Sennentuntschi

She sat in the corner of the hut for the whole of the alpine summer, a bundle of straw and rags in a dress nobody’s wife would miss, with hair the men had fixed to her head and a face somebody had cut out badly. They set a bowl in front of her at supper. They talked to her when the cloud came down over the pass and there was nothing else in the world to talk to. Somewhere towards the end of August, in most versions of this story, she answered.

The alp is the setting and the alp explains almost everything. From early summer until the descent in autumn, the high pastures above the tree line were worked by men and boys and nobody else, weeks of cold mornings, cowbells, wet wool, curd and whey and smoke, with the nearest village a long walk down. Out of that boredom, and out of something less comfortable than boredom, the herdsmen build a woman. Wood, straw, rags, sacking, hair. In some tellings they go further and baptise her, which the stories treat as the real crime, worse by an order of magnitude than anything else they do. Then they feed her, play with her, and take her to bed by turns.

The names shift from valley to valley. Sennenpuppe and Sennpoppa in the plain German of the collectors, Hausäli in some places, Tuntschi or Toggel elsewhere, and in the Liechtenstein version the Guschger Sennenpuppe, named for the alp it belongs to. The legend runs from the Bernese Alps through Uri and Graubünden and the St Gallen Oberland into Liechtenstein, Vorarlberg, Tyrol and Carinthia, with variants in the Upper Valais, Styria and Upper Bavaria. Stephan Kunz, who put the figure at the centre of a museum exhibition in Chur in 2015, counted seventy separate versions in Switzerland alone. Folklorists began writing them down around 1840. One of the most unnerving was taken down in Uri in the early 1920s by Josef Müller, the hospital chaplain at Altdorf, who filed it under a heading that names the sacrilegious baptism outright.

The Uri version runs like this. Three servants on the Wyssenboden alp above Bürglen build a figure and call her Zurrimutzi. She turns out to be useful. She cooks, washes, mends their clothes, helps drive and milk the cattle, and for a season the arrangement suits everybody. Then the weather turns and the men make ready to bring the herd down, and Zurrimutzi announces that she is staying, and that one of them is staying with her. They draw lots. The two who lose nothing walk down with the cows. When they look back up at the hut, the roof is covered with something red, and it is the third man’s skin, spread out to dry.

What she actually looks like, the tales mostly decline to say, which is its own kind of answer: the horror of the thing is that she looks like whatever a lonely man decided to make her look like. There is exactly one object in the world that carries the name. The folklorist Peter Egloff bought it in 1978 from the last inhabitant of Masciadon, a hamlet above Cauco in the Calanca valley of Graubünden, and handed it to the Rätisches Museum in Chur in 1986. It is forty centimetres tall, wood and cloth and real human hair, and its mouth is cut open. Andrea Kauer, who directs the museum, describes explicit genitals, large breasts, a bared lower body, and a face that will not let visitors settle. The museum’s own card records that herdsmen used it as a substitute wife. That has never been proved. What is certain, and this is Kauer’s point, is that it was not a child’s toy.

The creature’s powers are all consequences of how it was made. It speaks, which the men never intended. It works, which flatters them into forgetting what is sitting at their table. It remembers every single thing, in order. It is strong enough to take a grown herdsman apart on a roof, and patient enough to wait a whole season to do it. Its limits are just as strict. It has no reach beyond the alp and no interest in anyone who did not lay a hand on it. It takes one man, the one the lot falls to, and it does not follow the others down. Nobody in any of these stories is killed for being in the wrong place.

The legend is old in the Alps but the motif is older still and came from somewhere else. Egloff traces it to Ovid, to Pygmalion carving a woman out of ivory and Venus granting the wish, and notes that the erotic happy ending of the Roman poem is inverted somewhere in its long journey north into church-shadowed mountain country, where the same wish gets a man flayed. The standing scholarly treatment is Gotthilf Isler’s monograph Die Sennenpuppe, published in Basel in 1971 as volume 52 of the Swiss Folklore Society’s series, which reads the whole cycle as religious rather than merely lurid. Isler and Egloff agree on the function: this is a warning tale, an instrument of social control aimed at a temporary all-male society that was genuinely isolated and not always safe. In 1963 the collector Arnold Büchli recorded a version from Donat Maissen of Cumpadials in the Surselva, about the alp Naustgel, in which the farmhands amuse themselves with the doll, and do indecent things with it, as Maissen said the crews on the alps often did in front of the small herd boys. Büchli added a note underneath. Maissen had never let his own sons go up to the alp.

The name you know it by is more recent than the tale. The Basel writer Hansjörg Schneider turned the material into a dialect play in 1972, first staged in the late-night studio of the Zurich Schauspielhaus; his herdsmen assemble their tuntschi out of a wine bottle, dung forks, straw and cheese. When Swiss television broadcast the recording on 4 May 1981, after dark and after some hesitation, the complaint that landed was not about the sex. It was about blasphemy, for the animating of the doll. The prosecution was dropped by the end of the year and the broadcasting regulator threw out the appeal, on the grounds that the play belonged to Swiss culture. Jost Meier set it as an opera. Michael Steiner filmed it in 2010. The doll in Chur has outlasted all of them, and it is still only forty centimetres tall.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Sennentuntschi?

A Sennentuntschi is a doll made by alpine herdsmen out of straw, rags, wood and hair, which comes to life and takes revenge on the men who abused it. The name combines Senn, the word for an alpine dairyman, with Tuntschi, a dialect word for a doll. The legend is told across the German-speaking Alps under many local names, including Sennenpuppe, Sennpoppa, Hausäli and Toggel.

What happens in the Sennentuntschi legend?

Herdsmen alone on a high summer pasture build a female doll, feed it, talk to it, in some versions baptise it, and use it sexually. Near the end of the alpine season the doll wakes, speaks, and refuses to let them leave without one of them. In the best-known Uri telling the men draw lots, and the two who go down the mountain look back to see the loser’s skin spread across the roof of the hut.

Is there a real Sennentuntschi?

There is one object that goes by the name, held by the Rätisches Museum in Chur. It is forty centimetres tall, made of wood, cloth and real human hair, with its mouth cut open, and it was bought in 1978 from the last inhabitant of the hamlet Masciadon in the Calanca valley of Graubünden. The museum’s record says herdsmen used it as a substitute wife, but that has never been proved; what is certain is that it was not a child’s toy.

Where does the Sennentuntschi legend come from?

Folklorists began recording versions around 1840, and the tale is attested from the Bernese Alps through Uri, Graubünden, Liechtenstein, Vorarlberg, Tyrol and Carinthia, with about seventy variants known in Switzerland alone. The underlying motif of an artificial woman brought to life reaches back to Ovid’s story of Pygmalion. The standing academic study is Gotthilf Isler’s Die Sennenpuppe, published in Basel in 1971.

Why was the 1981 Sennentuntschi broadcast a scandal?

Swiss television screened a recording of Hansjörg Schneider’s 1972 dialect play late on 4 May 1981, and the criminal complaint that followed accused the broadcaster of blasphemy rather than indecency, because the play showed a doll being given a soul. The case was dropped before the end of the year, and the broadcasting complaints body later rejected an appeal on the grounds that the work belonged to Swiss culture.

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