Episode Details

Part One opens Folk Tales of Denmark, our telling of the folk tales Svend Grundtvig collected from the mouths of the Danish people in the nineteenth century, in fresh translations made here from the Danish. The shelf opens with the most famous of them all, a tale from Vendsyssel in the north of Jutland. (The Danish tales are read here part by part, tale by tale — this is not the whole of Grundtvig's great gathering, and no completeness is claimed beyond what is read here.)

King Dragon (in Danish, Kong Lindorm) — a childless queen eats both the roses she was told she must choose between, and bears a lindworm, who lives under the bed and demands a bride. Two princesses are lost to him in the bridal chamber, each in the tale's own single summary clause, carried at the weight the telling gives it. Then a shepherd's daughter takes a wise woman's counsel into the wedding night: ten shifts against his nine skins, a tub of lye, a tub of sweet milk, and a bundle of switches — and the disenchantment is carried here exactly as the tale prescribes it. The forged letters of the Red Knight, the burning order the old queen refuses to carry out, and the swan and the crane on the mountain all stand as Maren Mathisdatter told them in 1854. One thing is not read here: the tale's closing retribution, the spiked barrel in which the Red Knight is punished, is left out whole, and the story goes on without it. Nothing else has been softened or added.

Chapters:

00:12 — King Dragon

Source: Svend Grundtvig, Gamle danske Minder i Folkemunde (Old Danish Memories in the Mouths of the Folk), vol. I (Copenhagen, 1854), no. 216, "Kong Lindorm" — told by Maren Mathisdatter of Furreby in Vendsyssel and recorded by Niels Levinsen. The English here is our own translation from the Danish, made for this shelf. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.

Thank you for listening — Part 2 of the Danish tales follows on this shelf.

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