Abstract

Buried in the thousands of pages of Evald Tang Kristensen’s remarkable collection of nineteenth century Danish folklore is an amusing, yet shockingly obscene, story told by “Bitte” Jens Kristensen, a cobbler and smallholder from northern Jutland. Tang Kristensen’s decision to break the story into three parts, publishing two of those parts separately, and not publishing the most obscene section of the story, is an intriguing case of politically motivated censorship in nineteenth-century Denmark. This censorship and Tang Kristensen’s uncharacteristic editorializing raise important questions concerning distortion of the truth. Tang Kristensen’s deliberate misrepresentation of the stories and his targeted attack on ethnic outsiders in Denmark (in this case Jewish peddlers) resonates with the issues of censorship and distortion that are an important part of contemporary Danish debates about freedom of the press and immigration. These debates have long been part of the Danish media landscape, but have gathered considerable steam in the aftermath of the Muhammad cartoon crisis.

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