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 Soren 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 Soren 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 Soren, 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 Dragor 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 Soren 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 Soren 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 Gyldenlove, 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 Soren, 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 Gronsund. “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
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
