Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/243

 Rh person is buried, they are sure that he or she will remain quiet in the grave.

"927. To prevent a dead person from 'going again,' the water in which the body has been washed must be poured outside the door after the corpse has been carried out; this water the dead person cannot cross.

"933. One can prevent a dead person from leaving the coffin by fixing it with pins of rowan-tree, but he cannot be prevented from coming out of the grave in the coffin. Many credible witnesses have at the hour of midnight met a coffin which came dumping along the road on one of its ends.

"935. Over that door by which a corpse has been carried out of a house, an old spinning wheel should be hung, for if the dead man walks again he cannot enter the house until he has gone round it as often as the wheel has run round on its axle."

There still remains a very important section of Kristensen's work to be dealt with, his various collections of Æventyr, or fairy-tales as we may call them, though many of them scarcely fall under this title. Denmark is especially rich in humourous stories, which sometimes are closely related to the fairy-tale, but often have only the mode of narration in common with these. Although Kristensen began to note down Æventyr in the early days of his collecting, the first three years did not supply any great stock of them. When he began to go further afield in 1871, he took up this department in earnest, and his tours during this and the following six years resulted in the accumulation of no fewer than 1,068 different versions. I have already mentioned the proposal which Grundtvig made to purchase these materials for his own use; and though Kristensen declined to part with his own property in this fashion, he left the field clear for Grundtvig until 1881, when a collection of Æventyr appeared as vol. v. of Jyske Folkeminder. The work thus begun has been continued in vols, vii., xii., and xiii. of the same series, containing in all some 260 Æventyr. The total number which he has actually written down is close on 1,900;