Chapter 17

Sîn muoter was ein wildez wîp...........His mother was a wild woman,

dâ von was sîn kurzer lîp............therefrom was his short body

aller rûch unde stark,...............all over hairy and strong,

sîn gebein was âne mark..............his bones without marrow (solid)

nach dem geslehte der muoter sîn,...............after his mother's stock,

deste sterker muoser sîn. ................the stronger must he be.

In the Wolfdietrich a wild man like this is called waltlunder, and in Laurîn 173. 183 waltmann. The ON. mythology knows of wild wood-wives by the names îviðjur [[giantesses, orgresses]], Sæm. 88ª. 119b, and iarnviðjur [[jarnviðjur: literally - iron-wires. Giants were often associated with iron]], Sn. 13. About the îviðja [[giantesses]] we find at the beginning of the Hrafnagaldr the obscure statement 'elr îviðja [[the giantesses bring forth]],' alit, auget, parit, gignit dryas; îviðja [[giantess, orgress]] is derived from a wood or grove îviðr, of which the Völuspâ 1ª makes mention: 'nio man ek heima, nio îviði' [[I nine worlds remember, nine trees]]; so iarnviðja from iarnviðr, iron wood (see Suppl.). (87)

I cannot properly explain these ON. îviðjur and iarnviðjur [[literally - iron-wire. Giants were often associated with iron]]. The popular belief of today in South-eastern Germany presents in a more intelligible shape the legend of the wild-folk, forest-folk, wood-folk, moss-fok, who are regarded as a people of the dwarfkind residing together, though they come up singly too, and in that case the females especially approximate those higher beings spoken of on p. 432. They are small of stature, but somewhat larger than elves, grey and oldish-looking, hairy and clothed in moss: 'ouch wâren ime diu ôren als eime walttôren vermieset,' his ears like a forest-fool's bemossed (?), Iw. 440. Often holzweibel alone are mentioned, seldomer the males, who are supposed to be not so good-natured and to live deeper in the woods, wearing green garments faced with red, and black three-cornered hats. H. Sachs 1, 407ª brings up holzmänner and holzfrauen, and gives 1, 348c the lament of the wild woodfolk over the faithless world. Schmidt's Reichenfels, pp. 140-8 tells us the Voigtland tradition, and Börner, pp. 188-242 that of the Orlagau; from them I borrow what is characteristic. The little wood-wives come up to wood-cutters, and beg for something to eat, or take it themselves out of their pots; but whatever they have taken or borrowed they make good in some other way, not seldom by good advice. At times they help people in their kitchen work and at washing but always express a great fear of the wild huntsman that pursues them. On the Saale they tell you of a bush-grandmother and her moss-maidens; this sounds like a queen of elves, if not like the 'weird lady of the woods' (p. 407). The little wood-wives are glad to come when people are baking, and ask them, while they are about it, to bake them a loaf too, as big as half a millstone, and it must be left for them at a specified place; they pay it back afterwards, or perhaps bring some of their own baking, and lay it in the furrow for the ploughman, or on the plough, being mightily offended if you refuse it. At other times the wood-wife makes her appearance with a broken little wheelbarrow, and begs you to mend the wheel; then, like Berhta she pays you with the fallen chips, which turn to gold; or if you are knitting, she gives you a ball of thread which you will never have done unwinding. Every time a man twists (driebt, throws) the stem of a young tree till the bark flies off, a wood-wife has to die. When a peasant woman, out of pity, gave the breast to a crying wood-child, the mother came up and made her a present of the bark in which the child was cradled; the woman broke a splinter off and threw it in to her load of wood, but when she got hom she found it was of gold (see Suppl.).

Wood-wives, like dwarfs, are by no means satisfied with the ways of the modern world; but to the reasons given on p. 459 they add special ones of their own. There's never been a good time since people took to counting the dumplings they put in the pot, the loaves they put in the oven, to 'pipping' their bread and putting caraway-seeds in it. Hence their maxim:

Schäl keinen baum, ............No tree ever shall,

erzähl keinen traum, ...........no dream ever tell,

back keinen kümmel ins brot,............bake in thy bread no cummin-seed,

so hilft dir Gott aus aller noth. ..........and God will help in all thy need.

The third line may be 'pip kein brod,' don't pip a loaf. A wood-wife, after tasting some newly-baked bread, ran off to the forest, screaming loud:

Sie haben mir gebacken kümmelbrot,

das bringt diesem hause grosse noth!

(They've baked me caraway-bread, it will bring that house great trouble). And the farmer's prosperity soon declined, till he was utterly impoverished. To 'pip' a loaf is to push the tip of your fingers into it, a common practice in most places. Probably the wood-wives could not carry off a pricked loaf, and therefore disliked the mark; for a like reason they objected to counting. Whether the seasoning with cummin disgusted them as an innovation merely, or in some other connection, I do not know. The rhyme runs thus: 'kümmelbrot, unser tod!' the death of us; or ---'kümmelbrot macht angst und noth.'---Some wood-mannikins, who had long done good service at a mill, were scared away by the miller's men leaving out clothes and shoes for them, Jul. Schmidt, p. 146 (see Suppl.). (88) It is as though, by accepting clothes, the spirits were afraid of suddenly breaking off the relation that subsisted between themselves and mankind. We shall see presently that the home-sprites proper acted on different principles, and even bargained for clothes.

The more these wood-folk live a good many together, the more do they resemble elves, wichtels, and dwarfs; the more they appear singly, the nearer do the females stand to wise women and even goddesses, the males to gigantic fauns and wood-monsters, as we saw in Katzenveit, Gübich and Rübezahl (p. 480). The salvage man with uprooted fir-tree in his hand, such as supports the arms of several princes in Lower Germany, represents this kind of faun; it would be worth finding out at what date he is first mentioned. Grinkenschmied in the mountain (Deut. sag. 1, 232) is also called 'der wilde man.'

In the Romance fairy-tales an old Roman god has assumed altogether the nature of a wood-sprite; out of Orcus (89) has been made an Ital. orco, Neapol. huorco, Fr. ogre (supra, p. 314): he is pictured black, hairy, bristly, but of great stature rather than small, almost gigantic; children losing their way in the wood come upon his dwelling, and he sometimes shows himself good-natured and bestows gifts, oftener his wife (orca, ogresse) protects and saves. (90) German fairy-tales hand over his part to the devil, who springs even more directly from the ancient god of the lower world. Of the invisible-making helmet the orco has nothing left him, on the other hand a dæmonic acuteness of scent is made a characteristic feature, he can tell like a sea-monster the approach of human flesh: 'je sens la chair fraiche,' 'ich rieche, rieche menschenfleisch,' 'ich wittere, wittere menschenfleisch,' 'i schmöke ne Crist,' 'I smell the blood,' 'jeg lugter det paa min höire haand (right hand),' 'her lugter saa kristen mands been,' (91) exactly as the meerminne already in Morolt 3924 says: 'ich smacke diutsche îserngewant,' coats of mail (see Suppl.). The Ital. however has also an uom foresto, Pulci's Morgante 5, 38.

The Gothic neut. skôhsl, by which Ulphilas renders daimonion, Matth. 8, 31. Lu. 8, 27 (only in margin; texts reads unhulþô). 1 Cor. 10, 20. 21, I am disposed to explain by supposing a skôhs, gen. skôhis, or rather skôgs (the h being merely the g softened before sl). It would answer to the ON. skôgr [[forest]] (silva); in all our Gothic fragments the word for forest never occurs, so that in addition to a vidus (p. 376) we may very well conjecture a skôgs. In Sweden the provincialisms skogsnerte, skogsnufva (92) are still used; snerte appears to contain snert gracilis, and snufva to mean anhelans. (93) Now if skôhsl is wood-sprite, (94) there may have been associated with it, as with daimonion, the idea of a higher being, semi-divine or even divine. When we call to mind the sacred, inviolable trees inhabited by spirits (chap. XXI, and Superst. Swed. no. 110, Dan. no. 162), and the forest-worship of the Germani in general (pp. 54-58. 97-8); we can understand why wood-sprites in particular should be invested with a human or divine rather than elvish nature.

Water-sprites exhibit the same double aspect. Wise-women, valkyrs, appear on the wave as swans, they merge into prophetic merwomen and merminnes (p. 434). Even Nerthus and dame Holla bathe in lake or pool, and the way to Holla's abode is through the well, Kinderm. 24. 79.




ENDNOTES:

87. Afzelius 2, 145-7, mentions Swed. löfjerskor, leaf-maids, forest-maids, and compares them with Laufey (p. 246), but the people have little to say about them. Back

88. This agrees wonderfully with what Reusch, pp. 53-5, reports from Prussian Samland:--- A householder at Lapöhnen, to whom the subterraneans had done many services, was grieved at their having such poor clothes, and asked his wife to put some new little coats where they would find them. Well, they took their new outfit, but their leave at the same time, crying, 'paid up, paid up!' Another time they had been helping a poor smith, had come every night and turned out a set of little pots, pans, plates and kettles as bright as could be; the mistress would set a dish of milk for them, which they fell upon like wolves, and cleared to the last drop, washed up the plates and then set to work. The smith having soon become a rich man, his wife sewed them each a pretty little red coat and cap, and left them lying. 'Paid up, paid up!' cried the undergrounders, then quickly slipt into their new finery, and were off, without touching the iron left for them to work at, or ever coming back.---- Another story of the Seewen-weiher (-pond), near Rippoldsau, in the Black Forest (Mone's Anz. 6, 175):--- A lake mannikin liked coming to the folks at Seewen farm, would do jobs there all day, and not return into his lake till evening; they used to serve him up breakfast and dinner by himself. If in giving out tasks they omitted the phrase 'none too much and none too little,' he turned cross, and threw all into confusion. Though his clothes were old and shabby, he never would let the Seewen farmer get him new ones; but when this after all was done, and the new coat handed to the lake-mannikin, one evening, he said, 'When one is paid off one must go; beginning from to-morrow, I come to you no more;' and in spite of all the farmer's apologies he was never seen again.----Jos. Rank's Böhmerwald, p. 217, tells a pretty story of a waschweibel (see washerwife), for whom the people of the house wanted to have shoes made, but she would not hold out her little foot to be measured. They sprinkled the floor with flour, and took the measure of her footprints. When the shoes were made and placed on the bench for her, she fell a-sobbing, turned her little smock-sleeves down again, unlooped the skirt of her frock, then burst away, lamenting loudly, and was seen no more.' That is to say, the wee wife, on coming into the house, had turned up the sleeves of her smock, and looped up her frock, that she might the more easily do any kind of work. Similar tales are told of the brownie, R. Chambers, p. 33. And the same idea lies at the bottom of the first story about wichtelmännerchen in Kinderm. 39. It is a common characteristic, that holds good of wichtels, of subterraneans, of lake-sprites and of wood-folk, but chiefly of male ones who do service to mankind. [Might the objection of showing their feet arise from their being web-footed, like the Swiss härdmändle, especially in the case of water-sprites?] Back

89. See App., Superst. A, 'Orcum invocare' together with Neptune and Diana; Superst. G, extr. from Vintler, 1. 83: 'er hab den orken gesechen.' Beow. 224 has orcneas. pl. of orcne. Back

90. Pentamerone, for the orco 1, 1. 1, 5. 2, 3. 3, 10. 4, 8. For the orca 2, 1. 2, 7. 4, 6. 5, 4. Back

91. Perrault's Petit poucet; Kinderm. 1, 152. 179. 2, 350. 3, 410; Musæus 1, 21; Danske viser 1, 220; Norske folkeeventyr, p. 35. Back

92. Linnæus's Gothlandske resa, p. 312. Faye, p. 42. Back

93. In 1298 Torkel Knutson founded on the Neva a stronghold against the Russians, called Landskrona. An old folk-tale says, there was heard in the forest near the river a continual knocking, as of a stone-cutter. At last a peasant took courage and penetrated into the forest; there he found a wood-sprite hewing at a stone, who, on being asked what that should mean, answered: 'this stone shall be the boundary between the lands of the Swedes and Moskovites.' Forsell's Statistik von Schweden, p. 1. Back

94. To make up an OHG. skuoh and skuohisal is doubtless yet more of a venture. Our scheusal (monstrum), if it comes from scheuen (sciuhan), to shy at, has quite another fundamental vowel; it may however be a corruption. The only very old form I know is the schusel given in the foot-note on p. 269. But the Vocab. of 1482 has scheuhe (larva). Back