Today the old woman was telling about the Witches’ Village:
“Sometimes there is a wicked woman in a village who wishes harm to everyone. Usually these women conceive no children. Sometimes one of these women is so wicked that the village will no longer let her stay. Then the villagers go to her hut at night, her husband is fettered, and the woman is beaten with switches and driven far out into the woods and swamps. She is cursed with a curse and left there. Soon the husband’s fetters are removed and if he is not too old, he can take himself another wife. But if the expelled woman does not die, she wanders about in the woods and swamps, learns the language of animals, and when she has roamed long enough, sooner or later she finds her way to a small village that is called the Witches’ Village. There all the wicked women who have been driven from their villages have come together and made a village of their own. There they live, do their wickedness, and make magic. But especially, because they have no children of their own, they like to coax children from the proper villages, and when a child is lost in the woods and never seen again, it may not have drowned in the swamp or been eaten by a wolf, but led astray by a witch and taken to the Witches’ Village. In the days when I was still little and my grandmother was the eldest in the village, a girl once went to pick bilberries with the others, and while she was picking she grew tired and fell asleep. She was small, the ferns hid her from sight, and the other children moved on and did not notice until they were back in the village and it was already evening. Then they saw that the girl was no longer with them. The young men were sent out; they searched and called in the woods until night fell, and then they came back and had not found her. But the little girl, after she had slept enough, went on and on in the woods. And the more frightened she became, the faster she ran, but she no longer had any idea where she was and only ran farther away from the village, deeper and deeper into wild country. Around her neck, on a strip of bast, she wore a boar’s tooth that her father had given her. He had brought it back from the hunt, and with a stone tool bored a hole through the tooth so that the bast could be drawn through it, and before that he had boiled the tooth three times in boar’s blood and sung good spells, and anyone who wore such a tooth was protected against many kinds of magic. Now a woman appeared from among the trees. She was a witch. She put on a kindly face and said: ‘Greetings, pretty child, have you lost your way? Come along with me, I’ll take you home.’ The child went along. But she remembered what her mother and father had told her, that she should never let a stranger see the boar’s tooth, and so while she walked she slipped the tooth off the strip of bast and tucked it into her belt without being noticed. The woman walked for hours with the girl; it was already night when they reached the village, but it was not our village, it was the Witches’ Village. There the girl was locked up in a dark stable, but the witch went to sleep in her hut. In the morning the witch said: ‘Don’t you have a boar’s tooth with you?” The child said no, she had had one, but she had lost it in the woods, and she showed her necklace with the tooth missing from it. Then the witch took a clay pot filled with earth, and three plants were growing in the earth. The child looked at the plants and asked what they were. The witch pointed to the first plant and said: ‘That is your mother’s life.’ Then she pointed to the second and said: ‘That is your father’s life.’ Then she pointed to the third plant: ‘And that is your own life. As long as the plants are green and growing, you are all alive and well. If one withers, then the one whose life it is falls sick. If one is pulled out, as I am going to pull one out now, then the one whose life it is will surely die.’ She took hold of the plant that meant the father’s life and began tugging at it, and when she had pulled it out a little so that a piece of the white root could be seen, the plant gave a deep sigh…”
At these words the little girl beside Knecht sprang to her feet as if she had been bitten by a snake, screamed, and ran headlong away. She had been sitting for a long time fighting back the terror caused by the story, until she could no longer endure it. One old woman laughed. Other listeners were almost as frightened as the little girl, but they controlled themselves and remained seated. But Knecht, startled out of his trance of fear, also sprang up and ran after the girl. The old woman went on with her story.
