4 From
5 Ansgar the missionary received permission to build a church in Hedeby by the Slien River in Schleswig in 850.
6 A god of Nordic mythology, Odin’s son. At the instigation of the evil god Loki, the beautiful and good Balder was killed by a sprig of mistletoe, the only thing that could hurt him.
7 Loki is the trickster figure of Nordic mythology.
8 The Midgard serpent, which encircles the world and is destined to fight Thor at Ragnarok (the end of the world of gods and men).
THE GIRL WHO STEPPED ON BREAD
You MUST HAVE HEARD about the girl who stepped on bread to avoid dirtying her shoes, and how badly things turned out for her? It’s been both written down and printed.
She was a poor child, proud and arrogant. There was a bad streak in her, as they say. As quite a young girl she used to enjoy catching flies and pulling their wings off to make crawlers out of them. She took June bugs and dung beetles and stuck pins in them. Then she would put a green leaf or a little scrap of paper up to their feet and the poor bugs would clasp onto it, turn and twist it, to try to get off the pin.
“Now the June bug’s reading!” said little Inger. “Look how it’s leafing the page!”
As she grew up, she became worse rather than better, but she was pretty, and that was her misfortune. Otherwise she probably would have been treated harsher than she was.
“Desperate diseases must have desperate remedies,” said her own mother. “You often stepped on my apron as a child, and I’m afraid you’ll step on my heart when you’re older.”
And she did too!
She went into service out in the country with some distinguished people. They treated her as if she were their own daughter, and dressed her like it too. She looked good, and her arrogance grew.
When she’d been there a year, her mistress said, “You should really visit your parents sometime, little Inger!”
She went, but it was to show off. She wanted them to see how fine she had become. But when she came to the edge of town, she saw girls and boys gossiping by the pond, and her mother was sitting there on a rock resting with a load of firewood that she had gathered in the woods. Inger turned around because she was ashamed that she, who was so finely dressed, should have a mother who was so ragged, and who gathered sticks. She didn’t regret turning around; she was just irritated.
Half a year went by.
“You should go home one day and see your old parents, little Inger,” said her mistress. “Here’s a big loaf of white bread you can take along for them. They’ll be glad to see you.”
And Inger put on her best clothes and her new shoes, and she lifted her skirts and walked so carefully so that her feet would stay nice and clean, and one can’t blame her for that. But when she got to where the path went over some marshy ground, and there was water and mud for a long stretch, she threw the bread into the mud so she could step on it and get across with dry shoes. But as she stood with one foot on the bread and lifted the other, the bread with her on it sank deeper and deeper. She completely disappeared and there was nothing to be seen but a black bubbling pool.
That’s the story. Oh, you’d like to hear what happened to her?
Well, she came to the bog woman, who brews in the marsh. The bog woman is an aunt of the elf maidens. Everyone knows the elves. Ballads have been written about them, and they’ve been painted. But about the bog women people only know that, when there’s mist on the meadows in the summer, it’s the bog woman who’s brewing. Well, Inger sank down to her brewery, and you can’t stand it there for long. A cesspool is a light, magnificent apartment compared to the bog woman’s brewery. Every vat stinks so badly that humans faint from it, and the vats are pressed against each other. If there’s a little opening between them anywhere, where you could squeeze through, you can’t anyway because of all the wet toads and fat snakes that are matted together there, where little Inger sank. All the nasty living mass was so icy cold that her body shivered through and through, and became more and more stiff from it. She was stuck to the bread, and it pulled her, like a clump of amber pulls in a little straw.
The bog woman was home. That day the brewery was being inspected by the devil and his great-grandmother. She is an old, very venomous woman, who’s never idle. She never goes out without her needlework, and she had it here too. She was sewing trick insoles for people’s shoes so they couldn’t stop moving. She embroidered lies and crocheted thoughtless words that had fallen to the ground. Everything she did was for harm and depravity. Yes, that old great-grandmother could sew, embroider, and crochet.
She saw Inger, put her glasses on, and looked at her once again. “That’s a girl with talent,” she said. “I’d like to have her as a souvenir of my visit here. She would do for a pedestal in my great-grandson’s anteroom!”
And she got her. That’s how little Inger went to hell. People don’t always go straight to hell, but they can get there the long way around, if they have talent.
There was an unending anteroom there. You would get dizzy looking forward and dizzy looking back, and there was a languishing crowd of people who were waiting for the doors of mercy to open, and they would wait for a long time. Big fat waddling spiders spun a thousand-years web over their feet, and this web tightened like screws in the foot and held them like copper chains. Added to this was the eternal anxiety in each soul, a painful anxiety. The miser had forgotten the key to his money chest, and he knew it was standing in the lock. Well, it would take too long to rattle off all of the torments and tortures that were felt there. Inger felt that it was gruesome to stand as a pedestal. It was as if she was clamped from below to the bread.
“That’s what you get for wanting to keep your feet clean,” little Inger said to herself. “Look how they’re staring at me!” Yes, everyone was looking at her. Their evil desires shone from their eyes and spoke without sounds from the corners of their mouths. They were a terrible sight.
“It must be a pleasure to look at me,” thought little Inger. “I have a pretty face and good clothes.” She moved her eyes, her neck was too stiff to move. She hadn’t thought of how dirty she had gotten in the bog woman’s brewery! Her clothes were coated with a single big slimy blob. A snake had gotten tangled in her hair and was
