Not far from the venue of the Tenth International James Joyce Symposium is a church, Vor Frelsers Kirke, with a superb eighteenth-century spire, so constructed that around the outside of it a stair spirals disconcertingly to the top. There is no truth, my guidebook reassures me while inviting me to make the ascent (‘in good weather only’), in the legend that the builder fell to an untimely death from his newly completed but not entirely stable tower. But if the story is untrue, how has it gained suffcient currency to merit an official denial in a guidebook? And why,in any case, should a guidebook, whose function is to enhance my pleasure by giving me facts about the objects I see, waste its space with a legend I am told to dismiss as false?

Evidently, the story of the hapless builder, irrespective of its historical accuracy, has a vivid appeal which strongly colours the sightseer's experience of the fantastic spire – an appeal that springs no doubt from its connection with the wide-ranging family of mythic and literary texts that work and rework the motif of the building of the tower and the consequent fall. (Leaving James Joyce out of it for the moment, three texts we might think of are the eleventh chapter of Genesis, Ibsen's play The Master Builder, and the ballad of Tim Finnegan.)