Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/230

204 If their natural surroundings have tended to make the Western Jutlanders more given to folklore than the Eastern, the economic conditions were no less powerful in continuing the old traditions. The horizon was so narrowed by poverty that intellectual interests could only move within a very limited sphere, which was maintained with scarcely any expansion from one generation to another.

"When the poor mothers told stories or sang ballads to their children, to keep them awake, while they sat and knitted in the dark, or at most by the light of a smoking cruisie, these oral traditions became so imprinted in their minds that they were never forgotten. . . . Such stories, well told as they were, awoke the child's fancy when out with the sheep on the dreary moors or sitting in the little hut during the dark winter night. The results were important; these traditions contained a number of pictures which, although they did not belong to the actual daily world, were yet apprehended as real; and these fantastic figures were accepted as forms that had existed in the olden times. Everything was received with a childish faith and preserved by the child's living and accurate fancy. This explains the remarkable fact that not merely a few, but very many indeed, have asked me in all seriousness whether I believed that Nisses and Bergfolk and Elves existed, and I could see that they themselves had full belief in the real existence of such creatures."

Not only during these monotonous hours in the dark or dimly lighted huts were the old stories used to pass the time; they could be of service on all occasions when children had to be kept interested. Two touching examples of this may be quoted.

"Ivar Skade's wife in Tise (Salling)," says Kristensen, "told me in a most affecting fashion, how she when a child stood till far on in the night and worked the bellows for her father, who was famous for the hay-scythes he made. During the day he fished in the Fjord, and worked as a smith in the evening and the night time. He seldom got more than four hours' sleep, as he had a large family and was extremely poor. As soon as the children