accordingly. At Wiedingharde in Schleswig when a stranger comes to the threshing-floor he is asked “Shall I teach you the flail-dance.” If he says yes, they put the arms of the threshing-flail round his neck (as if he were a sheaf of corn), and press them together so tightly that he is nearly choked.[1] In some parishes of Wermland (Sweden) when a stranger enters the threshing-floor where the threshers are at work, they say that “they will teach him the threshing-song.” Then they put a flail round his neck and a straw rope about his body. Also, as we have seen, if a stranger woman enters the threshing-floor, the threshers put a flail round her body and a wreath of corn-stalks round her neck, and call out, “See the Corn-woman! See! that is how the Corn-maiden looks!”[2]
In these customs, observed both on the harvest-field and on the threshing-floor, a passing stranger is regarded as a personification of the corn, in other words, as the corn-spirit; and a show is made of treating him like the corn by mowing, binding, and threshing: him. If the reader still doubts whether European peasants can really regard a passing stranger in this light, the following custom should set their doubts at rest. During the madder-harvest in the Dutch province of Zealand a stranger passing by a field where the people are digging the madder-roots will sometimes call out to them Koortspillers (a term of reproach). Upon this, two of the fleetest runners
- ↑ W. Mannhardt, op. cit. p. 42.
- ↑ Ib. p. 42. See above, p. 343. In Thüringen a being called the Rush-cutter used to be much dreaded. On the morning of St. John’s Day he was wont to walk through the fields with sickles tied to his ankles cutting avenues in the corn as he walked. To detect him, seven bundles of brushwood were silently threshed with the flail on the threshing-floor, and the stranger who appeared at the door of the barn during the threshing was the Rush-cutter, Witzschel, Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Thüringen, p. 221. With the Binsenschneider compare the Bilschneider. Panzer, Beitrag zur deutschen Mythologie, ii. 210 sq.
