Moss People

On a wild night in the Silesian hills, when the wind came off the mountains with something like a voice in it, the little people who lived in the trees broke cover and ran. They came out of the bark and the root-holes in a grey scatter, none of them taller than a child of three, their small bodies shaggy with green moss, and they ran because the thing loose in the dark behind them was the hunt of the dead, and the hunt wanted them. Some did not make it to morning.

These were the moss folk, the Moosleute, and they went by a crowd of names across the German lands. In one valley they were the wild folk, the wilde Leute; in the next the wood folk or the forest folk, the Holzleute and Waldleute; an old word, Schrat, served for a single one of them. They were thickest in the southeast, in the Bavarian forests and the Upper Palatinate, through the Vogtland and Saxony and over the hills into Bohemia. Most of the ones people actually met were women, which is why the whole race is so often called the wood-wives, but there were men among them too, and in some districts they answered to a queen, an old mossy matriarch called the Buschgroßmutter, the shrub grandmother.

Jacob Grimm set them down plainly: little men and little women, clad in moss round and round, grey and old-looking and hairy, found in the heath and in the dark places of the woods and in holes under the ground, where they lay on the green moss itself. A moss man stood about three feet high. Where the wood folk proper went dressed, the moss folk were shaggy and unkempt, their faces sometimes furred over with the same moss that clothed them, their feet in little wooden shoes. Not every teller made them ugly. Some gave the women gold hair and green cloth spun fine, but small, always small, small enough to sit in the crook of a branch or fold themselves into the gap behind an oven.

Their lives were in the trees, and this was no figure of speech. Each of the moss folk was tied to a particular tree the way a nut is tied inside its shell, and the bond ran both ways. Rub at the inner bark of that tree until it loosened and the creature bound to it sickened and died. So the fortunes of the moss folk and the fortunes of the forest were a single thing, and the arrival of men with axes was, for them, a slow catastrophe wearing the face of ordinary work. You could kill one without ever seeing it.

For all that, they made good neighbours to the households that treated them well. A moss woman would come to a farm kitchen at first light, when the fog stood smoking between the trunks, and ask to borrow a loaf or the loan of a tool, and she paid such debts many times over, with a handful of wood chips that were gold by dark, or a word of counsel that steered a family clear of ruin. Fed with crusts and dumplings and dried pears, anything at all but meat, the moss folk slipped into stable and byre after nightfall and finished the work left undone. In plague years they were worth more than any physician, for the wood-women came out from among the trees to show the villages which herbs would break a fever or hold the sickness at the door.

The same hands dealt the sickness out. A moss person could send a plague as readily as lift one, and one carrying a grudge was a dangerous thing to have living in your timber. They wanted things from people, too. They asked nursing mothers for milk to feed their own young, and they coveted human infants, the healthy ones most of all, carrying a child off and leaving one of their own blood squalling in the cradle. The old dread of the changeling had their fingerprints on it.

And every year, when the nights turned long, they ran. The moss folk were the favoured quarry of the Wild Hunt, that ghostly company of the dead which swept howling through the winter woods behind its huntsman. In Silesia the little hunted women were called the Rüttelweiber, the shaking women, because they trembled without stop. There was one refuge, and it lay in a woodsman’s hands. If a man felling a tree cut a cross into the stump as the trunk came down and spoke the blessing over it in the right order, a hunted moss person could throw herself onto that stump and sit there safe while the hunt tore past overhead. Get the words backward and the stump was only wood.

A cross could save them. So, strangely, could a smell they could not abide, and that smell was caraway. Caraway bread was intolerable to the moss folk, and the sight of a caraway loaf sent them off wailing the one blunt line the record keeps in their mouths, Kümmelbrot, unser Tod, caraway bread, our death. The same country heads held both beliefs at once, the saving cross and the banishing seed, and felt no strain in it. Where the moss folk came from, the stories part ways. Grimm placed them in the oldest layer of the German imagination, among the wild people said to have lived on the hilltops when the stones were still soft, before farmers pushed them back into the deep woods. Later folklorists read them as the forest itself grown a face, the green life of the trees walking about in a grey coat, keeping its accounts, remembering every kindness and every axe.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Moss people?

The Moss people, or Moosleute, are a race of small forest spirits from German folklore, also called the wood folk or the wild folk. They live inside the trees of the woodland, stand no taller than a young child, and are clad in moss; most of those who appear in the tales are women, which is why they are often called the wood-wives.

What do the Moss people do to humans?

The Moss people borrow bread and tools from the farms at the forest’s edge and repay the favour generously with gold, good advice, or knowledge of healing herbs, and during epidemics the wood-women come out of the trees to show villagers which plants will cure the sick. They also have a darker side: a slighted Moss person can send disease, ask a nursing mother for her milk, or steal a human baby and leave a changeling of its own kind in the cradle.

Why does the Wild Hunt chase the Moss people?

The Moss people are the favoured quarry of the Wild Hunt, the spectral host of the dead that rides through the winter forest behind its huntsman, and in Silesia the hunted moss-women were called Rüttelweiber, the “shaking women,” for their constant trembling. A Moss person can escape only by reaching the stump of a freshly felled tree into which the woodsman has carved a cross and spoken the blessing in the correct order, then sitting on it safe until the hunt has swept past.

How can a Moss person be killed or driven away?

A Moss person’s life is bound to a particular tree, and rubbing the inner bark of that tree until it loosens will kill the creature. They can also be driven off by learning and speaking one of their names, or by offering them caraway bread, which they hate so intensely that they flee crying “Kümmelbrot, unser Tod” (caraway bread, our death).

Where do the Moss people come from?

The Moss people belong to the oldest layer of German forest belief, recorded across Bavaria, the Vogtland, Saxony, Silesia, and Bohemia by folklorists such as Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Mannhardt. Grimm placed them among the ancient “wild folk” said to have lived on the land when the stones were still soft, while later scholars understood them as spirits of the trees and the growing wood themselves.

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