ABSTRACT
It is an early spring day in 1887. Evald Tang Kristensen-itinerant folklorist and occasional schoolteacherwanders into a small farming village near the eastern coast of Jutland in Denmark. He has come to hear stories and so this afternoon finds him in a ramshackle cottage with two local men, Mikkel Hansen and Jens Baek, who are well-known in the area as good story tellers. Mikkel and Jens, both weavers by trade, take turns talking, but they seem to be in competition with each other, each one trying to outdo the other with his stories. Here is one of the stories told that day:
North of here, out in the country a bit, a smith’s wife and their apprentice had become good friends. So they wanted to get the smith out of the way, and they come up with a simple plan of how to do away with him-the apprentice made a big nail and said he’d drive it into the man’s head. They did it too, while the smith was lying asleep. She held the nail and he hit with the hammer. It went quietly and well. Twenty years later, the same grave digger who’d dug the smith’s grave happened to dig him up again and found the head. Then the nail head could be seen, it was sticking up out of the skull. He thinks about the case a bit and remembers that the smith was buried there, so he goes to the parson and tells him what he’d discovered. He says, “Bring me the head,”—the parsonage lay in town close to the church. So the parson puts the head in his room and sends after the wife. “How long ago is it that your previous husband died?”—“Oh, it must be about a score years ago.”—“Is it so long ago? Could you recognize him if you saw him?”—“Yes, certainly.” Then the parson takes the cloth off the skull
and shows it to her. “Yes, that’s sure enough him,” she says. “How did it happen with that nail?” Yes, so she tells it all, and they were punished and were both executed, both the wife and the apprentice.1
