part0025

A good story can remain for decades, even centuries, in the collective memory, changing as it passes from generation to generation to suit different times and places.

Sometimes you can dig beneath a legend’s modern veneer to discover its ancient ancestor.

Take the legend called “The Lost Wreck,” which I know best from a version that circulates in Canada. It’s a legend in which an old story is buried—literally—within a new one.

A clipping of the story that appeared in the Edmonton Journal on December 15, 1985, was sent to me by Professor John Johansen of the Department of English at Cam-rose (Alberta) Lutheran College. The story, dateline Jasper (Alberta), is headlined: “Miette Skeleton Mystery As Real As Mountain Mist.”

Sounds like old news already? You ain’t heard nuthin’ yet.

According to the news article, a resident of Jasper, “who preferred to remain nameless,” tells that “a friend of a friend heard about a gruesome discovery made by a work crew widening the road to Miette Hot Springs over the summer.”

While on a lunch break, the story goes, members of a work crew were idly shoving boulders over the edge of the steep road when they suddenly heard the sound of a rock hitting metal.

It turned out that buried among the jagged rocks of the roadside was a wrecked old car with 1950s Canadian license plates. Inside, still looking straight ahead, were the skeletons of four unfortunate passengers.

Local police—named as Chief Dumpleton and Staff Sergeant Rumple—were quoted in the 1985 news story denying that any such discovery had been made. But I didn’t need Dumpleton and Rumple to tell me that this was a very old legend, since I’d heard that clang of rock upon metal somewhere before. “The Fatal Wreck” seems to be a modern version of a Norwegian story from the nineteenth century.

There’s a good translation of the story in Reidar Th. Christiansen’s book Folktales of Norway (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), where it is entitled “The Church Found in the Woods.”

The time of the original story is the Middle Ages, during the period when the bubonic plague (“Black Death”) was ravaging Europe. And the setting, Christiansen writes, “is always a remote valley which the Black Death had struck with overwhelming force.”

The buried object in the older story isn’t a car, of course. It’s a church.

Here’s how the Norwegian legend begins:

“Once there was a hunter who was out shooting grouse. It must have been a long time ago, for he was using a bow and arrow. He caught sight of a bird sitting in a tree and shot at it, but a strange clang was heard as though the arrow had struck a metal object. The hunter went over to see what it was, and underneath some huge trees stood an ancient church.”

The hunter has discovered the site of a village apparently completely wiped out by the plague. The metal his arrow had struck was the old churchbell.

How did this story of long ago and far away move to Canada?

I suspect that it was retold by Norwegian immigrants in Alberta, then updated to describe a forgotten auto accident in the mountains.