Cousin-hunting in Scandinavia

by Mary Wilhelmine Williams

And now put in the houses. Just coming into view on one side is a mossy, thatched-roofed gaard, with dazzling white walls partly concealed by clumps of trees; on the other side, a little nearer at hand, note a red brick building peeping forth from the clustering foliage; and yonder is a white one with red tiles substituted for thatch. As you cycle past, there will be a constant shifting and changing of styles and colors, according to whether the farms are new or old, small or large. Tuck into the panorama a few large windmills here and there, with long arms slowly and lazily grinding out Danish grist; and finally finish off your picture by adding an occasional church, at first just peeping its spire or tower over the rolling surface of the ground, but as you approach looming large, in Lutheran dignity conscious of State support.

We rode all day in the midst of this beautiful landscape, now and then making a cousinly call. And always, for the sake of the cousinship, these cousins welcomed their clanswoman from the Land of the Setting Sun; and everywhere they insisted that we partake of coffee, regardless of the amount of which we had already drunk; and always they accompanied us to the main road when we departed, remembered the “Hils hjemme” (Greet those at home for us) when the good-byes were said, and were waving a final farewell when we took a last look at the turn of the road. Verily, cousin-hunting in a foreign land may be a wondrous pleasant pastime—if the foreign land be an ancestral homeland.

Near the end of our ride we came to Östermarie Church, of the parish in which my mother lived as a child. And there in the church-yard were many old grave-stones with family names; names that were familiar, but strange—when found there. The ancient church is in ruins, but twenty years ago a new one was built, after an old pattern, with a square tower topped off with a gable. A memorial tablet to Jens Kofoed, who helped save Bornholm for Denmark, has been carefully transferred from the old building to the new.

Harvest Time in Bornholm

Österlars Church, Bornholm

Östermarie represents one of two characteristic types of Bornholm church architecture. The other type which I have in mind is the rotunda. These rotunda churches are among the rare sights of Denmark, and date from well back into the Middle Ages. Österlars, the finest sample, is Östermarie’s near neighbor at the northwest. The main part of the building is a huge cylinder, capped with a cone-shaped roof. Attached to the outer walls, like barnacles, with little regard to symmetry or uniformity, are a number of buttresses. The whole structure has a grotesque appearance, and is like nothing else I have ever seen,—except, perhaps, as regards form, the grass huts of the South Sea Islanders. But it is much more substantial than these; the walls are thick and heavy; for in the old fighting days the rotundas served as fortresses as well as houses of worship.

The northeastern part of the island possesses various reminders of earlier days than those in which Österlars was built. Among these are the sites of several burial mounds. During my mother’s girlhood some of the mounds were leveled by bold farmers, unfearful of the hauntings of outraged ghosts; and their contents—weapons, utensils, ornaments, etc.—which the heathen Danes had buried with their dead, were brought to light. Some of the objects reached the museum at Copenhagen in safety; others, especially the ornaments of gold and silver, were melted down by the thrifty but short-sighted country people. The most famous mound of all was, however, carefully excavated by Danish archæologists. This was on the large farm called Store Bakkegaard, not far from my mother’s old home.

Most of the country people realized that the mounds were prehistoric graves; and some of the farmers, for superstitious reasons, refrained from leveling them. As you may imagine, many ghost stories grew up around these—stories of mysterious lights which appeared and disappeared in the trees on top of one of them; of a monstrous three-legged cat which yowled from another; of a surpassingly beautiful maiden with incredibly long golden locks who haunted a third. They were “spooky” landmarks, my mother said—places past which the school children hurried with bated breath in the early twilight of the short winter days.