A Story from the Sand Dunes

And this story ran like a thread of gold tinsel - his most humorous recollection - through the web of Jörgen's life. He too wanted to go past the threshold, "a little way up the river," or rather out into the wide world in a ship; but his foster mother objected, just as Mother Eel had objected, "There are so many wicked men with spears." He longed to go a little past the sand dunes into the heath. And at last he did for four pleasant days, the brightest of his whole childhood; and he saw all of Jutland's happy, homelike beauty and sunshine. He went to a party; it was a funeral party.

A wealthy relative of the fisherman had died; his farm was far inland, "to the east, a bit northerly," as the saying goes. Jörgen's foster parents had to go, and they took him with them. They passed from the dunes over heath and swamp to the green pastures where the Skjaerum River hollows out its bed - that brook full of eels, where lived Mother Eel and her daughters whom the wicked people speared and cut in pieces. And hadn't men often acted just as cruelly toward their fellow men? The good knight, Sir Bugge, whose name lives in the old song, was murdered by wicked men; and, though he himself was called "good," he is said to have come very close to slaying the architect who built his castle, with its tower and thick walls, on the slope where the brook Skjaerum falls into the Nissum Fiord, just where Jörgen now stood with his foster parents. The ramparts and the red crumbling fragments of the walls could still be seen.

It was here that Sir Bugge, after the architect had left, ordered one of his men to follow him. "Say to him, 'Master, the tower leans to one side.' And if he turns and looks to find out, you must slay him and take from him the money I have paid him; but if he turns not, let him depart in peace." The man obeyed, but the architect did not turn; rather did he answer clearly and boldly. "The tower does not lean, for I have built it well; but one day a man shall come from the West in a blue cloak, and he shall make it lean.