friend here, she was going to come over here and hold the course, and she was
very good at bringing ghosts up. And so, I told her about how I’d felt that she sort of took over.
Not negatively. I mean, it wasn’t evil, but she just wanted to make herself noticed, I mean. So,
we went out there in the evening, after the festival play, and called on her. And she came,
actually. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her. She went into my body again. And my friend
could see that she did it. She could see her do it. And so, we talked with her. I couldn’t say
anything, but I could think. I’m not sure that I couldn’t say anything, but it felt that way. I
suppose I could have, but it was just strange. She went up [into the light]. We made a
connection with her. And then, there’s someone who says they’ve seen her after that. And the
conclusion about that, as far as I’m concerned and also as far as my friend is concerned, is that
there are more [spirits at Søbygård]. She isn’t earth-bound anymore, but there are more spirits
who are stuck over there. It was the only reason we could think of as to why she would come
again. But I haven’t seen her. I don’t necessarily see them. I feel them. I see them in my mind’s
eye.
This is the fourth explanation that we have heard concerning the White Lady’s origin: She has
fallen in love with a common man and been walled-in for it; gotten pregnant by a common
man and been walled-in for it; gotten pregnant by a duke and been walled-in for it; or been
accidentally killed after having been walled-in to protect her from enemies, probably the
Swedes.
Birthe’s rationalization of later encounters with the White Lady is intriguing and points to
something essential about the nature of experience itself. While many non-spiritualists will –
whether or not they believe in ghosts – have difficulty believing that Birthe helped the White
Lady, her worldview is such that once a ghost has “gone up,” there is no longer any
possibility of its coming down to haunt again, a theory that, again, matches Medieval
Catholicism. So, assuming that Birthe is telling the truth about what she experienced, it is not
merely idle speculation on her part that she and her friend helped the White Lady’s ghost. Her
experience included not only the sense of possession but also the sense of the ghost “going
up” and entering “the light.” If she simply supposed that the ghost had “gone up,” she surely
would not take the rather extreme position that other ghosts are present at Søbygård. This is
further evidence that, even assuming the reality of ghosts, spiritualists and non-spiritualists
tend to have phenomenologically-distinct ghost experiences since the former are so much
more likely to have extreme, dramatic, communicative experiences than are the latter.
For those who do not believe in the reality of ghosts but who do hold with the experiencecentred approach to folklore of the supernatural, it is bound to be something of a mystery why
a particular ghost should be experienced by different people with little in common. It could be
that supernatural experiences that take place where there is a known ghost tradition are more
frequently remembered because a tradition for it already exists. There is also the possibility of
suggestion, that stories of the White Lady cause people to attribute perfectly ordinary
experiences or even random supernatural experiences to this one, local ghost.
Chapter 24: Hauntings and Witches
The White Lady is special because she is widely known, but not everyone experiences
supernatural celebrities. One anonymous contributor in her 40s, who we will call Carina, tells
me and two of her friends something that she has never before told anyone else:
Carina: Seven years ago, my husband, who I’d been married to for ten years, died. That night
he died, a painting with an angel on it fell from the wall at four o’clock in the morning, and
that’s when he died. And then, a few weeks later, I saw him sitting in the chair in the living
room. It was very cozy being alone in the evenings, and he sat like that in the living room. But
it’s some sort of psychological revenant, right? I mean, it’s something completely different, but
it’s also a bit ghost-like, right?, something you interact with, but then you see it inside your head
anyway, right?
Carina’s Friend: You were divorced from him.
Carina: It was, really, three months after we’d split up, right? I didn’t know that he was going to
die that night.
First an omen, then a ghost. Carina does not believe in God, so for her, the falling picture of
the angel is just a symbolic sign. This is her only supernatural experience, and despite it, she
thinks that the concept of ghosts originates from the days when oil lamps threw strange
shadows on the wall. We have to note that, as in Palle Abramsson’s family tradition described
above, this spirit would have usually be seen as different than a true ghost. Whereas ghosts
are on Earth after death in search of resolution, wraiths simply visit home or visit loved ones
directly after or at the time of death, and they are not even necessarily seen as spirits of the
dead men themselves as opposed to some spirit in the dead men’s forms. In this way, tradition
distinguishes between Carina’s omen and her later, visual ghost experience.
Carina was evidently disturbed by her experiences, and even though she thinks that 50% of all
Danes believe in ghosts, she said nothing for seven years. Unfortunately, it is not only adults who
have these fears of coming forward, and concern about mocking reaction to one’s experiences
drives even some young people underground. One anonymous teenager, who we call Henrik, thinks
that 80% of all Danes are believers but that most will not admit of it. Henrik is one of such people.
He tells me about some experiences he had had the previous summer. Throughout, he speaks
nervously, his voice quavering:
Henrik: My mobile phone was lying upstairs. And then, we came down to eat. Then, the phone
rings. And then, my brother, he hurries to get the telephone because he thinks that it was one of
his friends. And he says to us, “It’s some strange woman or other who’s speaking.” And he
couldn’t understand what she said. And then, we look – we have caller ID on our telephone –
and my number is there. And so, I go upstairs and look, and then my mobile phone, it’s not
lying there where I left it. And it wasn’t plugged in either.
Adam Grydehøj: Were you worried about it?
H: Yes, every time something strange happens, I get to thinking about it. […] My mother, she’s
also had something or other happen with her mobile phone. There was someone who called her,
and she couldn’t understand what she said. And there’s no one who has her mobile number. We
were over visiting my cousins, and then my mother’s telephone rings. And then, the only thing
she can hear is a woman who says that it’s Ærø Ferries because we’d rung there and ordered a
time [on the ferry] because we were going home the next day. And so, she says something or
other, “It’s Ærø Ferries,” and then she says, “Bwalalawalawa” or something like that. […]
AG: Have you told your friends about it?
H: I don’t know if they’d believe it or…
AG: But if you think that 4/5 of Danes believe in it, why are you afraid of it?
H: Because they definitely wouldn’t admit that they believe in it. And they’d just say, “I don’t
believe that.”
Because Henrik and his family could not find an explanation for these events, they decided
that a ghost must have been responsible. This did not, however, lead them to try to find out
who the ghost was, and there was no interest in having the spirit removed by a local specialist.
Henrik believes that these ghosts are dead people who are stuck between death and
reincarnation and that the ghost most likely phoned them up in order to try to tell them
something. While Henrik’s experience might have been considered ghostly a few hundred
years ago, it certainly would not have been seen as a clear-cut case if supporting evidence
were lacking since goblins and social fairies could also get up to verbal shenanigans.
Another youth, Jens Kristian Bech, likewise tells me about ghosts. When he visits some of
his friends’ houses, he can sense an otherworldly presence and can feel spirits staring at him.
When I ask him how he knows that ghosts are responsible, he replies, “I don’t know. I can’t
see what else it could be.” Jens Kristian is also of the opinion that ghosts are dead people who
had bad lives, were not buried, or were murdered. They remain on Earth because they need
our help and because they want to tell us that we should live our lives in a different manner
than we do. He says:
Jens Kristian Bech: Actually, someone from my school class, her mother, she has a farm, and
there are a whole lot of ghosts – three, four –, and they’ve cleared three of them away. Because
her great-grandfather had fallen down from the grain loft, and there was a girl who’d died from
blood poisoning when she had a baby, and then I can’t remember the last one. […] She [The
classmate.] is named Julia. And her mother’s named Pia, and she’s like a magnet, her mother,
for spirits. It’s like they’re drawn to her.
Adam Grydehøj: And what have they done to clear the house of ghosts?
JKB: They fetched – or got hold of – a shaman who helped. And her mother had to go out and
touch a tree a few times so that they’d stay away. But Julia’s great-grandmother, she lives in
their office, and she doesn’t do anything. She sort of guards them so that nothing happens to
them.
AG: Have you had any really concrete experiences yourself?
JKB: No, not really. I mean, I’ve been out there on the farm and sort of felt that they were there,
but not really. […] Some people don’t say that they believe in ghosts because they’re
embarrassed. That girl, Julia, she talks about it a lot during some periods, and sometimes there’s
nothing at all. But there was a spirit in their field because her father didn’t believe in that spirit
stuff. So, he drove out in the field, and then he could sort of feel that there was some spirit out
there, and so he drove back because he was afraid to drive out there. It was probably some…
Yeah, what are they called? In the really old days, they shot with bows and arrows and that sort
of thing. That there was that sort of flint people out there. The Stone Age.
A shaman deals with these ghosts, which are generally classically conceived by young Jens
Kristian. It is no coincidence that, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, spiritualists are more likely
than anyone else to speak of traditional ghosts. The Stone Age ghost is unusual in tradition but not
entirely absent from it. The very fact the fairies have a habit of living in burial mounds, use flint
arrowheads, and are non-Christian makes their conflation with prehistoric peoples more or less
inevitable. The only clearly non-traditional ghost Jens Kristian mentions is that of Julia’s greatgrandmother, who hangs around as a protective spirit.
One of Jens Kristian’s peers, Karoline Strand, has not only heard about ghosts from her family
but has also learned about the topic from Michael Banke, the Marstal schoolteacher who we have
found to be one of the island’s most knowledgeable individuals concerning folklore of the
supernatural. Michael often tells ghost stories in class, and although I did not get the chance to hear
him tell them myself, it was, perhaps, even more instructive to hear some of them retold by
Karoline. For example, she relays that “in the old days” Michael’s aunt:
was on a farm where she worked in the kitchen and that sort of thing. She made food. One day,
she’s stirring a pot, and she’d a special way of stirring in figure-eights so that it didn’t get burnt.
And then all of a sudden, her hand begins to stir completely crazy, and she got very scared, and
she couldn’t control it at all. So, she sits down on a sofa where there’s a table, and on the table,
there’s a pencil and some paper. And then all of a sudden, her hand grabs that pencil and just starts
to draw freely on this paper, and she could never draw before. It’s as if her hand showed her
something. So, she’d been possessed by a spirit, and she stopped working at that farm, but she
constantly had these sorts of attacks where she had to draw, and then this spirit wanted to show her
something. I’ve seen 50 drawings myself where she’s drawn everything, which’ve been preserved
over time. I mean, pretty, pretty drawings. If she picked up a pencil, then she couldn’t let go of the
paper before it was done. And then, it finishes with a signature down in the corner, and sometimes
they were different, but it was mostly one name. In the end, she found out that it [The spirit.]
wanted to show that he had been hanged from a tree, where it showed the face and who he was
and things inside the drawings that you had to spot. It was very creepy, I think. And she died of it
at last because she also got another illness.
I was interested as to Michael Banke’s own stance regarding this story, so I asked him about it at a
later point. Besides noting that this story ought to concern his grandfather’s sister rather than his
mother’s sister, Michael is inclined to believe – though not totally convinced – that this family
legend is true. He blends, he says, true stories about ghosts with what he sees as more traditional
tales in that he does not believe. This is an interesting example both of willingness to blend fact
with fiction – something we noted in our investigation of the White Lady – and of willingness to
believe in relatively-contemporary supernatural experiences but not necessarily in more distant
ones. Even Karoline Strand engages in this latter mindset, replying to question as to whether ghost
belief has changed over the centuries by saying, “Yes, I think that 200 years ago, a ghost was more
someone covered with a white sheet who stood around and haunted, right? I mean, really
superstitious. But today, a ghost’s someone who’s dead and rises again.” Such is the popular
conception of a superstitious and illogical past that even firm believers often disrespect previous
belief in the same phenomena.
Karoline tells me two other stories from Michael, one of which we will reproduce here since
Michael has since vouched for its truthfulness:
And then, I’ve heard, he’s also said that they [Michael and his wife.] were, actually, visiting
some of their friends on Ærø out on a farm at night. They [The friends.] had a girl who was
always so afraid of being there. She said that she didn’t dare sit upstairs in her room because she
thought she saw spirits. She told her mother and father that there was a man who watched her
every time she sat up there. They didn’t believe her and continued to say to her, “No, you go up
now. You’re fanaticizing.” But then, Michael and his wife, Kivi, were there, up in the attic
where she usually slept, and they experienced the same thing. So, they decided to get hold of a
shaman as quickly as possible, and they got hold of one, and then, it turned out that if they
hadn’t found out about it, then he, the spirit, could’ve killed someone.
This is one of the few first- or second-hand stories of a clearly aggressive spirit that I have heard on
the island, and although I would not say that Michael himself is a spiritualist, the evidence of a
spiritualist’s involvement is plain enough in the story. Whereas, in the past, experts might have
been required to lay ghosts, it did not usually take an expert to figure out a ghost’s identity or
motives. Today, even this skill seems to be the preserve of specialists.
Karoline tells me that she knows many young people who are afraid to sleep alone because of
ghosts, and this, combined with some of the other statements we have heard from Ærøese youths,
might make us suspect that local young people are less likely than adults to believe in ghosts who
have no purpose to their wanderings and do nothing besides act as perplexing poltergeists. As we
shall see, youths are also prone to engage in active attempts to contact the spirit world, something
that seems to be limited to spiritualists among adults. This is particularly strange since none of the
young people with whom I spoke hold spiritualist worldviews.
We noted before that present-day spiritualism is not a homogenous movement, and practitioners
partake of varying degrees of universal blissfulness. There are also hints – from Mai-Britt
Rosendale, for example – that the overall scheme of things is not necessarily infused with love and
that it is simply a matter of individual choice whether one will involve oneself with the negative as
well as the positive aspects of the spiritualist worldview. This differentiation in spiritualist
philosophies becomes even clearer when I speak with 44-year-old Anne Folting, a Marstal
psychologist. Anne is a spiritualist in the sense that she believes in a full-fledged spirit world, but
whereas the other spiritualists with whom I spoke have – even if they are unaware of the fact –
Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner as the primary influences behind their philosophy, Anne’s
spiritualism is a combination of Jungian psychoanalysis and the results of contemplating her own
experiences. This focus on psychological work has led Anne down a somewhat darker spiritualist
path than most of her peers.
Anne is the very vision of confidence and self-assurance. She speaks, rather disconcertingly, a
moderate Marstal dialect under the sway of a rapid, clipped Copenhagen accent. Although she is
always courteous, when she has something to say, she says it, and as far as interviews are
concerned, she seems to view my questions as obstacles that get in the way of her answers. While
we sit in her office, Anne describes the relationship between her beliefs and her work:
I’m not doubtful. And what I experience here when I work with people, these things happen.
deceased children, deceased people come to them. And give them advice and give them love,
and thus hope, right? When they ask them—. I say to them, “Ask your father what you should
do.” Then, just a few, particular sentences come. “Trust your heart.” “Watch out for your
children.” “Stay close to yourself.” And it offers these people great, great meaning. And they’re
touched, and they cry because of it. And they [The spirits.] depart, and so I say, “Where’ve they
gone?” And they say, “I don’t know, but now I know that he or she is with me and will always
be there.” So, once you’ve worked with people in this way, then I feel that you just can’t bring
yourself to say that these things don’t exist because it’s a part of it. It happens in this room all
the time. […] And they never believe it when they come in. There aren’t all that many who
believe that I can understand it. But when they realize that I say that it’s a natural part of it, it’s
completely like a natural part because I know, for example, that people can talk to their foetus.
[…] When I begin to tell them this sort of thing, then they understand that I’m also in agreement
that there’s much more than we can explain right now. Because we can’t explain all that much
right now.
This is not the place to get into a debate about the validity of psychoanalytic therapy, but Anne’s
description does little to allay one’s fears that there is a large element of suggestion at work in her
therapy. Now, I am in no position to say that there is anything wrong with a psychologist using
suggestion – that is, placing thoughts in clients’ minds – as a means of therapy. Indeed, if Anne’s
clients come to her knowing that she is a psychologist who specializes in spiritual problems, and
she is able to convince them that these are not problems after all, she has succeeded in her goal as a
therapist. We merely have to be careful about accepting Anne’s analysis of other people’s
experiences at face value; her descriptions, however, of the phenomenology of their experiences are
probably sound enough.
Anne mentions communication between a mother and her unborn child. This is, in fact, a field
in which Anne has done research, and it is a sign of how spiritualism and psychoanalysis can
sometimes coalesce. The sometimes-complimentary nature of these two fields is evident in Anne’s
statement that there exists a form of telepathy in children that is usually closed off once someone
reaches five years of age. Some people, however, hold open these telepathic parts of the mind. Anne
is one of these gifted – or rather, trained – individuals:
Anne Folting: So, I just know – and I experience it in my work – that when I get close to people
and sit and talk with them, then they tell me their messages without words. I suddenly get a
feeling that—. I just get the word grandmother inside of me. And so, I stop them and say, “Tell
me about your grandmother.” And then, they begin to cry. “How did you know? She hanged
herself.” “I didn’t know, but you told me. I felt it. It came to me.” And you can say that, if
you’ve worked with cars, then you get a good ear for hearing if there’s something wrong with
the motor. I sit here six hours a day, completely occupied with what people transmit. So, you
can say, I’ve gotten a sharper—. A satellite dish to perceive these things, but I truly think that
everyone has it. And if you use it, then it’s a means of communication.
Adam Grydehøj: Can you also feel it over long distances?
AF: I can sit in that chair where you’re sitting and people are lying down there [across the
room], and then I sense what’s going to happen.
AG: What about if it were 100 kilometres?
AF: I’ve experienced that some clients I’ve had have had some terrible nights. It’s the third,
fourth, fifth of May when they’ve been deeply disturbed and were nearly immersed in
nightmares and that sort of thing, right? Those three nights, I couldn’t sleep. I lay at home in my
bed and couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t understand what it was. But now, I’ve learned that when I
get nights like that, then I know that there’s one of my clients who’s having a bad night. And so,
I just sit and wait for who’s going to tell me, “Last Wednesday, I was in this mood.” And you
know what? These are things that I’ve experienced so strongly that I’ve gotten physical things
on me. […] There are some people who’ve begun to punish themselves, hit themselves, right?
And last Christmas, I got some attacks where I punished myself. And it was as if I thought,
“Now, I’m possessed by this or that” or “What’s happening here?” And I asked my clients, and
there was a client who does this, and she’d never told me about it. So, I went to supervision with
some other psychologists and said, “What should I do about this?” And they looked at me with
completely wild eyes. And I understood that I couldn’t use them. So, I found an old
psychologist who’s an educated shaman and goes up and lives in Lapland three months of the
year and lives and fasts and that sort of thing, right? And I can talk with her about it. Because
she experiences it too. But you don’t learn it at university. You don’t learn it. You don’t learn to
protect yourself from it. […]
AG: Can you sense things in the future? […]
AF: I experience sometimes that I think, “She’s going to be pregnant in three months, and it’s
really unfortunate with that man who she has.” And she’s pregnant within three months. And I
don’t know where it comes from. I have to say, yes, I can. […] Similarly, I don’t believe that
anything’s coincidental.
Many of Anne’s supernatural experiences represent telepathy. Her feeling of possession, for
example, is merely a sign of how sensitive she is to other people’s thoughts. This is clear in her
watershed experience with the supernatural:
My grandmother dies. I’m 14 years old at the time. And my mother’s over at the hospital when
she dies. And in my house, we don’t talk about this sort of thing. And my mother comes home,
and I can just remember that she was sad, but she didn’t cry because people didn’t cry. And she
says to me that I should go to bed because she has to go out and take care of something in my
grandmother’s house and clean up. And I’m just about to fall asleep, and then I wake up.
Because I had such a desire to find a headscarf and tie it around my chin and make a bow up
here [on the top of my head]. I just had such a desire to do it. So, I get up in the dark and turn on
the light – it was during the summer – and begin to root around in some boxes with winter
clothing. And find a sort of winter headscarf and tie it around as a bow. And I lie on my back
and fall asleep. And then, I wake up a few hours [later] with the light on and my mother just
screaming. And then, she hurries over and tugs that headscarf off. And so, she sits down on a
chair and begins to cry. I have no idea what’s happened. So, she says to me, “Are you aware
that Grandmother was so afraid to die that I had to leave the room? I couldn’t be together with
her. And when I came in and saw her again, they’d tied a headscarf around her chin, made a
bow. And it’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced. Why are you lying here with a headscarf
on?” I couldn’t explain it to her, but today, I can. I got a message because she was knotted up in
sorrow and couldn’t get out of it. And one way or another, it had to come out. And coming
home and finding her child in the same state as her mother who was dead, that’s what was
needed. First, she became outraged, and then she could become sad. And that’s how, I suddenly
experienced the impulse to do things, which – in one way or another – have a positive effect on
other people. And I believe, in reality, if you pay attention to your everyday life, then you’ll see
that we go and do that sort of thing for each other all the time. […] I view the Earth as the planet
of tests. We come in here, and we’re almost like pure beings when we’re born, and then we get
seven years in a childhood concerning which we use the rest of our lives to find out about the
patterns into which we’ve been placed.
It is unclear whether Anne’s childhood experience is an example of her having contact with
the dead or of her unconsciously using telepathy to discover her mother’s needs. This sort of
experience seems less common than premonitions, which Anne has also experienced. There is
little recorded tradition behind this sort of experience, and it is difficult to see why,
folklorically speaking, this event would occur. As it is not an omen, it does not fit into the
usual abilities of someone with second sight nor is it not conclusively a visit by the dead to
the living. Telepathy in general is a rather new concept. Traditionally, instances of mindreading were usually put down to some other folkloric agent. For example, a witch could find
out what someone else was thinking through the use of magic bequeathed upon them by some
supernatural being, and fairies could often do the same either through magic or simply by
being supernaturally observant.
Anne’s premonitions are more in line with history, and the following is just the sort of
thing that True Thomas might have predicted:
I’ve also had that experience of lying in that intermediate state and waiting, sort of just lying
and waiting. “What am I going to see now?” And then, a lot of people come onto a square.
Then, an airplane comes and does somersaults and everything, and then suddenly, it catches
fire, and it falls down. And a lot of people are burning. And then, I sort of wake up and think,
“What was that?” And the next day, I see on the front page of Ekstra Bladet [A Danish
newspaper.] that a performance airplane from Germany has crashed, and 40 people were killed
because it was on fire, right? And so, I sometimes think, I don’t know what sort of thing time is,
but it’s as if some people can be advanced in time, and then one sees some things that are going
to happen without, in the end, being able to do anything about it. I’ve experienced that sort of
thing. And I’ve also experienced it while in a waking state, sitting across from other people.
The disaster for which Anne reports an omen was, presumably, the 28 August 1988 accident in
which three Italian jets performing in an air show at Ramstein Air Force Base collided and crashed,
causing 70 deaths. Besides past tradition, this sort of vision is also known in popular culture,
figuring in numerous books and films. However, Anne also has experiences that are both traditional
and of a sort not widely discussed today:
Anne Folting: I once experienced when I’d just been hired at a school, and we were supposed to
– one of the first weeks – do some pedagogical work in small groups and discuss things, and I
didn’t really know who people were yet, but I was put together with six others because there
were supposed to be seven people in each group. And there were open-faced sandwiches there,
and we were supposed to start. I’m sitting across from a man, and all of a sudden, it happens.
We start the meeting at one o’clock in the afternoon. It’s still summer, right? Then, the pores in
his skin begin to open up. And I know full well that they aren’t doing that. My common sense
says that. But at the same time, I see something, that his pores are opening. And he begins to be
surrounded by a sort of yellow light, and it’s really, really ugly. So, I look out the window and
keep my eye on the big hall, out on the gymnastics hall. And the minutes go by, and I can just
see that it’s getting worse and worse, and when I look at him, his lips begin to fall off, and his
chin breaks up. And then, I just hear, “Watch out for yourself, Georg. Watch out for yourself,
Georg. Watch out for yourself, Georg.” And the experience lasted six minutes because I keep
my eye on the clock the whole time. And I lose my appetite. And I don’t know what his name
is, but it turns out that he’s named Georg. And so, during the rest of the meeting, I fight with the
thought of, “I ought to say to him, ‘You should watch out for yourself, Georg.’” Then, he’ll ask,
“Why do you say that?” Can I, then, tell him what I’ve seen? Will he think I’m crazy? He
doesn’t know me. Or will I make him incredibly afraid? So, I decided that I couldn’t do
anything. But I’m totally plagued with this. And I haven’t asked to experience it because it was
unpleasant. When I come home, I tell Christian [Anne’s husband.] about it. Because I think, “If
I’ve said it, then it won’t happen.” [...] The next day, we get to school, the vice headmaster
knocks on—. And he says he has a sad announcement. It concerns Georg. And I just get the
thought, “I don’t want to hear any more.” And [he] doesn’t know how he should explain it to us,
but his [Georg’s.] wife has said that one could say that Georg has almost started disintegrating.
And he uses the word disintegrating. He had, over the course of the night, gotten some – I never
asked about it – some form of fever or other, sort of as if his—. He began to deform. And we
never saw him again. He died four months later. So, he had to watch out for himself. But it was
this sort of thing I thought, “It was completely beyond of my control, and I couldn’t do
anything.” I believe that it’d already started inside of him. And I saw it, and I found out that he
had to watch out for himself. I didn’t have any idea what I should do about it. I didn’t know
how I should respond.
Adam Grydehøj: If it helps, on a historical level, then it doesn’t look like there’s anything—.
That there’s a possibility for this to happen, but more that it will happen.
AF: It’ll happen, right? Because I also saw […]—. I was on my way down to a lady to give
reflexology. And she had a farm, and she had some animals grazing in her bog. […] And [I’m]
cycling on my racer-bike, look up, and then I see a big, black shadow go towards the bog, and
then I just think, “Well, that was Death.” As if you think, “What did you just think? You
damned well didn’t think that it was Death!” And so, I just say, “I didn’t doubt it.” And so, I
drive down to her, and then I think, “I’d better say it because then it won’t be fulfilled.” So, I
say to her, “Do you know what, Lise, it’s a sort of strange sort of thing I’m saying now, but do
you know what? I saw Death go down into your bog.” And so, she laughs and sort of says,
“Well, really? Oh!” So, she says, “Won’t you just come with me and see what we’ve gotten
here?” It’d been a little while since I’d last been there. It’d been a few weeks before. And so, we
go down to the bog, and she’s in the process of pouring water up in a trough for her two, big
Hereford cattle. And they stand there and drink with their long tongues, and we poured all of
that water in, and the sun was shining and all of that, and they whip their tails, it’s filled with
flies. And so, we go in, and I give her reflexology, and when we’re done, then she says, “Damn
it, I’ve forgotten to turn off the water. Now, it’s just stood and gushed out.” She’s forgotten to
turn off the hose. So, I go out down there with her, and one of the cows is lying down dead.
AG: Why?
AF: One of the big cows they’d gotten is just lying by the water-trough with its tongue out of its
mouth and is dead. And we close the gate that leads in, and it’s totally warm. The tongue is
warm, and the body is warm, but it’s dead. And so, she says, “So, you did see Death.” And [I]
just sort of got uncomfortable and thought, “What was that about?” When her husband comes
home […], and he doesn’t believe in anything, then he says, “What’s wrong?” And she says,
“My reflexologist comes and says she saw Death.” And she hardly manages to say it before he
begins crying. And she’d seen him cry twice in their marriage. So, he then says, “I’m the one
who’s going to die, Lise.” “No,” she says. “you’re not. The Cow’s dead.” Precisely six weeks
go by, then he begins to walk around strangely in his house because he’s gotten some big brain
tumour or something. And he’s found by the police, he walks around way out on a road – it’s
there pressing on something –, and he’s operated on, and then he dies. So, it was a very strange
story. [Anne tells me of other premonitions she has had. ...] When it happened, then I prayed to
God and said, “I don’t want more experiences now.” Because I didn’t know what I should do
about them.
AG: And did it work?
AF: Yes. I haven’t had them since. Now, I can say, I have the small ones now.
Like so many with second sight, Anne wanted to be rid of it. Her prayer worked to an extent.
Traditionally, prayer seems to have been a means of dispensing with this double-edged gift:
Sure it is that persons that have a sense of God & religion, & may be presumed godly, ar known
to have this faculty [of second sight]. This evidently appears in that they ar troubled for having
it judging it a sin, & that it came from the devil & not from God, earnestly desiring & wishing
to be rid of it if possible, & to that effect have made application to their minister to pray to God
for them, that they might be exonered of that burthen. they have supplicated the presbytrie, who
judicially appointed publick prayers to be made in severall churches, & a sermon preached to
that purpose in their own parish church by their minister, & they have compeired befor the
pulpit, after sermon making confession openly of that sin with deep sense on their knees; &
renounced any such gift or faculty which they had, to God’s dishonour, and earnestly desired
the Minister & people to pray for them, & this their recantation recorded, & after this they were
never troubled with such a sight any more.536
Of course, Anne did not go to the same lengths as did people in Early Modern Scotland, but then
again, she never believed second sight to be a thing of the Devil. The idea that omens often take the
form of “hallucinations” that overlay a certain person or place is not well-known today, but this is
the traditional form that second sight – at least so far as it was recorded in Northern Europe – takes.
Anne’s experience with Georg is, then, no different than that recorded regarding 17th Century
Scottish seers:
The men with the second sight see a man with a light like the light of the glowworm, or with
fish [scales] over his hair and clothes, if he is to be drowned; bloody, if he is to be wounded; in
a shroud if he is to die in his bed; with his sweetheart on his right hand if he is to marry [her],
but on his left hand if he is not to win his sweetheart.537
This kind of small-scale prophecy has been relatively ignored in the mass media. Unlike most
spiritualists, Anne has not even read pop folklore books; she has experienced very traditional
phenomena with no prior knowledge whatsoever.
Anne has too many interesting stories for us to mention here, many quite frightening and
involving what seems to be sleep paralysis, or the folkloric nightmare. Since she does not seem to
go by the usual spiritualist interpretations of these events, I ask:
Adam Grydehøj: When we’re talking about things like the nightmare or even your second sight,
which had completely different explanations a long time ago than they do today, and something
like social fairies, for example— What would your explanation be today for fairies? […]
Anne Folting: I mean, I don’t know. I’ve lived in a forest for six years over in Sorø [on
Zealand]. And I’d never been in the vicinity of a forest because there isn’t forest here [on Ærø].
The atmosphere in a forest is a completely different atmosphere than on open land. For me, I
always think of the fairies [elverfolk] as the light that lives—. I mean, like some light-folk who
are in between the trees. […] Around the ferns and so on. And it’s very funny because horses
react to particular stones. […] They get unbelievably frightened.
AG: Of particular stones?
AF: For example, up in the forest, there were three different stones along the forest-paths with
sort of moss on them, right? All of the horses I’ve taken up there, also when I got a little foal,
have stood there [Anne makes puffing noises.], flaring their nostrils, and I seriously knew that
they were scared and took a large arc around this stone. The strange thing is, on one of the
stones, that when my little son began to speak, then he says to me one day, “Mum, what is it
with that stone?” “What do you mean?” “Yeah, those people who are by that stone?” And I just
thought, “What is he seeing?” Because it’s clear that horses see something. It’s not that he—. I
couldn’t explain it. I believe that the fairies are in the vibration or atmosphere around the forest.
There’s an unbelievably great sense of troubledness.
AG: What about, let’s say, hill-folk [bjergfolk; a synonym for social fairies] or those beings
people said lived here on Ærø? […] Are they nature-spirits or just another type of being?
Because the way that you describe them is completely different than most spiritualists describe
it. […]
AF: They’re just there. They live there. I have no doubt about it. I definitely don’t. And there
are some places here on the island around the town [Marstal.] that I feel are… That I feel are
unpleasant. I mean, where I don’t feel there’s a good atmosphere. And I don’t know what’s been
there. I don’t know what people have thought in those areas. […] I feel on Ærø that there are
basically – if you talk about supernatural things –, then there are basically nice things out in
nature. When I ride a horse or go walking by myself, then I feel that it’s nice. In Sorø, in some
parts of that forest I lived in, it was decidedly unpleasant there. And I had dreams at night about
some of those unpleasant places. And one of these places that I didn’t like, my dog always got
afraid there. You can, of course, say that it’s because it can sense that I’m scared. […] And then,
one day when I was on a guided walk, then I learned that one of those big stones lying there,
it’d been a sacrifice stone. That people had, actually, sacrificed on it. And I don’t know what
people sacrificed. But then, you can say that I’d almost believe that if you went for a walk in the
forest, then you could sense the unpleasant parts of the forest. It was a different unpleasantness
than those fairies or light-beings. It’s something completely different. It’s unpleasantness that
lives in that forest, which is light, right? Whereas on Ærø, I feel there are some places where I
feel it’s ugly, but otherwise, I feel the nature here is generally friendly. Then, there are some
houses and some places in town where I feel it’s very unpleasant.
No other spiritualist with whom I spoke has such ambivalent views about fairies. Anne might
connect the beings with the old gods, but she does not, in any case, view them as part of the cosmic
machinery.
Anne Folting’s mindset is not traditional. Still, traditional mindsets are not solely the result of
growing up and living “traditionally,” for there are others who have come by their belief in fairies
through some combination of experience and learning. One of these seems to be the former radio
historian, Jesper Groth. As we have noted, Jesper denies belief in the supernatural, but he, like the
next contributor we shall consider, plays with his words, giving what I consider to be purposeful
hints of his belief while being unwilling to admit it. With some contributors, this is simply a sign of
embarrassment; with Jesper, however, it is a sign that he views the supernatural unconventionally.
In the example that we saw earlier, Jesper describes the Death-horse as “an especially scary horse
with three legs. It’s been a horse that warns of misfortune. And it’s, you know, because of it that I
don’t go down there [to Rise Mark] to meet that horse without a head.”
This is not the only evidence of Jesper’s belief. Jesper hints at it again when telling me how he
knows a certain Ærøese fairy story. Jesper occasionally interjects a sentence in English, and these
have been marked in italics in the quotes below:
Jesper Groth: It’s common Ærøese knowledge. At least, when I was a child, people knew it.
And it’s in Hübertz’s Description of Ærø. […] This story is deeply serious for me. It shows that
you shouldn’t fight against those forces with which you don’t have a completely rational
relationship. I mean, those forces that exist down in the earth or… You can interpret this story
as a modern ecological story. If you don’t respect the earth’s resources but misuse them, and
you don’t keep the agreement with those who live beneath the earth, then you’re going to be
hurt, right? […] There are a lot of subterranean forces that you have to watch out for on Ærø of
course. I have on... In a road between my fields, I have a horse that walks around without a head
in the middle of the night. I don’t go down there at night when it’s there. It’s down there, the
horse. It walks around there without a head.
Adam Grydehøj: Is it still there?
JG: Yeah, it must still be there. I haven’t heard that it was supposed to have stopped doing it in
any case. It was down there… It was a place where the skinner… The skinner, he went around
and hanged folk all the time. The last person who was executed here on Ærø was in 1714. The
skinner couldn’t live off of that, so that’s why he lived off of skinning dead animals. If there
was a horse that was dead, then it was skinned by the skinner. […] It’s in the crossroads of
Østermarksvej and Møllesøvej [just northwest of Drejet] where the horse walks around without
a head.
AG: And when was the last time someone saw it?
JG: I don’t know, but I always avoid seeing it because I don’t think that one should go down
and see that sort of thing.
AG: Do you believe in the horse?
JG: Of course not. I don’t go down there. I never go down there. It’s a story. But many of these
stories, you act upon them. You don’t believe in it, but you act in some way according to those
stories.
AG: Is it the same with hill-folk with you?
JG: Yes, of course. I don’t believe in it. If you’re asking me if I believe in it, then I say, “No.”
[…] Now, you live in Marstal, right? And the Marstallers, really, are superstitious like nothing
else. Out here… Marstallers, there are things they never do. An old Marstaller, he doesn’t start
anything on a Monday. The Marstallers are controlled by things they can’t… That which one
calls “superstition”, right? I mean, when people get together… When you do specific things in
connection with the construction of a house, then it’s superstition, right? Then, it’s because
you’d like to have a good relationship with these supernatural beings.538
It is difficult to get to grips with Jesper’s ideas. The key lies in Jesper’s statement that “It’s a story.
But many of these stories, you act upon them. You don’t believe in it, but you act in some way
according to those stories.” While it is fair enough for a nonbeliever to say that other people often
act on their superstitions, one cannot very well speak of a nonbeliever acting on his own
superstitions. This is, obviously, no insult to Jesper, but it may be reasonable to suggest that his
explanation of his own non-belief rests upon a redefinition of belief. Indeed, we shall see that when
Jesper speaks of the headless horse, he seems to be of the opinion that this being is at once real and
merely a symbol for something else. It may also be that Jesper, as a historian, recognizes the
influence of culture and upbringing, understands that his unwillingness to go down to the crossroads
at night is a result of something more than apparently-incredible tales of a headless horse.
Jesper’s belief – or whatever it ought to be called – is historically and philosophically informed.
Jesper speaks of the skinner, the same unfortunate character involved in Poul Erik Jensen’s ghost
explanation, an explanation that Poul Erik received, we must recall, from Jesper. It was,
incidentally, certainly Poul Erik’s assumption that Jesper believed in this particular ghost. There
has, however, been an error in transmission from Jesper to Poul Erik, for Jesper states that the last
execution on Ærø took place in 1714 whereas Poul Erik places the event in 1772. Jesper is correct
in this instance, but there is a further complication since the key to Poul Erik’s version of the story
is that the husband and wife who were executed were found to have been innocent of the murder in
question not long afterwards. Either this is a mistake on Jesper’s part or on Poul Erik’s since
Hübertz writes of the case:
Of true murder, I have only found one example. Namely, crofter Anders Christensen in Torup
[in Rise Parish], who [in], 1714 as agreed to by his wife, killed their farmhand, in whom they
intended to find money, in which expectation they were, though, disappointed. They were both
executed on the gallows hill by Lille Rise.539
How, precisely, the skinner is related to the headless horse is not easy to ascertain. Is this a horse
that the skinner skinned? Or might we guess, from the context, that the skinner haunts the area in
the form of one of the beasts he killed?
Whatever Jesper’s belief or disbelief in something as concrete as this horse without a head, he
makes it fairly clear that he believes in something, and his denial of belief seems to stem from the
fact that he views this ghost horse and the fairies as symbols for the mysterious powers of nature.
Of course, talk of nature’s mysterious powers immediately makes us think of spiritualism, and
although Jesper’s description of the headless horse is not at all along the lines of the unvaryingly
positive worldview proclaimed by, say, Marijanne Meyer, his philosophy would be familiar to her.
The possibility that Jesper’s belief is symbolic is strengthened when he continues with:
When people, for example, make sure that food and drink is set up in the attic for the brownie
on Christmas Eve. And it disappeared, and it was the cat or the mouse in the attic that’s taken it.
But I mean, it tells me something about how people should make sure to save something for
some beings or forces that people can’t really control. The entire brownie belief is in conflict
with the modern efficiency theory. A modern, efficient person, he won’t answer this, right?
Because people calculate everything, and the certainty of natural science, it’s taken over
everything. And everything about brownies and trolls and mermaids and dwarfs and whatever,
about things that have something to do with irrationality, that which we don’t know but we have
to pay attention to, right? If someone – sort of as a modern, rational person – believes he can
calculate everything… You have a field here. Then, you have some pesticides. And then, some
manure. And you treat this field according to all of science’s directions. Then, there’s still
something you didn’t reckon with. And it’s that which is represented by the brownie and the
subterraneans and the forces that crop up. These hill-lads, social fairies, and so on I view as an
image of the forces man can’t lord over. So, in that sense, then I believe in it. I don’t believe
that the human rationality is… I don’t believe that because we’ve read a thick book that we’ve
figured it all out. 250 years ago, the foremost agronomists in the world believe, they believed
that the plants ate the soil. When grain grows, how should one explain it? […] People meant it
back then, and it was the most-advanced science that held it. So, you can take these forces with
brownies and trolls and social fairies, and so on as an expression for [the concept that] people
haven’t figured out the entirety of existence. And of course, it’s a load of bull, but you have to
respect that you don’t know everything here in the world. […] These forces, I mean, fairies and
all of that, it’s something you have to take seriously, right? You can’t do whatever you want.
You always have to respect that there are some forces people haven’t understood. You’ll make
yourself into a god if you believe that you’ve figured out all of the forces and everything in the
entire world. There’s something or other you need to bow before because there’s something you
don’t know. We know we’ll die one day. We know that. And many people believe in something
or other, and it’s not as if you have a tried and tested theology, but there’s something that you
can never explain. You can’t explain everything.
Jesper might, more than anything, a seeker after an alternative to the rational worldview, and it
could be that even though he cannot bring himself to fully believe in supernatural beings, he has
decided to live his life as though he does. An interesting counterpoint to this is that many
sympathetic folklorists and non-folklorists assume that people have always viewed fairies
symbolically. This reasoning might be a result of misinformation naively propagated by the
spiritualist community, might be wishful thinking on the part of people who need to find an excuse
for Christians having once believed in fairies, or might be a means of seeing one’s ancestors as
close to nature without seeing them as being delusional.
We have had occasion to mention Dion Abrahamsen before, as is fitting considering that, until
his death, he was almost universally considered to be Ærø’s folklore expert. Prior to meeting Dion,
I had been told that he believed in both brownies and social fairies, but the contributor who
informed me of this corrected his statement the next time I saw him: He had spoken with Dion
about it, and Dion claimed only to believe in social fairies, not brownies. When I spoke with Dion
myself, he told me about his experience with a film crew making a television programme
concerning Ærøese folklore. One day, they were filming at an exposed burial mound:
While he [The camera man.] is filming, then he can’t have his wedding ring on, so he takes it
off and sets it on the camera […]. So, we finish shooting, and when he comes back to get the
camera, then the gold’s gone. There hadn’t been anyone at all in the vicinity. It was gone. It
puzzled us a lot, and we searched and we searched and we searched. And the filming, it lasted
14 days. We were out every evening after we’d filmed some place of other in order to search
within a larger and larger distance from that burial mound. Now, it’s the way of the
subterraneans, they always bring back things when they’ve used them. They come in the houses
and fetch what they need to use, and then they come and deliver something back. When you
couldn’t find something, then you always said, “The subterraneans have taken it. It’ll come back
for sure.” […] We agreed that we should make a deal with the subterraneans. It was the day he
was going home. He had to go home and celebrate his 25th anniversary, and it would’ve been
embarrassing if he hadn’t had his ring on. But there wasn’t really anything to do. Now, luckily,
I’m also an archaeologist. I have a metal detector. I’d tried it before, of course, but we agreed to
give a sacrifice of white flour to these subterraneans. So, we threw it in the burial mound, and
then we walked once around the mound with my detector. Not 12 seconds went by before I
found it even though we’d searched for 14 days in precisely the same place. […] It got me
speculating over whether it could, really, be that there were… That I could, I mean, really, be
convinced that these peculiar… I don’t do it, because I’m not superstitious, but the story is,
really, very sweet.
Dion comes close to telling me that he is a believer but does not quite go all the way. Unlike Jesper
Groth, I do not get the impression that Dion is simply choosing his words carefully. For him, the
statement of disbelief is just a way of playing it safe. This is interesting enough in itself, suggesting
that Dion’s professions of belief have previously been negatively received but that he still does not
wish to conceal it entirely. This is also evident when he says:
Dion Abrahamsen: Now there’ve been so many popular television programmes about
superstition and that sort of thing. It’s increasing incrementally if you think of how many people
believe in ghosts. 5%? […] There’s more between Heaven and Earth. There’s no doubt about
that. […] I’ve personally had contact with some of my deceased [relatives], a very few times.
And since my childhood, I could communicate with my mother over long distances, I mean,
thought transference. When I was in school two kilometres away, and she lacked something or
other, then she just needed to think. Then, I drove in and bought a pound of minced meat or
some milk or whatever it was she’d thought I should bring home. It didn’t puzzle me. I mean, it
was completely natural. It’s the same now. I don’t believe it’s unnatural. […] I lived in
Copenhagen. My mother was hospitalized in Århus [in Jutland] with cancer. We were eating
lunch. Precisely the same second she died, I broke down. I was shocked. So, ten minutes went
by, then they call from the hospital in Århus to say that she had departed in death. I say, “I damn
well know that.” So, I call my brother, who lives on Greenland and say that she was dead. He
says, “I know. I’ve just felt it.” We had a very close relationship in that way. Why, I mean, it
wasn’t something that puzzled us or something we talked about. It was just completely normal.
Everyone must have that ability in one way or another. But whether they believe in it, I don’t
know about that. And directly concerning ghosts, I don’t believe in it. That is to say, we have a
man at home who comes every so often. The cat gets so scared then. And he comes, and we can
hear his wooden shoes, and he sets them outside the door and goes in a door that hasn’t been
used in over 100 years. And then, we don’t hear him anymore. It doesn’t trouble us. The cat gets
scared, but we’re indifferent.
Adam Grydehøj: Have you tried to find out who he is and why he’s there?
DA: As long as he doesn’t do anything… It’s not someone who complains about something or
does strange things. It’s just that he comes walking up over the gravel drive, sets his wooden
shoes down, and goes in through a door that’s bricked up. We don’t hear anything else. And it’s
gone on like that for 20 years. And it’s just once a year that he comes. […] But I mean, I don’t
believe in that ghost except for that it comes. It’d be quite welcome; I just don’t believe in
ghosts. It’s hard to explain.
Are we to understand Dion as saying that he believes in the ghost who comes to his house only
when it comes to his house? His faith in premonitions and omens is beyond debate, and the sort of
humdrum telepathy he experienced as a child resembles that reported by Palle Abramson as an
adult.
In common with most believers, however, there are places in which Dion firmly draws a line
between what is possible and what is simply a matter of fiction: He sees mermaids as a Hans
Christian Andersen invention, gives the usual naturalistic explanation for will-o’-the-wisps, and
thinks that kelpie traditions were limited to Norway. It is not always so easy though to discover
where Dion’s belief starts and stops, as when he speaks about witches:
We still believe in witches here on Ærø. We have four or five left. It’s the exciting thing about
an island community, that they believe in witches. And they are, as a rule, very peaceful, wise,
and sensible folk, but when the old people meet this sort of person, they turn their backs to them
so that they can’t see them. Or also, they have, in the village of Ommel, they sort of have some
pieces of steel on the door threshold. Witches can’t cross it. Old people still believe in it. The
last witch trial in Denmark, it was here on Ærø in the 1950s. As late as that, it was still brought
before the court. And he was convicted of being a witch because he could talk with birds, and
he could do the one thing and the other. When he died, he was in a nursing home. His daughter
came and was extremely shocked that the employees had set lit tea candles down under his bed
because they also believed that he was a witch. This is, you know, in the ’70s. It’s unbelievable.
There are, occasionally, witch’s sabbaths, or witch-meetings. There are, among others, two of
them who got divorced because their husbands found out that they held these meetings down in
Drej Forest, among other places. They still exist. And one of them is in possession of Cyprianus
[The Black Book; a spellbook]. I’ve had the opportunity to see it.
Part of the complexity here is that, according to Dion, there are people today who believe
themselves to be witches, and there are also many elderly people who are inclined to agree with
them. Whether or not Dion thinks that these witches have any true powers is another issue.
Considering Dion’s propensity to give folkloric information that is not entirely factual, one
might suspect that his account of a 1950s witch trial is but an imaginative fiction. Amazingly, his
account is not entirely off. The witch in question is Carl Wilhelm Goldmann. Anna Hansen’s
amateurish but useful book about the supernatural folklore of Ærø relates Goldmann’s story:
In 1937, there is a witch trial going on at the court in Ærøskøbing.
A man, who lives in this town, has needed to bring a case before the courts in order to clear
himself of guilt for having killed the parish bailiff in Ommel with his witch-arts and for
constantly causing accidents with his “evil eye.” […] His ancestors had immigrated from the
south and were very poor. “The witch’s” mother thus went around and sold rusks.
How could it come to the point where her son had been construed as a witch? Certainly, it
was just a bad coincidence at fault that, for example, she had come into a house precisely at that
moment when the man had gotten a toothache. Of course, it was that poor crone who had done
it.
She had now been singled out as a witch and thereby her entire family.
“The witch’s” father was not superstitious in the least. When the boy drew a cross with
chalk on the street, it was in order to make the witch walk around it since witches are scared of
chalk-lines and steel. —But “the witch’s” father walked over the children’s artwork
unconcerned— This means, that he was not a witch. When the young lads made a detour so as
not to go by the graveyard, where they believed the dead’s spirits roamed, he walked cavalierly
over it. This means, when he was not scared, he was a witch who was in collusion with ghosts
and revenants in the graveyard. The evidence about the family was, then, good enough. “The
witch” was a friend of the animals. Once, a pair of large chicks fell out of their nest, and “the
witch” took them into his care and fed them. They became so tame that they hopped around in
his living room and ate out of his hand, and if he walked in the street, they followed after him.
— This means, yet another piece of evidence: When he had so great a power over a pair of baby
birds, he must be a witch.
One day, Broby-Johansen [A famous Danish artist, poet, and communist.] came and visited
“the witch’s” little home. He had heard about the strange witch trial and wanted to know what
the deal was.
The old man and his daughter welcomed Broby-Johansen with great friendliness and told
him, calm and composed, about the many difficulties he and his family had been made to bear –
but as these, however, had lately lessened –, everything went a bit better. But here, he was
contradicted by his son-in-law, who had just come home from work. “No, father-in-law,” he
said: “I’d just like to say that when you were down at the harbour yesterday, and the dog had
run out on one of the boats, and you were just about to go out after it, the skipper said
afterwards, that if you had gone out on the boat, he would not have sailed on it anymore.”
Broby asks if he [The witch.] is not bothered by it, and the answer is: “Yeah, I do. It’s not
funny, you know, not being to go down the street, without people spitting and making the cross
in front of themselves. Of the two legal cases I’ve been through, the first was the worst. Once, at
an auction, I was supposed to have stood next to a woman whose neck was tilted when she got
home. It must have been me, then, whose fault it was. When I met her on the street, she halted
and spit on me, and when I asked her why she did it, she answered: “You are a witch, and one
has to guard oneself against that!”
In the next legal case, then “the witch” was placed before the court as a murderer. The local
parish bailiff died suddenly of a stroke. His wife claimed that the accused had strewn a white
powder on their rhubarbs— Poison, of course, that would kill instantly.
“Who was most hostile to you?” asked Broby. The answer sounded: “It was definitely the
missionaries!”540
Anna Hansen’s amateur folklore writing is, in itself, instructive. She has read the source
material for this particular case but knows nothing about folk belief in witches in general.
Such is the fate of folklore writing: Since it belongs to the folk everyone feels qualified to
write about it. As we saw earlier, witch belief was rarely a one-way street, and people who
were accused of being witches usually played a role in cultivating this belief. Such may have
not been the case with Goldmann himself, but the reason why so many beggars and door-todoor sellers like his mother bore the brunt of these accusations is that, as long as a tide of
enmity did not turn against them, a reputation for uncanny skills could be a profitable. Fear of
negative witchcraft and desire to benefit from positive witchcraft was empowering for those
impoverished individuals who had to rely on others’ generosity. One can, of course, stretch
this point too far, and it is obvious that in mass, localized witch hunts like that in Salem,
Massachusetts, a good many perfectly innocent people were caught up in the frenzy. It is,
however, a sign of misunderstanding of historical context to see pre-industrial society as
mindless and illogical.
The magical book, Cyprianus, which Dion Abrahamsen says he has been shown by a
witch, is a frequent element in Scandinavian witch folklore. Its name comes from its
purported author, the third-century St Cyprian, another sign that – for the commoners at least
– the d