Hammer strokes

In a public house in Tondern some profane persons were sitting at cards during divine service.The game became more and more exciting, and in the dispute which followed, one stabbed the other with his knife. The murderer fled. When the dead was to be buried, the coffin was borne to the marketplace and there set down; it was then struck on the lid with a hammer, and the murderer cited. He was at that time in Riga, and afterwards discovered himself to a friend who came thither, to whom he told the hour in which those hammer strokes struck into his heart.

Benjamin Thorpe (1782–1870)

from ‘North German Popular Traditions’ in Northern Mythology (1851)


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