Elvira Madigan and Sixten Sparre

On Monday 22 July 1889, an elderly woman finds two young people in the forest Nørreskoven on Tåsinge while she is out picking raspberries. The two young people are lying on a kind of rain sheet and at first, she thinks they are asleep. As she gets closer, however, she quickly realises that this is not the case. They are dead. Shot.

The dead are 34-year-old Swedish Lieutenant Sixten Sparre, and 21-year-old Elvira Madigan, Danish circus artist and tightrope dancer.

For many years, their deaths have been described as a tragic love story about two people who were so unhappily in love that they saw no other way out than to take their own lives. Sixten was married and had two children.

The two lovers had fled together to Svendborg, where they stayed at Hotel Svendborg. After a month, they travelled on to Tåsinge, probably mostly to escape the unpaid hotel bill, where they both ended their days in a small clearing in Nørreskoven, on Baron Iuel-Brockdorff's land near Valdemars Castle. What has previously been described as a love story is today considered a murder of a young and beautiful woman and a suicide.

In the book "Sixten and Elvira: The Story of a Murder", Kathinka Lindhe, great-granddaughter of Sixten Sparre, describes how that love story was actually the story of a man who could not live up to the expectations of the outside world and saw the young Elvira Madigan as the perfect opportunity to stage his own suicide.

Their story is told in a collection in the Tåsinge Museum, directly opposite Bregninge Church, where you can get even closer to the two people.