The Inexperienced Use of the Black Book is a motif in Scandinavian folklore. In such legends, a servant, maid or someone else unexpectedly happens to find and read the Black Book, thus summoning the devil, while the owner, often a clergyman, is away. The only way to save oneself is to give the devil a task that he can’t solve: to empty a fjord, to untie all knots in a fishing net, to twist a rope of sand, to row against the wind with a boat filled with empty buckets, etc.. The devil is then kept busy until the expert or the owner of the book returns and exorcises the devil away.
It is given an ML (Migratory Legend) number of 3020 and is related to Aarne-Thompson type 325, "Apprentice and Ghost" and type 565, "The Magic Mill".
Famous quotes containing the words black and/or book:
“If a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pineapple, has of those particular relishes.”
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“The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.”
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