The first storks who told it had experienced it themselves, they had been part of it. They had their summer residence on top of the roof of the wooden house of a Viking chieftain who lived near the great bog in the north of Jutland, which is called Vendsyssel. If one were to describe it learnedly—as it is described in a Danish geography book—then one must explain that once this was an ocean bed, but the waters departed and the land rose. Today the bog is very large, but once it was even larger; there were miles and miles of swamp, marshland, and stretches of peat. There were no trees worth talking about, and over the bog hovered, almost always, a dense fog. At the turn of the eighteenth century there were still wolves there; and it was even wilder a thousand years ago. Yet the landscape was the same; the reeds were no taller, and they had the same feathery flowers and slender leaves. The birch tree’s bark was as white as it is now, and the branches with their fine green leaves hung toward the earth as gracefully. The animal life, too, has not changed. The flies, then, were as troublesome as they are now; and the storks wore the same black and white livery with red stockings. But the human beings were dressed differently, though their fate was the same, if they stepped out upon the surface of the great bog: a thousand years ago—as today—they would slowly sink into the muddy ooze down to the bog king. That was the name given to the ruler of the great bog. Some called him the swamp king, but we prefer the bog king and the storks agree with us, for that is what they called him. Very little is known about his rule, which may be just as well.
Near the bog, on the shores of the fjord, a Viking chief had built a big house. It had a stone cellar, three floors and a tower, constructed of logs. On top of the roof a pair of storks had built their nest. The mother stork, who was brooding, was convinced that every one of her eggs would hatch.
One evening the father stork was away from the nest longer than usual, and when he finally returned he looked upset and unhappy. “I have something horrible to tell you,” he said.
“Don’t!” exclaimed his wife. “Remember I am brooding. If you upset me, it might harm the eggs!”
“You must know what has happened!” insisted the male stork. “She has come, the daughter of our landlord in Egypt, and now she has disappeared!”
“The girl who is related to the fairies? Tell me, tell me! Don’t keep me in suspense, that is not good for me when I am sitting on eggs!”
“You know, my dear, that she believed the doctors who said that the water lilies, here in the north, would cure her father. She has flown up here. She was wearing a swanskin and came together with the two other princesses who fly up here every year to bathe—they believe the waters make them retain their youth. The young princess was here and now she is gone!”
“You are so long-winded, get to the point!” complained his wife. “The eggs may catch cold; I can’t stand being kept in suspense.”
“You know I keep an eye on everything,” the male stork continued. “Last night I was down in the reeds, where the mud is solid enough for me to stand, and I saw three swans. There was something about their flight that said: ‘Look out, they are not swans, they are something else wearing swanskins.’ You know as well as I, how one can feel that a thing just isn’t right.”
“Yes, yes!” His wife was getting very impatient. “Tell me about the princess and never mind the swanskins, they bore me!”
“You know that right in the center of the bog there is a lake—you can see part of it from here if you stand up. Near the reeds at the shore, there lay the trunk of an old alder tree, and the three swans landed on it. They flapped their wings and looked around. Then one of them cast off her swanskin and I recognized her. She was the princess from the palace in Egypt. She had nothing to cover herself with but her long black hair. She asked the other two to guard her swanskin, while she dived down into the water to pluck the flower that she thought she had spied underneath the water. The other two swans flew up, taking the princess’ swanskin with them in their bills. I wondered what they wanted to do with it; and I am sure the princess would have liked to ask the same question. We were answered soon enough.
“ ‘Dive down into the dark water!’ cried the swans. ‘Never again shall you see Egypt, you shall stay here in the wild bog forever!’ Then, with their beaks, they tore her swanskin into hundreds of pieces. The feathers flew around them; it looked like a snowstorm. Then the two evil princesses flew away.”
“It is horrible!” exclaimed the mother stork. “I can’t bear hearing stories like that. I am sure it is not good for me.… But tell me what happened afterward, please tell me!”
“The princess cried and her tears fell on the trunk of the old alder tree. It began to move! It wasn’t an alder tree, it was the bog king himself! The one who lives in the bog and rules it. I saw the tree trunk turn in the water, and then it no longer looked like a tree trunk. Its long branches were not branches but arms! The poor girl got frightened. She tried to jump up onto the shore, but she was too heavy to stand in the muddy bog. At that place the ooze can’t even bear me. She sank down into the bog and at the same moment the bog king disappeared. I think he pulled her down. Some big black bubbles rose to the surface, burst, and were gone. Now she is buried in the bog and she will never return to Egypt and bring her father the flower. You couldn’t have borne seeing it, I am sure!”
“I don’t think you should even have told me about it now; it may spoil the eggs! The princess will take care of herself, I am sure; there is always someone who is ready to help her kind. Now if it had been you or I who had been sucked down into the mud, then everything would have been over.”
“Still, I will keep an eye on the place,” said the male stork, and he did.
A long time passed; then one day a green stalk shot up through the water. When it reached the surface a leaf unfolded, and in the center of it was a bud. The leaf grew bigger and bigger, and so did the bud. One morning when the stork flew above it he saw that the bud was opening in the warm sunshine. In the flower lay a little girl, a beautiful child; she looked so much like the princess from Egypt that the stork thought it might be she, grown smaller. But on second thought he found it more reasonable that the child was her daughter with the bog king, and that was why she was lying in a water lily.
“She can’t stay there,” thought the stork. “There is no room in my nest, we are already crowded. But the Viking chief’s wife has no child, and I know she wants one badly. I have heard her sighing. Since they claim that I bring children I might as well do it for once. I will give it to our landlady; it will make her happy.”
The stork took the little girl in his bill and flew up to the house. There he pecked a hole in the window—that was easy, for it was only covered by a pig’s bladder. He lay the baby beside the sleeping woman, then he flew back up to his wife to tell her all about it. The children were allowed to listen; after all, they were almost grown up.
“You see, the princess isn’t dead, she must have sent the little girl up with the water lily. And I found a home for her.”
“I told you all the time that, if she couldn’t take care of herself, then someone else would take care of her,” said the mother stork. “But you should think a little more about your own faimly and less about others. It will soon be time to leave; my wings are itching. The cuckoo and the nightingale have already left, and the quails are saying that the wind will soon blow just right for flying south. I am sure our children will do well on the maneuver; I know them, I am their mother.”
The Viking chieftain’s wife was ever so happy when she awoke and found the little girl. She kissed and fondled the little baby, but the child did not seem to like it, she kicked and screamed and cried. Finally she fell asleep and no child has ever looked lovelier than she did then. The Viking woman felt so happy and lighthearted that she was sure that her husband and his men would be home soon: they would come just as unexpectedly as the child had. She got busy putting the house in order. She ordered the slaves to polish the old shields that hung on the walls and to
ld her maid to bring out the tapestries that had pictures of their gods woven in them: of Odin, Thor, and Freya. Skins were placed on the wooden benches and dry firewood on the great central fireplace, so that it could be lit as soon as the voyagers returned. The mistress worked along with the others; by evening she was very tired, and she slept well throughout the night.
Just before the sun rose she awoke. The child was gone! She got terribly frightened and jumped out of bed to look for it. She lit a bit of kindling and then she saw at the foot of her bed not the child but a big ugly frog. She felt sick at the sight of it and grabbed a large piece of firewood to kill it. But the toad looked up at her with such infinitely sad eyes that she couldn’t. She looked around the room. The frog gave a pathetic little croak, and the woman shivered at the sound. Then she ran and opened up the shutters. Just at that moment the sun rose. Its first rays came in through the opening and fell on the bed, where the big frog was sitting. Its broad mouth became small; its ugly limbs straightened and took on the lovely shape of her little child. The ugly frog was gone.
“What has happened!” she cried. “I must have had an evil dream. There is my lovely fairy child!” She picked up the little girl, kissed her, and pressed her to her heart. But the baby acted more like an angry kitten; she scratched and bit.
The Viking chief did not return that day or the next. He was on his way home but had the wind against him. It blew toward the south for the storks’ sake. Fair winds for one are foul for another.
The next night the Viking woman realized how things were with her little child; she was bewitched. By day she was as beautiful as a fairy but her character was wild and evil; at night she was an ugly frog with sad sorrowful eyes and sat whimpering quietly. These transformations in the girl, whom the stork had brought, were caused by the two natures within her. In the daytime she had the shape and appearance of her lovely mother but the soul of her father. At night her kinship with the bog king could be seen in her body, but then she had the sweet character and heart of her mother.
The chieftain’s wife was frightened and sorrowful: who could break such a curse? Yet she loved the unfortunate creature that fate had brought to her. She was determined not to tell her husband about the child being bewitched, for she feared that he would set her out in the wilderness to be eaten by wolves, as this was the Viking custom with babies that were deformed. She vowed—poor woman—that her husband would never see the child except by day.
One morning the sound of the wings of storks could be heard. They were resting after the big maneuver and were now ready for the flight south. There were more than two hundred of them.
“Everybody ready!” was the command. “Children and wives stay with your husbands!”
“I feel so light,” said one of the stork children. “It creeps and crawls inside me right down into my legs, as if I were filled with living frogs. How wonderful it is to travel!”
“Keep in your places,” admonished their mother and father, “and don’t talk too much, it is bad for the breathing.”
And away they flew!
Right at that moment a horn was blown. The Vikings had landed. Their ships were loaded with rich booty. They had come from the coasts of Gaul, where the people—just as they did in England—prayed: “Free us from the wild Norsemen.”
A great celebration took place in the Viking hall near the great bog. A vat of mead was carried in and the great fire was lit. Horses were butchered, and the warm horse blood was sprayed on the new slaves, in honor of Odin: a heathen baptism. The smoke drifted from the fire up to the roof, soot dripped from the great beams; but no one took any notice.
The house was filled with guests and everyone received a costly present. All old disagreements and broken promises were forgotten. They drank and they ate, and they threw the gnawed bones in each other’s faces—that was considered amusing. The poet of the time, who was called a skjald, was a warrior too; he had been on the voyage, so he knew what he was composing verses about. He sang ballads about their adventures, recalling every battle each Viking had fought in. His verses always ended with the same words! “Richness vanishes and friends die, as one must die oneself; only the fame of greatness never dies.” Then they would all bang with their knives or hit their shields with their gnawed bones, so the noise could be heard far away.
The chieftain’s wife sat on the women’s bench, dressed in a silken gown; she wore gold bracelets and an amber necklace. The skjald did not forget to mention her in his verses; he sang about the golden treasure she had brought her rich and famous husband. In truth, the chieftain was pleased with his child, whom he had only seen while the sun was in the sky. She was beautiful, and as for her temper, he liked it. “She will become a valkyrie, who will fight as well as any man and not be frightened by the sound of a sword as it cleaves the air,” he said proudly.
The vat of mead was empty and another one was carried into the hall. Oh yes, these were people who could drink. The Vikings had a proverb: “Cattle know when it is best to stop grazing, but a fool never realizes the size of his own stomach.” Although all of them knew these words, they seemed to have forgotten them. Just as they did not remember another proverb from that time: “A good friend becomes a bore if he stays too long in another man’s house.” For weeks the guests stayed, for the sake of the meat and the mead.
Once more that year the Vikings went on a raid, but only across the waters to England. The Viking woman was again alone with her little girl. By now she loved more deeply the sighing frog with the sad lovely eyes than the beautiful girl who bit and tore at her.
The raw and cold autumn fog, which, although it has no mouth, gnaws the leaves of the trees, now covered the landscape. The first snowflakes had followed each other down from the clouds. Winter was not far away. The sparrows had moved into the storks’ nest and were criticizing endlessly the departed owners. But where were the father and mother stork and all their children?
They were in Egypt, where the sun in winter shines as warmly as it does in Denmark in the summer. Tamarisks and acacias were in bloom there, and above the temple dome shone Mohammed’s moon. On the tops of the tall, slender towers many stork couples sat resting from their long journey. Whole flocks of them had built their nests in the ruins of the other temples; those once busy places that were forgotten now. The date palms lift their leaves high up in the air like gigantic parasols. The whitish-gray pyramids look as if they had been drawn on the clear air of the desert. There the ostrich demonstrates that, although it cannot fly, it at least can run; and the lion, with its sad and knowing eyes, contemplates the marble sphinx that stands half buried in the sand. The waters of the Nile were low and the muddy river bed was alive with frogs. For a stork that was the most pleasant sight of all. The young ones, who had not been in Egypt before, thought it was all an optical illusion, so marvelous was it.
“No, it is real, and that is the way it always is here in our winter residence!” said the stork mother.
“Aren’t we going any farther?” asked the young ones. “Aren’t we going to see even more?”
“There isn’t much more to see,” answered their mother. “The part that is fertile is a little too wild. The trees grow too close together in the jungle, and among their branches are thorny vines; only the elephants with their thick skins and broad feet can make their way through there. The snakes are too big to eat and the lizards too agile to catch. And if you go in the other direction, toward the desert, you will get sand in your eyes, and that is not pleasant. No, it is best to stay here, where there are plenty of frogs and grasshoppers. I will stay here, and so will you!”
And they stayed. The old ones had a nest on top of a minaret; there they rested, while they smoothed down their feathers and polished their bills on their long red legs. They would lift their heads and nod gravely toward other storks, as they looked out over the landscape with their brown eyes that seemed to shine with intelligence. The young female storks would wander about in the swamp, making friends and eatin
g a frog for every third step they took. Often they would walk around with a little snake dangling in their bills; they thought it looked attractive, and besides, it tasted good. The young males fought with each other; they would flap their wings and fight such duels with their beaks that sometimes blood would flow.
After a while they all got engaged, which was only natural; then they built nests of their own, and argued and fought some more. In the hot countries everyone has a hot temper, but it was all very entertaining. The older storks, found it amusing to watch; they thought anything their own offspring did most marvelous and unique. Every day the sun shone, and every day there was enough to eat; the only thing left to do was to enjoy oneself.
But inside the great castle life was not amusing at all. The great powerful ruler of the country lay as still as a mummy on his couch in the great hall of the castle. The walls were all covered with murals; it looked as if he were lying in the center of an enormous tulip. Servants and relations flocked around him. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t alive either. The water lily from the north that could have saved him would never be found. His young and beautiful daughter who had flown in a swanskin over the ocean and the great mountains, far to the north, to fetch it would never return. “She is dead and gone,” said the two princesses who had accompanied her on the journey. Listen to the pretty story they told: