Fairy Tales

THE FAMILY OF HEN-GRETHE

HEN-GRETHE WAS THE only resident human being in the handsome new house that was built for the hens and the ducks at the manor. It stood where the old knight’s castle had stood, with its tower, corbie-gabled roof, moat, and a drawbridge. Close by were overgrown trees and bushes. This was where the garden had been, which had stretched all the way down to a big lake that was now a swamp. Rooks, crows, and jackdaws flew screaming over the old trees—teeming flocks of birds. Shooting at them didn’t decrease their number at all, in fact, they seemed to increase. You could hear them from inside the henhouse, where Hen-Grethe sat with ducklings running across the toes of her wooden shoes. She knew every hen and every duck from the time it hatched. She was proud of her hens and ducks and proud of the fine house that had been built for them. Her little room was clean and neat. This was insisted upon by the lady of the manor to whom the henhouse belonged. She often brought fashionable and distinguished guests to show them “the barracks of the hens and ducks,” as she called it.

There was both a clothes closet and an easy chair. There was a chest of drawers, and on top of it was a shiny polished brass plate, engraved with the word “Grubbe.” That was the name of the old noble family that had lived in the castle. The brass plate had been found during the construction there, and the schoolteacher had said that it had no other value than as an old keepsake. The schoolteacher knew a lot about the place and about old times. He had knowledge from books, and there were so many things he had written up in his desk drawers. He had great knowledge of olden days. Maybe the oldest crow knew more about it and shouted it in his language, but that was Crocawish and the schoolmaster didn’t understand that, no matter how wise he was.

After a warm summer day a fog would rise from the swamp so that it looked like a whole lake lay out behind the old trees where the rooks, crows, and jackdaws flew. That’s how it had looked when the knight, Grubbe, had lived there and the old castle stood with its thick red brick walls. At that time the watchdog’s chain reached past the gate, and you came through the tower into the stone paved hallway that led to the rooms. The windows were narrow with small panes, even in the big hall where dances were held. By the time of the last Grubbe no one could remember the last dance, and yet there was still an old kettledrum lying there, that had been used for music making. There had been an elaborately carved cabinet in which rare flower bulbs were kept because Mrs. Grubbe had been fond of planting and cultivating trees and herbs. Her husband preferred riding out to shoot wolves and wild boar, and his little daughter Marie always accompanied him. At the age of five she sat proudly on her horse and looked around bravely with big black eyes. She enjoyed cracking the whip amongst the hunting dogs, but her father would rather she had cracked it at the peasant boys who came to watch the gentry.

The farmer in the earthen house close by had a son, Søren, the same age as the little noble maiden. He was good at climbing and always had to climb up in the trees to get bird nests for her. The birds screamed as loudly as they could, and one of the largest of them pecked him right over the eye so the blood streamed out. They thought the eye was lost at first, but it had not been injured. Marie Grubbe called him my Søren. That was a great favor, and it paid off for his father, poor Jon. One day he had done something wrong and was to be punished—he had to ride the wooden horse. It stood in the courtyard with four stakes for legs, and only one narrow plank for a back. Here Jon had to sit astraddle with some heavy bricks tied to his legs so he wouldn’t sit too lightly. He grimaced in pain, and Søren cried and begged little Marie for help. She immediately ordered that Søren’s father be let down, and when they didn’t obey her, she stamped her feet on the stone bridge and pulled at her father’s sleeve so it ripped. She wanted what she wanted, and she got her way. Søren’s father was allowed to get down.

Mrs. Grubbe had come up, stroked her little daughter across her hair and looked at her with gentle eyes, but Marie didn’t understand why.

She wanted to go with the hunting dogs, and not with her mother, who went into the garden and down towards the lake where white and yellow water lilies were in bloom, and cat tails and flowering rushes waved amongst the reeds. “How lovely,” she said as she looked at the lush freshness. In the garden stood a tree that she had planted herself, a rare one at that time. It was a copper beech, and with its dark brown leaves, it stood like a kind of negro among the other trees. It needed strong sunlight, otherwise in constant shade it would turn green like the other trees and thereby lose its distinctiveness. There were many bird nests in the tall chestnuts and also in the bushes and grass. It was as if the birds knew that they were safe there where no one dared shoot off a gun.

Little Marie came into the garden with Søren one day. We know he could climb, and he collected both eggs and downy baby birds. The birds flew in fear and terror, small and big alike! The plovers in the meadow, and rooks, crows, and jackdaws from the treetops shrieked and shrieked. It’s a cry that they have to this day.

“What are you children doing?!” shouted the gentle mistress. “These are ungodly acts!”

Søren was down-hearted, and the little noble maiden also looked away a little, but then said shortly and sullenly, “I have permission from father.”

“Away! Away!” cried the big black birds and flew, but they came back the next day for that was their home.

But the quiet, gentle mistress wasn’t at home there for long. Our Lord called her to him, and there she was also more at home than at the manor. Stately church bells rang out as her body was driven to the church. Many poor men’s eyes were misty because she had been good to them.

When she was gone, no one took care of her plants, and the garden fell into decay.

It was said that Master Grubbe was a hard man, but his daughter, young as she was, could cope with him. He had to laugh, and she got her way. She was twelve years old now, big and strong, and her black eyes pierced right through people. She rode her horse like a man, and shot her gun like an experienced hunter.

One day a great and most distinguished company came to that part of the country. It was the young king and his friend and half-brother, Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve. They were hunting wild boar and would stay at Sir Grubbe’s castle for the day and night.

Gyldenløve sat beside Marie Grubbe at the table. He turned her head and gave her a kiss, as if they were relatives, but she slapped him and said that she couldn’t stand him. Everyone laughed a lot at that, as if it were very entertaining.

And perhaps it was at that because five years later, when Marie had turned seventeen, a messenger brought a letter. Mr. Gyldenløve asked for the noble maiden’s hand. That was something!

“He is the most distinguished and courteous man in the kingdom,” said the squire. “This can’t be rejected.”

“I don’t care much for him,” said Marie Grubbe, but she didn’t reject the country’s most distinguished man, who sat by the side of the king.

Silver, woolens, and linens were sent by ship to Copenhagen. She made the journey by land in ten days. The trousseau met head winds or no wind, and four months passed before it arrived. When it did, Mrs. Glydenløve was gone.

“I’d rather lie on coarse canvas than in his silk bed!” she said. “I’d rather walk barefoot than drive with him in the coach!”

Late one evening in November two women came riding into Aarhus. It was Glydenløve’s wife, Marie Grubbe, and her maid. They had come from Veile, where they had arrived by ship from Copenhagen. They rode up to Sir Grubbe’s brick walled villa. He was not happy about this visit and had angry words for her, but he gave her a chamber in which to sleep. In the morning she got sweet porridge but not sweet words. She was not used to having her father’s evil temper turned towards her, but since she didn’t have a mild temperament, she gave as good as she got. She talked back to him and spoke with bitterness and hatred about her husband. She didn’t want to live with him—She was too decent and respectable for that.

A year passed, and it did not pass pleasantly. Harsh words were exchanged between father and daughter, and that should never happen. Harsh words bear harsh fruit. How would this end?

“We two can’t remain under one roof,” her father said one day. “Move out to our old castle, but bite your tongue off before you start spreading lies!”

So the two parted. She moved with her maid out to the old castle where she had been born and grown up, and where her quiet pious mother lay in the burial chamber of the church. An old cattle herder lived on the property, but he was the only servant. There were cobwebs hanging in the rooms, black and heavy with dust. The garden was growing wild. Hops vines and bindweed twisted nets between trees and bushes, and hemlock and nettles grew bigger and spread. The copper beech was overgrown and standing in shade. Its leaves were now as green as the other ordinary trees, and its days of splendor were past. Teeming flocks of rooks, crows, and jackdaws flew over the tall chestnut trees. There was screaming and shrieking as if they really had news to tell each other. Now she was back, the little one who, with her friend, had stolen their eggs and young ones. The thief himself, who had done the stealing, had become a sailor. He sat on the high mast and received a flogging when he didn’t behave himself.

All of this was told by the schoolmaster in our own time. He had collected and gathered it together from books and notes. It all lay hidden away in the drawer with many other writings.

“Rise and fall is the way of the world,” he said. “It’s a strange story.” And we do want to hear what happened to Marie Grubbe, but we mustn’t forget Hen-Grethe. She’s sitting in her fine henhouse in our own time. Marie Grubbe sat here in her time, but with a different disposition than old Hen-Grethe’s.

The winter passed, spring and summer too, and then the blustery autumn came again with clammy, cold fogs from the sea. It was a lonely life, a boring life there in the castle.

Marie Grubbe took her gun and went out on the heath. She shot hares and foxes and whatever birds she could hit. More than once she met the nobleman Palle Dyre from Nørrebœk, who was also out with his gun and dogs. He was big and strong, and he boasted about that when they spoke together. He could have measured up to the deceased Mr. Brockenhuus from Egeskov in Fyn, whose strength was legendary. Palle Dyre had followed his example and had had an iron chain fastened to the top of his entrance portal. It had a hunting horn attached to it, and when he rode home through the gate, he grabbed the chain and lifted himself and his horse off the ground and blew the horn.

“Come see for yourself, Mrs. Marie,” he said. “There’s fresh air at Nørrebæk!”

It’s not recorded when she moved to his manor, but engravings on the candlesticks in Nørrebœk church say they were gifts of Palle Dyre and Marie Grubbe of Nørrebœk.

Palle Dyre had a big body and brute strength. He drank like a sponge and was like a barrel that could never be filled. He snored like a whole pen full of pigs and was red and puffy looking.

“He’s cunning and mischievous!” said Mrs. Palle Dyre, Grubbe’s daughter. She was soon bored with that life, but that didn’t help.

One day the table was set, and the food was getting cold. Palle Dyre was out hunting fox, and his wife was nowhere to be found. Palle Dyre came home about midnight, but Mrs. Dyre came neither at midnight nor in the morning. She had turned her back on Nørrebæk and had ridden away without so much as a word.

The weather was grey and wet. A cold wind was blowing, and a flock of black screaming birds flew over her, but they were not as homeless as she was. First she rode south, to the German border. She sold a pair of gold rings with precious stones and then headed towards the east. Then she turned and went west again. She had no goal, and was angry with everyone, even gracious God, so miserable was her spirit. Soon her body became so as well, and she could hardly lift her foot. The plover flew up from its tuft when she stumbled over it, and cried as it always cries: “Raah-ber raah-ber.” She had never stolen anything, but she had had eggs and young birds brought to her from tuft and tree when she was a little girl. She thought about that now.

From where she lay she could see the sand dunes. Fishermen lived over there on the shore, but she was too sick to reach them. The big white seagulls came flying over her and cried like the rooks, crows, and jackdaws cried over the garden at home. The birds flew quite close to her, and at last it seemed to her that they appeared coal black, but then everything went black for her.

When she opened her eyes again, she was being lifted and carried. A big, strong fellow had her in his arms. She looked right into his bearded face, and saw that he had a scar over his eye so that it looked like his eyebrow was divided into two parts. He carried her, as miserable as she was, to the ship, where he got angry words from the captain for his actions.

The next day the ship sailed. Marie Grubbe had not come ashore. Indeed, she was taken along. But did she come back? Well, when and where?

The schoolmaster knew about this too, but it was not a story he had put together himself. He knew the whole strange course of events from a credible old book, one that we could take out and read ourselves. The Danish storyteller Ludvig Holberg,¹ who has written so many books worth reading and those funny comedies in which we recognize his time and its people, tells about Marie Grubbe in his letters, and about where and how he met her. It’s worth hearing, but we certainly won’t forget Hen-Grethe, who is sitting happy and satisfied in the magnificent henhouse.

The ship sailed off with Marie Grubbe. That’s where we left off.

Years and years passed.

It was 1711, and the plague was raging in Copenhagen. The queen of Denmark went to her home town in Germany. The king left the capital, and everyone who could manage it hurried away from the city. Students, even if they had free room and board, left town. One of them, the last one left in the so-called Borch residence, right by the residence close to the Round Tower, was now leaving too. It was two o’clock in the morning. He had his knapsack with him which had more books and written materials in it than clothing. There was a wet, clammy fog hanging over the city, and not a person was to be seen on the street where he walked. Crosses had been posted on doors and gates round about, which meant that there was plague inside or that the people had died. There weren’t any people to be seen on the wider, curving Kjød-manger street, as it was called, either—the street that goes from the Round Tower down to the King’s castle. Then a big hearse went rumbling by. The driver was cracking his whip, and the horses galloped. The wagon was full of bodies. The young student held his hand to his face and smelled the strong alcohol that he carried on a sponge in a little brass box. From a pub in one of the alleys came raucous singing and cheerless laughter from people who were drinking the night away in order to forget that the plague was at their door and wanted to add them to the hearse with the other dead. The student headed towards the bridge by the castle where there were a couple of small boats. One was just pulling away to escape the infested city.

“If God allows us to live, and we have a good wind, we’re headed to Grønsund by Falster,” said the captain and asked the student, who wanted to go along, for his name.

“Ludvig Holberg,” said the student, and the name sounded like any other name. Now it resounds as one of the proudest names in Denmark, but then he was just a young, unknown student.

The ship sailed past the castle. It wasn’t quite light yet when it came into the open sea. A light breeze blew and the sail swelled. The young student sat with his face to the fresh wind and fell asleep, which wasn’t really advisable.

By the third morning the ship was already lying off Falster.

“Do you know a place I can stay here that’s not too expensive?” Holberg asked the captain.

“I think you could do well with the ferryman’s wife at Borrehuset,” he answered. “If you want to be especially courteous, her name is Mother Søren Sørensen Møller. But she might get angry if you are too high-class with her. Her husband was arrested for some misdeed, so she drives the ferry herself. She certainly has the fists for it!”

The student took his knapsack and walked to the ferry house. The living room door was not locked, the latch opened, and he walked into a paved room where a sleeping bench with a huge pelt comforter was the most noticeable thing. A white hen with chicks was tied to the bench and had tipped over the water dish so water was spilled all over the floor. There was no one in this room, or the little chamber next to it except a baby in a cradle. The ferry was on its way back, and there was only one person in it. It wasn’t easy to say if it was a man or a woman. The person had a big cloak wrapped around itself and a man’s hat with ear flaps, but tied under the chin like a woman’s hat. The boat docked.

It was a woman who came into the room. She looked pretty big when she straightened up and had two proud eyes under black eyebrows. It was mother Søren, the ferryman’s wife. Rooks, crows, and jackdaws would call her by another name that we would know better.

She looked sullen and didn’t seem to like to talk, but this much was said and decided—the student bargained for room and board for an undetermined time—while things were so bad in Copenhagen.

One or another pair of decent citizens from the nearby town were in the habit of frequenting the ferry house. Frands the knife-maker and Sivert the sack-peeper² were two of them. They drank a pint of beer in the ferry house and talked with the young student. He was a competent young man, who understood practical things, as they called it. He also read Greek and Latin and knew about learned things.

“The less you know, the less you’re burdened,” said Mother Søren.

“You have a hard life,” said Holberg one day, when she was washing her clothes in warm soapy lye water, and had to chop wood stumps into firewood herself.

“Leave me to it,” she answered.

“Have you had to work so hard from childhood on?”

“I guess you can read that in my hands,” she said and held out two quite small but hard, strong hands with bitten nails. “You are so learned, you can read these.”

Christmas time brought a strong snowstorm. It became very cold, and the wind blew as if it were washing people in the face with nitric acid. Mother Søren didn’t let it affect her. She threw her cloak around her and pulled the hat down over her head. It became dark in the house early in the afternoon. She laid wood and peat in the fire and sat down to darn her stockings. There was no one else to do it. Towards evening she spoke more to the student than she was in the habit of doing. She talked about her husband.

“He accidentally killed a man, a captain from Dragør, and has to work in irons for three years on Holmen. He’s just a common sailor, so the law must take its course.”

“The law also applies to the higher classes,” said Holberg.

“Do you think so?” said Mother Søren and looked into the fire. But then she started talking again. “Have you heard about Kai Lykke who ordered one of his churches to be torn down? And when Pastor Mads thundered about it from the pulpit, Lykke had him thrown in irons, and sentenced him to lose his head, and lose it he did. That was not accidental, and yet Kai Lykke walked free as air!”

“He was in the right according to the views of that time,” said Holberg. “But that time is past now.”

“You can make fools believe that,” Mother Søren said. She got up and went into the chamber where “Lassy,” the little baby, lay. She picked her up, and laid her down again. Then she made up the bed on the bench for the student. He got the pelt comforter because he was more sensitive to cold than she was, even though he was born in Norway.

New Year’s Day was a clear sunny day. There had been a heavy frost so cold that the snow was frozen solid so you could walk on it. The church bells were ringing for services, and student Holberg wrapped his woolen cloak around him and went to town.

Rooks, crows, and jackdaws flew over the ferry house with cries and shrieks. You couldn’t hear the church bells over the squalling. Mother Søren was outside filing a brass kettle with snow to melt over the fire for drinking water. She looked up towards the flocks of birds, and thought her own thoughts.

Student Holberg went to church. On the way there and coming back he went by Sivert the sack-peeper’s house at the gate and was invited in for a mug of warm beer with syrup and ginger. The talk fell to Mother Søren, but the sack-peeper didn’t know much about her. Nobody did. She wasn’t from Falster, he said. She had evidently had a little money once. Her husband was an ordinary sailor with a hot temper. He had beat a captain from Dragør to death. “He whips his old lady too, and yet she defends him.”

“I wouldn’t tolerate such treatment!” said the sack-peeper’s wife. “But I come from a better class. My father was a royal stocking weaver.”

“And therefore you also married a royal civil servant,” said Holberg and made a deep bow to her and the sack-peeper.

It was Twelfth Night Eve.³ Mother Søren lit for Holberg a Twelfth Night light, that is to say, three tallow candles she had dipped herself.

“One candle for each man!” said Holberg.

“Each man?” said the woman and stared hard at him.

“Each of the wise men from the east,” said Holberg.

“Oh, them,” she said and was quiet for a long time. But in that Twelfth Night he learned more about her than he had known before.

“You care about the man you’re married to,” said Holberg, “but people say that he mistreats you.”

“That only concerns me,” she answered. “Those blows could have done me some good as a child. I guess I get them now because of my sins, but I know what good he has done for me.” She stood up. “When I lay on the open heath, and no one cared about me, except maybe the rooks and crows who wanted to peck at me, he carried me in his arms and received only angry words for bringing me to the ship. I wasn’t made for illness. So I got well. Everyone has his own way, and Søren has his. You can’t judge the horse by the halter. I have lived more happily with him than with the one they call the most courteous and distinguished of all the king’s subjects. I was married to Governor Gyldenløve, the king’s half-brother. Later I married Palle Dyre. It makes no difference. Each has his own way, and I have mine. That was a long talk, but now you know it!” And she left the room.

It was Marie Grubbe! How strange were her changes of fortune! She didn’t live many more Twelfth Nights. Holberg wrote that she died in June of 1716, but what he didn’t write, because he didn’t know, was that when Mother Søren, as she was called, lay in her coffin in the ferry house, a flock of big black birds flew over. They didn’t shriek, as if they knew that silence belongs to funerals. As soon as she was buried, the birds were no longer seen, but the same evening enormous flocks of rooks, crows, and jackdaws were sighted in Jutland, by the old castle. Each screamed louder than the next, as if they had something to tell. Maybe it was about him who as a little boy had taken their eggs and downy chicks, the farmer’s son, who ended up in irons on the king’s island; and about the noble maiden, who ended up a ferryman’s wife at Grønsund. “Bra! Bra!”⁴ they cried.

And their relatives cried “Bra, bra!” when the old castle was torn down. “They are crying it yet, and there’s nothing left to cry over,” said the schoolteacher as he related it. “The family has died out. The castle was torn down, and where it stood now stands the stately henhouse with the gilded weathervane, and with old Hen-Grethe inside. She is so happy to have her lovely house, and if she hadn’t come here, she’d be in the poorhouse.”

The doves cooed above her. The turkeys gobbled round about, and the ducks quacked. “No one knew her,” they said. “She has no family. It’s an act of mercy that she’s here. She has neither a drake father nor a hen mother, and no offspring.”

But she did have a family. She didn’t know it, nor did the schoolmaster, no matter how much material he had in his table drawer. But one of the old crows knew and told about it. From its mother and grandmother it had heard about Hen-Grethe’s mother and grandmother, whom we know too, from the time she rode as a child over the drawbridge and looked around proudly as if the whole world and all its bird nests were hers. We saw her on the heath by the sand dunes, and finally at the ferry house. Her grandchild, the last of the family, had come home again where the old castle had stood and the wild black birds had screamed. But she sat amongst tame birds, known to them and knowing them. Hen-Grethe had nothing more to wish for. She was happy to die, and old enough to die.

“Grave! Grave!” croaked the crows.

And Hen-Grethe got a good resting place, but no one knows where, except the old crow, unless she’s dead too.

And now we know the story about the old castle, the old kin-ships, and all of Hen-Grethe’s family.

NOTES

1 Often called the father of Danish and Norwegian literature, Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754) was the most important intellectual and writer in eighteenth-century Denmark and Norway; he wrote drama, comedies, history, and essays on a wide variety of topics.

2 Reference to a nickname for tollgate attendants who collected tax on products at town gates. The name comes from Ludvig Holberg’s play Den politiske Kandestøber (The Political Tinker).

3 The twelfth day after Christmas is called Epiphany. The evening before (sometimes the evening of) this day is called Twelfth Night.

4 In Danish bra means “good” or “fine.” Andersen is very fond of onomatopoeia.