Michele Simonsen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Michèle Simonsen was born and grew up in Paris. Aged 21 she moved to London and five years later to Denmark. She has been a Senior lecturer at the university of Copenhagen in French language and Literature and Folklore Studies. She has written many books and articles on oral literature ( folktales, ballads, legends, etc.), festive traditions and folk rituals, and the theory and methods of Folkloristics.She is also a children writer, and has published 22 books in France and in Denmark in almost every genre:
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Papers by Michele Simonsen
Flies France eBooks, 2014
Presses Universitaires de France eBooks, 1981
Utah State University Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2017
In 1798 the Danish priest Joachim Junge, in an ethnographic description of his parishioners’ ways... more In 1798 the Danish priest Joachim Junge, in an ethnographic description of his parishioners’ ways of life, gave a rational explanation to the extraordinary accounts of ‘goat-feeted’ and ‘one eyed’ people who were supposed to live near the polar circle. The goat-feeted people may have been so named because they climbed up mountains with a goat’s speed, probably with the help of skis of a sort; whereas the ‘one-eyed’ probably wore a kind of travelling cloak with only a narrow slit for the eyes; and the ‘wolfsmen’ could be just Nordic people entirely dressed in animal skins as protection against the polar winter. In the same way, he explains the fact that pregnant women, afraid of werewolves, always take a young boy with them if they have to go out after dusk, by the superstition’s positive function: it prevented them from falling down, hampered as they were in their walk when heavily pregnant.1 To discover a more satisfying reason, and one that related more to the people who said those kinds of things, as to why pregnant women had to be careful about werewolves, we will have to look at the legends of about a century later.2
Flies France eBooks, 2014
Presses Universitaires de France eBooks, 1981
Utah State University Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2017
In 1798 the Danish priest Joachim Junge, in an ethnographic description of his parishioners’ ways... more In 1798 the Danish priest Joachim Junge, in an ethnographic description of his parishioners’ ways of life, gave a rational explanation to the extraordinary accounts of ‘goat-feeted’ and ‘one eyed’ people who were supposed to live near the polar circle. The goat-feeted people may have been so named because they climbed up mountains with a goat’s speed, probably with the help of skis of a sort; whereas the ‘one-eyed’ probably wore a kind of travelling cloak with only a narrow slit for the eyes; and the ‘wolfsmen’ could be just Nordic people entirely dressed in animal skins as protection against the polar winter. In the same way, he explains the fact that pregnant women, afraid of werewolves, always take a young boy with them if they have to go out after dusk, by the superstition’s positive function: it prevented them from falling down, hampered as they were in their walk when heavily pregnant.1 To discover a more satisfying reason, and one that related more to the people who said those kinds of things, as to why pregnant women had to be careful about werewolves, we will have to look at the legends of about a century later.2