Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/400

 THE CORPSE-DOOR: A DANISH SURVIVAL.

BY DR. H. F. FEILBERG.

{Read at Meeting, \<^th June, 1907.)

Almost a span of life has elapsed since I moved away from one of the far-stretching moorland parishes and returned to the west coast of Jutland, and to the people amongst whom I had passed my childhood.

The village was large and closely built, with old- fashioned low straw-thatched houses built of hard dark bricks cemented with clay, that appeared to creep close together, so as to offer as little resistance as possible to the storm, when it comes sweeping with all its might from over the North Sea.

One day, when the light happened to fall sharply on the gable-end of a house, I distinctly saw the outline on the wall of what looked like a bricked-up oven- door; and as it evidently was the outer wall of the best or company room, I wondered how that could be. So I went inside, and after greeting the people asked them if they had an oven in their best room. Oh no ! they said, it was not a baking oven, it was a " corpse-door." There were very few such left now, but in olden days it had been the custom that the coffin, which was always placed in the upper room, was carried out through this opening, which was bricked up again as soon as the procession had started for church, so that on their return