Parson Sausage

^{Note on the title}

There was once upon a time a girl who had been allowed to go to church to attend Mass. But she lived far away in the forest, and the church road was so long that she had to leave home early on Saturday. She walked and she walked, but however she walked, she did not arrive; she had trodden wild grass. She walked and she ran, but she didn’t find the church, nor did she come to folk, until late in the evening; then she came to a cabin far away in the forest. A light shone from the window, and inside a woman went about, cooking and tidying. So the girl went in and asked for a place to stay.

“God help me for a house this is!” said the woman; “I cannot let you stay, I cannot; it would be better to stay in the forest, beneath the sky, than to stay here,” she said, “for here dwell twelve robbers; they are my sons, and if they see you, they will kill you on the spot!”

But the girl said it was better to have a roof above her head, no matter how wrong, than to be out in the forest, beneath the night sky. Well, then she would be allowed to stay, and when they heard the robbers coming, the woman hid her as well as she could, in a corner behind some clutter which lay there. Then came all twelve faring, and between them they had the parson in his parson’s cassock, and in full church decor. They laid him on a stool and stabbed him in his throat with a butcher’s knife, butchered him like any other pig and hung him up by his hind legs. They put his blood in a butcher’s pail, made sausages from it, and cooked and roasted and ate well enough.

The girl did not feel very brave, and she did not think that her life was worth many shillings, there where she lay. But when they had eaten their fill, they settled down, the robbers, and early on Sunday morning the woman woke the girl up, put her on the right path, and then gave her some sausages as food along the way, and bade her hurry so that the robbers wouldn’t take her. But that was something she needn’t bid her, for the girl ran as quickly as she could, and then some. And when the day began to to dawn in the forest, and she glimpsed the church, then she heard a rumbling; the robbers were after her, and wanted to catch her, and so she flew away from the fields, as she thought, and when she saw the church congregation standing on the church hill, waiting for the parson, she swung the sausages in the air, crying: “Parson sausage, parson sausage!” - Then the congregation understood what had become of the parson, and so they immediately took the robbers. Some they beat, and some they hanged, and some they rolled in nail barrels. They caught eleven, but the twelfth escaped, and he walks and crawls and skulks, and if you aren’t very good, then he’ll leap down across all the hills and take you. There he is!

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1. This tale has been printed but twice: once in Norske Illustreret Kalender (1853), and once in Østberg, Henning. Asbjørnsen og Moes eventyr og sagn en bibliografi (2011). It has been called “The Secret Tale,” and considered an “abominable tale,” for reasons that are quickly apparent. I doubt I will be including it in the complete collection, but who knows?  ↩