ABSTRACT
It is usually said that witch trials in Denmark stopped around the year 1700, and that the last witch-burning took place in Falster in 1693. Neither part of this statement is quite correct. The execution in Falster, when the witch was in fact beheaded before she was put to the stake, was the last public witch-burning in this country. Thirty years later an old woman was burned in a witch-lynching at Sailing. And insofar as the trials are concerned, witches continued to appear before the courts right up to the beginning of our own century, although as time went on they tended to be witch-trials “in reverse”, that is, the witch brought charges against the person who had accused him or her of witchcraft. Reports on the subject appear in copious detail in magazines and newspapers, but they invariably deal with individual cases and they are almost always accompanied by the writer's amazed comments on how such a thing could occur so long after “the era of witch-trials” The present article is an attempt to show how, when we collate these isolated cases, we can link “the era of witch-trials” in the 16th and 17th centuries with the era of folklore records of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time I wish to illustrate how the later trial material is often of greater ethnohistoric source value than the earlier records (previous to 1700), when the interrogations sought to confirm the witch-belief current at the time rather than to clarify the situation in the case in question. My material is chiefly limited to the references I have been able to find in the registers of the Danish Folklore Archives. If nothing else, despite its incompleteness, this essay may serve to show the results to be gained from searching for witch-trial records in our juridical archives from 1700 onwards, not to mention newspapers from the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
