Part Seven of Folk Tales of Denmark draws both of its tales from Svend Grundtvig's third gathering of Gamle danske Minder i Folkemunde (1861), recovered for this shelf from a public scan of the printed volume. (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. A third tale mapped with these two, The Clever Young Girl, still waits for its Danish leaves to be recovered, and will follow when they are.)
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The Deer Prince (in Danish, Hjorteprindsen) — a widower and a widow marry, and his beautiful daughter is envied by her stepmother. When something knocks at the door two evenings running, the stepmother's own daughter drives the visitor off with a broom-handle — a single clause of the telling, from which no harm comes, for the visitor is gone in the same breath — but the kind stepdaughter speaks gently to the poor buck at the door, and rides away on his back to a great castle, where she must live alone and may open no door: not the wooden door, not the copper door, not the iron door. Behind the doors she finds the castle's folk held in their enchantment — fellows stirring tar with their bare hands, girls raking a glowing fire with theirs — and her kindness, and a wisp of straw, set them and their prince free. The tale is read as written, down to its old ending: the envious mother and her daughter, quarrelling in the road, fly into flint — which is why, the tellers say, there are so many flint-stones.
The Little Girl and the Serpent (in Danish, Slangen og den lille Pige) — a little girl carries dinner to her father in the field, and finds a terribly great snake lying on his jacket. It will give up the jacket only if she comes back and sits on its back — and so she rides deep into the wood, past a castle shining like silver and a castle shining like gold, to a third that gleams like diamond, and takes service there. And in the evening there is a knock at her door: it is so cold outside, and the snake is freezing, and she thinks it a pity, and lets it in.
Chapters:
00:17 — The Deer Prince
07:54 — The Little Girl and the Serpent
Source: Svend Grundtvig, Gamle danske Minder i Folkemunde (Old Danish Memories in the Mouths of the Folk), vol. III (Copenhagen, 1861), no. 37, "Hjorteprindsen," from East Jutland; and no. 4, "Slangen og den lille Pige," from Bornholm, recorded by Frøken Elise Lindberg. 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 8 of the Danish tales follows on this shelf.
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