Part Five of Folk Tales of Denmark stays with the second gathering of Svend Grundtvig's Gamle danske Minder i Folkemunde, and with Vendsyssel in the north of Jutland. (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.)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The Princess on the Island (in Danish, Prindsessen paa Øen) — an English prince will marry no one but the Danish princess, and her father will not give her, though it should cost blood; so she is sent away to an island castle with seven maids, a little dog, and seven years' provisions, and the castle is walled up fast. When the seven years end, the king is slain and the prince holds the city; all that is left of the princess in her chamber is her ivory loom with its rollers of red gold, the web of birds and fishes and all kinds of beasts unfinished upon it — and the prince proclaims that whoever can weave the web to its end shall be his queen. Out on the island the provisions are eaten, and hunger comes into the walled castle: the seven maids, one after another, ask to be killed and eaten, and are, until the princess is alone with the little dog, and after it the rats and mice; and it is her own tongue that tells it, twice over, in the verses she speaks on the ride to church — for she comes home in rags to her father's kitchen, weaves the web down where the false bride could not, and rides to the wedding in the false bride's place on her own horse Blanke, who kneels at her voice. The tale is read here whole and as written: the story stands exactly as Lars Østrup told it, and as Grundtvig printed it in 1857. Nothing has been cut, nothing softened, and nothing added.
Chapters: 00:11 — The Princess on the Island
Source: Svend Grundtvig, Gamle danske Minder i Folkemunde (Old Danish Memories in the Mouths of the Folk), vol. II (Copenhagen, 1857), no. 308, "Prindsessen paa Øen" — told by the smallholder Lars Østrup of Hvedsted in Vendsyssel and recorded by the student Nik. Chr. Christensen. 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 6 of the Danish tales follows on this shelf.
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