1 The 1980 edition is almost, but not entirely a reproduction of the original edition of 1892–1901, its additional eighth volume is an index volume. The 1928–36 collection, edited by ETK’s son Johannes, contains additional material. Fabula 51 (2010) Heft 3/4 DOI 10.1515/FABL.2010.022 © Walter de Gruyter Berlin · New York M i c h è l e S i m o n s e n , C o p e n h a g e n Danish Werewolves between Beliefs and Narratives Danish traditional legends about werewolves are somewhat different from those of other European countries, both concerning the reasons why a human being turns in- to a werewolf and the ways he can be saved from the spell. I will here present legends about werewolves as they appear in Evald Tang Kris- tensen’s Danske Sagn som de har lydt i folkemunde (1892–1901) 1 . Kristensen (ETK) was certainly one of the best and most prolific folklorists of Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The texts in his seven-volume edition of Danish legends were partly collected by himself (about half of them), and partly by others as a response to the collection campaign launch- ed by Svend Grundtvig and the Dansk samfund til indsamling af folkeminder (Danish Society for the Collecting of Folklore) as well as his own folklore journal Skattegraveren. ETK was quite critical about the legends contributed by other col- lectors, both concerning the way they were elicited and the way they were noted down. But he nevertheless included them in his edition, ‘because they contributed to shed light upon Danish folk tradition’.The legends about werewolves in Danske sagn cover the whole of Denmark, from Jutland to Zealand. Let me first consider the content of these belief stories taken as a whole. Most texts share a common semantic core: the origins of the werewolf, victim of a mag- ical ritual practised by his mother. Girls and women who wanted to escape the pains of labour during childbirth, could take the afterbirth from a mare – i.e. the placenta in which the foal had been wrapped – and stretch it between four pales. They would then take all their clothes off and crawl through the stretched placenta, completely naked. This secret ritual would ensure that they would give birth with- out pain. But the child thus born would become a ‘mare’ if it was a girl (a female supernatural being that rides on men’s chests during their sleep and oppresses them, and which is at the origin of the English word ‘nightmare’), or a werewolf if it was a boy. This is the only way a man becomes a werewolf in Danish tradition. All narratives but one agree on that. The one exception states that, for unknown reasons, a man wants to become a werewolf and practises the secret ritual. There is no example of the spell being due to being the seventh child of a seventh child, as in some countries; or being the punishment for an undetected crime, as in Nor- Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 1/2/15 8:59 PM