Episode Details

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Part Three returns Folk Tales of Denmark to Svend Grundtvig's great gathering, and to Vendsyssel in the north of Jutland, the home of Maren Mathisdatter, the teller of Part One's King Dragon. (The Danish tales are read here part by part, tale by tale — this is not the whole of either collector's great gathering, and no completeness is claimed beyond what is read here.)

Ederland, the Poultry-Maid (in Danish, Ederland, Hønsepigen) — a dying mother leaves her two fine elder daughters everything she owns, and to the youngest, little Ederland, only a dough-pan, a broomstick, and an apron. In service at a manor she is made poultry-maid, and praised for her poultry, until her envious sisters tell the master she can fetch wonders: a candlestick that shines without light, a horse with bells on all four legs, a sow that stays as fat however much bacon is cut from it. Three times she sails to the trolls' island in the dough-pan, broomstick for mast and apron for sail, counselled at her dead mother's grave — and three times she comes home with the wonder, while the trolls' shouted reckoning follows her across the water: the old troll-mother pushed headfirst into the well, the old troll-father beheaded at his own block, his head laid in the bed with a nightcap on and his body in the soup kettle, and at the last the two sisters who sail to the island in their turn. The tale is read here whole and as written: the story stands exactly as Maren Mathisdatter told it, and as Grundtvig printed it in 1854. Nothing has been cut, nothing softened, and nothing added.

Chapters:

00:14 — Ederland, the Poultry-Maid

Source: Svend Grundtvig, Gamle danske Minder i Folkemunde (Old Danish Memories in the Mouths of the Folk), vol. I (Copenhagen, 1854), no. 248, "Ederland, Hønsepigen" — 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 4 of the Danish tales follows on this shelf.

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