Detail map

Germany

4 entries in 4 subareas: 1 at grade A, 3 at grade B. The points fall where the entry was collected, not where the story is set. Hover a point to see the subarea, click it to open the entry.

The entries, in brief

The folklore of Germany documented in this atlas: Nachzehrer, Rübezahl, Frau Holle e Frau Perchta and Klabautermann. Every entry is placed on the map at the point where it was collected or attested — not where the story is set — and carries its declared grade of documentation (1 at grade A, 3 at grade B), with the sources it comes from. The 4 subareas are not an administrative division: folklore lives in cultural areas, which rarely coincide with state borders.

Klabautermann A
The ship’s spirit, invisible, who lives in the hold and makes himself heard hammering on the planking at night. The first to write of him is Heinrich Heine, in the third part of the Nordsee (1826), reporting what the sailors…

Frau Holle e Frau Perchta B
The fairy tale is the most recent level. The ancient level is a calendrical figure of the Twelve Nights who inspects domestic work and the observance of the festival fast: to those who have not spun, or have spun badly, or have…

Nachzehrer B
The dead man stays in the grave — and it is this that distinguishes him from the revenant who walks. He chews the shroud, his own fingers, his limbs, with a sound compared by the sources to that of a pig eating; and as long as…

Rübezahl B
Not the good-natured giant of children's books. In the seventeenth-century corpus he is a demon of the massif, changeable and touchy: he appears as a monk, a raven, a frog, a mule, an old man, a beggar; he unleashes storm, hail…

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