Tatzelwurm

The scree above Unken is loose underfoot and smells of hot stone in August, and in 1779 a hunter named Hans Fuchs came down off it running. What happened next is recorded on a painted board rather than in a book. He was pursued, the memorial says, by Springwuermer, which the same country people also called Tatzelwuermer, and he died im gachen Schrecken, in sudden terror. The painter gave him a small cross above his head to show that the man lying face down in the grass was already gone. The two creatures rearing over him look very much like the dragon that Saint George is busy with on the right-hand side altar of the village church, which tells you what the artist had to work from. The original hangs today in the Haus der Natur in Salzburg. The accounts of that afternoon do not agree on where he actually fell. Unken remembers him outrunning the things, reaching his own farmyard and collapsing in front of it; another telling has him barely getting the story out to his family before his heart stopped on the spot where he met them. He had been picking berries, or he had come down from the Heutal, or he had come out of the Glemmerich. The one fixed point is the board.

The name is younger than the fear. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, the Zurich physician who spent the first decade of the eighteenth century walking Switzerland and writing down what he found, filled part of his 1723 Ouresiphoites helveticus with dragons: a plate opposite page 395 shows a traveller meeting one on a mountain path. Scheuchzer called them dragons and, to his credit, believed almost none of it. A chronicler around 1480 reported a sort of giant four-footed snake surfacing now and then near Zofingen on the Aare. On 26 May 1499 something twenty metres long and shaped, an appalled witness said, like a calf with big ears was seen swimming in Lake Lucerne. None of those creatures was called a Tatzelwurm at the time. The word arrived later and was fitted backwards over the whole heap of Alpine dragon stories, and it stuck because it is such a good word: Tatze, a paw or a claw, welded onto Wurm, the old term for anything long and legless. A worm with hands. That is the whole animal in one compound.

By 1814 the Bernese historian Samuel Studer could write of the Aare gorge that a serpent creature was said to live there with an almost round head and very round paws, and that it showed itself from time to time. Three years later Rudolf Wyss compared the same gorge to Dante’s Acheron. In 1890 Josef Viktor Widmann stood near its exit and noticed a niche cut into the rock that seemed made to measure for whatever the place was supposed to contain. The gorge is a kilometre and a bit of green water hammering through a slot two hundred metres deep, and for centuries nobody went in.

Ulrich Magin, who gathered and sorted more than four hundred and thirty eyewitness accounts for his study of the creature, found no animal in them so much as a shape that will not hold still. Sometimes the head is a snake’s, sometimes a cat’s, sometimes a child’s. Sometimes there are two forelegs, sometimes half a dozen, sometimes a fringe of small ones like a monstrous millipede. The skin is smooth, then scaled. There are wings, then no wings. It is shy; it is aggressive and venomous; a few people thought it good eating. In Salzburg it goes by Bergstutz and its bite is supposed to kill where you stand. Its other names are all descriptions of behaviour. Springwurm, because of the way it moves, in bounds rather than a glide. Haselnusswurm, because it turns up in hazel scrub and seems to like hazel, along with berries, mice and chestnuts.

Cornered, it is said to whistle, a single high note that leaves a person paralysed for as much as ten hours. Where it drags itself across sand the sand is supposed to fuse into glass, which is the last remnant of dragon fire in a creature that has otherwise lost almost everything. It does not breed. A cock lays a black egg in a lake, the sun broods it, and out comes a Tatzelwurm that may in time grow into a Lindworm. That is the basilisk’s birth exactly, borrowed whole.

Picture it, then, at the mouth of a hole it has dug for itself in the limestone, lying out in the last of the afternoon with its two front claws crossed over the rock lip and its tail still in the dark, watching the hazel for movement. Nothing about the scene is dramatic. It eats a mouse and goes back inside.

The nineteenth century wanted very badly to catch one. Archduke Johann offered a substantial sum for a specimen, dead or alive. In the 1930s a Salzburg museum went so far as to keep a display space empty and waiting. Then in the spring of 1935 a photographer of Russian extraction working around Meiringen produced a picture. He described the animal at the Hotel Baer: roughly eighty centimetres long, twenty-five across at the widest, a very thick snake with front feet, brown, mottled light and dark, scaled. The photograph showed something with a shark’s mouth, a monkey’s nose and almond eyes set to the sides of the skull. The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung ran it across two issues, sent staff into the Haslital twice, and posted a thousand Reichsmark for a live capture. Even the Neue Zuercher Zeitung gave the business several full pages. Nobody collected. The picture has been doubted ever since.

Its powers are all defensive and all local. It can hide better than anything in the Alps, in scree, in crevices, in the mine adits and tunnels its name keeps pointing at. It has the whistle, the venom, and a reputation loud enough to keep herders off certain slopes without needing to appear at all. What it cannot do is anything at scale. It does not fly, does not burn villages, does not hoard gold; the Lombard plain has a proper monster for that, and this one has a burrow. It is small enough to be fought with a hunting knife, which is precisely what an Austrian official named von Drasenovich said he did, driving a wounded half-metre specimen off into a crack in the ground. When zoologists in the 1930s tried to make it real they reached for the Gila monster and half proposed a European Heloderma, and other zoologists said at once that people were probably seeing an unfamiliar reptile, or an otter crossing dry country far from water, or nothing at all.

No one has ever produced one. The museum shelf in Salzburg stayed empty, the reward went unpaid, and the creature drifted into the confectioners’ windows in Meiringen, where it is sold to children in chocolate with a marzipan tongue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Tatzelwurm?

The Tatzelwurm is a legendary creature of Alpine folklore, reported from Switzerland, Austria, Bavaria, South Tyrol and the French Alps. Its name combines the German Tatze, meaning paw or claw, with Wurm, an old word for a serpent or dragon, and it is usually described as a short thick snake with a cat-like head and two clawed forelegs. It is regarded as a small surviving relative of the dragon and the lindworm.

What does the Tatzelwurm look like?

Descriptions do not agree. Across more than four hundred collected eyewitness accounts the Tatzelwurm ranges from half a metre to about two metres long, with a head variously compared to a cat’s, a snake’s or a child’s, usually two forelegs but sometimes many small ones, and skin that is smooth in some reports and scaled in others. The one consistent element is the combination of a serpent’s body with visible clawed feet.

Is the Tatzelwurm dangerous?

In folklore, yes. It is said to bite with venom that kills on the spot, particularly in its Salzburg form the Bergstutz, and to give a piercing whistle that leaves a person paralysed for up to ten hours. The most famous casualty is the hunter Hans Fuchs of Unken, whose 1779 memorial records that he died of fright after being pursued by the creatures.

Was the Tatzelwurm ever photographed?

A photographer working near Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland claimed to have photographed one in the spring of 1935, and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung published the picture across two issues and offered a thousand Reichsmark for a live specimen. Nothing was ever caught and the reward was never paid. The authenticity of the photograph has been disputed since it appeared.

Where does the Tatzelwurm live?

It is said to inhabit high stony ground across the Alps, sheltering in caves, rock crevices and mine tunnels that it digs for itself, which is the source of its alternative name Stollenwurm, meaning adit worm. Particular haunts include the Aare gorge near Meiringen in Switzerland, the Salzburg mountains around Unken, the Tatzelwurm waterfall near Oberaudorf in Upper Bavaria, and the hills of South Tyrol.

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