1
Note: Literal translation of the real words of a showman.
2
Translator’s Note: Name of one of the heroes in Waldemar the Conqueror, a romance by Ingemann.
3
Note: This superstition of the people is mentioned in Thieles’s Danish traditions: “When a girl at midnight stretches between four sticks the membrane in which the foal lies when it is born, and then creeps naked through it, she will bear her child without pains; but all the boys she conceives will become were-wolves, and all the girls nightmares. You will know them in the daytime by their eyebrows grown together over the nose. In the night she creeps in through the key-hole, and places herself upon the sleeper’s bosom. The same superstition is also found in German Grimm speaks thus about it: If you say to the nightmare,—
Old hag, come to-morrow,
And I from you will borrow,
it retreats directly, and comes the next morning in the shape of a man to borrow something.”
1
Note: Literal translation of the real words of a showman.
2
Translator’s Note: Name of one of the heroes in Waldemar the Conqueror, a romance by Ingemann.
3
Note: This superstition of the people is mentioned in Thieles’s Danish traditions: “When a girl at midnight stretches between four sticks the membrane in which the foal lies when it is born, and then creeps naked through it, she will bear her child without pains; but all the boys she conceives will become were-wolves, and all the girls nightmares. You will know them in the daytime by their eyebrows grown together over the nose. In the night she creeps in through the key-hole, and places herself upon the sleeper’s bosom. The same superstition is also found in German Grimm speaks thus about it: If you say to the nightmare,—
it retreats directly, and comes the next morning in the shape of a man to borrow something.”