The Wild Women of the Schweinschied valley gather at their forest church to worship on every Sunday.
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The Wild Women of the Schweinschied valley gather at their forest church to worship on every Sunday. But to which gods do they pray?
#Germany #folktale #folklore
https://www.patreon.com/posts/spirits-of-112808069
@juergen_hubert
That's a strange one. -
@juergen_hubert
That's a strange one.A lot of folk tales are.
But "wild women" are fairly common in the southern reaches of Germany and the Alps.
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A lot of folk tales are.
But "wild women" are fairly common in the southern reaches of Germany and the Alps.
@juergen_hubert
I like the cave involved too, and the quite detailed description of what the women were like. -
@juergen_hubert
I like the cave involved too, and the quite detailed description of what the women were like.As so often in these tales, the storytellers took a pre-existing local element (the Roman remains) and interwove them with the narrative tropes they had heard in other stories.
This is also why I prefer local legends to fairy tales - such connections to local geography makes the tales feel "more real".
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As so often in these tales, the storytellers took a pre-existing local element (the Roman remains) and interwove them with the narrative tropes they had heard in other stories.
This is also why I prefer local legends to fairy tales - such connections to local geography makes the tales feel "more real".
@juergen_hubert I agree, and I like that you just report the tales as they are left to us. Oral traditions are very sturdy, cities rise and fall, but someone remembers a little and it's often quite accurate - where a ruin is, where a thing happened, who was there at the time and to our eyes what was important, isn't so much. Pehaps not so much a ruin in the vicinity that we can see, but a memory.
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@juergen_hubert I agree, and I like that you just report the tales as they are left to us. Oral traditions are very sturdy, cities rise and fall, but someone remembers a little and it's often quite accurate - where a ruin is, where a thing happened, who was there at the time and to our eyes what was important, isn't so much. Pehaps not so much a ruin in the vicinity that we can see, but a memory.
@juergen_hubert The focus of the story for me is more that the wild women didn't harm children, and needed protection from the Wild Hunt. Also, that they weren't afraid of crosses. It really is a very odd tale, even without the cave mentioned. I presume Roman Ruins were easy enough to spot but only the story tells of this cave.
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A lot of folk tales are.
But "wild women" are fairly common in the southern reaches of Germany and the Alps.
@juergen_hubert
(PS now I'm intrigued what on earth a wild woman was) -
@juergen_hubert I agree, and I like that you just report the tales as they are left to us. Oral traditions are very sturdy, cities rise and fall, but someone remembers a little and it's often quite accurate - where a ruin is, where a thing happened, who was there at the time and to our eyes what was important, isn't so much. Pehaps not so much a ruin in the vicinity that we can see, but a memory.
@TheDailyBurble Yeah, while the people who buy my books or subscribe to my Patreon campaign will get my extensive footnotes and commentaries where I might speculate about what is actually going on, I am not going to rewrite the tales themselves - I will leave that to others.
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@juergen_hubert The focus of the story for me is more that the wild women didn't harm children, and needed protection from the Wild Hunt. Also, that they weren't afraid of crosses. It really is a very odd tale, even without the cave mentioned. I presume Roman Ruins were easy enough to spot but only the story tells of this cave.
The notion that the Wild Huntsman is unable to touch a spirit which sits on a tree stump that has three crosses carved into it is really widespread in Thuringia, Bavaria, and Austria.
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@juergen_hubert
(PS now I'm intrigued what on earth a wild woman was)One of the many names of female wilderness spirits, which also include "moss women", "forest women", and "Blessed Maidens".
There were also some tales of "wild men", though those were less common.
