Waldgeist

Across the Upper Palatinate and up into Bohemia, a woodsman finishing a felling would cut three crosses into the top of the stump before he walked away. The marks were not piety. They were sanctuary, a hiding place the size of a hand, and they were cut because the forest had asked for them. Something small was being hunted through those trees, and a stump with three crosses in it was the only door that would open.

That something has a name in German, and the name is a problem. Waldgeist means forest spirit, and it covers everything. When the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens took up the subject in 1932 it opened by admitting defeat: no clean line can be drawn between forest spirits and tree spirits, or between either and the wild folk, the wild women, the Tyrolean Fanggen, house spirits, dwarfs. Graber’s Carinthian collection uses Waldgeist as a bag word for witches, giants and dwarfs together. Jacob Grimm had already noticed the pattern a century earlier: the more these beings live in troops, the more they resemble elves and wichtels and dwarfs, and the more they appear singly, the closer the women drift toward wise women and even goddesses, and the men toward giant monsters of the woods. There is no single Waldgeist. There is a category, and the category leaks at every edge.

What the category holds are local names, and the local names are specific. In Franconia, the Upper Palatinate, the Egerland and the Vogtland they are Holzfräulein and Moosweiblein, wood ladies and moss wives. In the Eifel, in Hessen, in Salzburg and Tirol they are the wilde Leute. Bohemia has Waldfrauen and Waldmänner. Tirol adds Fanggen, Fänken, Nörgel and the Salige Fräulein. Silesia has the Rüttelweiber. The word Waldgeist is what nineteenth-century scholarship laid over the top of all of them.

Where the sources agree, they agree closely. A wood-wife is small, rarely more than three feet, and looks weathered rather than merely old: the face wrinkled and split like bark, the hair matted, the whole body heavily haired. Her clothes are Baumbart, the grey beard-moss off the branches, which she also spins into yarn. She washes her face in dew, and at first light she drags her body through the wet meadow and dries herself on wool moss. She sleeps under a root or in a hollow trunk or in a hut of moss, and in some districts she carries a name taken straight off the tree: Hochrinde, Rohrinde, high bark and reed bark. The men of the same family come off rougher. The Waldschrat, whose name runs back through Middle High German waltschrat to Old High German scrat and scrato, glossed in the manuscripts as pilosus and satyrus and faunus, is shaggy and half animal, his eyebrows grown together, his teeth like a wolf’s.

They are not fixed to one tree the way a tree spirit is. They wander. Their lives run on the same sap all the same, and the rule that follows is exact and unforgiving: as often as a person twists a sapling on the stem until the bast springs loose, a wood-wife dies. This is why the wood-wives teach. Peel no tree, they say. Do not tear out a bearing tree. The full version of the advice is a rhyme, and it wanders off the subject of trees almost at once: peel no tree, tell no dream, bake no caraway into the bread, and God will help you out of every trouble. Break the terms and the servant goes. They have baked me caraway bread, one of them says on her way out the door, and that will bring this house great sorrow.

Then there is the hunting. In the Giant Mountains the local wild huntsman, the Nachtjäger, rides down the Rüttelweiber. In the Upper Palatinate the pursuit has its own specialists inside the Wild Hunt, the Holzhetzer, named for nothing except the chase they run on the Holzfräulein. If one is caught she is torn apart. The only shelter is a stump signed with three crosses, which is why the wood-wives come to the villages and ask, in that flat practical way folklore has, for three axe-strokes in the stumps and in the wagon poles. Sometimes one of them runs out of forest and takes refuge in a farmhouse instead, and stays, and becomes a house spirit by accident.

Those that stay work. They mind the byre, spin, watch the children, and take payment in food that has to be given in a particular way: a little flour and water poured into the oven before baking, the first Krapfen out of the fat, the first slice off the loaf, the scraps left round the rim of the dish. Dumplings and loaves must not be counted, because a counted loaf cannot be quietly taken. Those that stay outside are paid in the field, with a bundle of flax or corn left standing at harvest, a few seeds thrown into the bushes at sowing, sometimes a little hut built for them when the flax comes up. What comes back is generous and slightly odd. A farm woman who nursed a forest child was handed a lapful of bark, threw most of it away, and found the rest had turned to gold. A poor woman was given a ball of yarn that never ran short until she lent it to a neighbour, and then there was no yarn at all. Comb their tangled hair for them and they pay for that too.

They know things. Wood-wives are healers and herb-women who can see an illness coming before it arrives. Eat burnet and valerian, they told people during the plague, and the plague will pass you by. The two wood-wives at the Rodenstein said that if the farmers understood what the wild white heather and the wild white salves were good for, they could afford to hoe with silver mattocks. One of them refused to fetch water from the village well because there was coughing and sneezing in it, and every household in the village fell sick except the one she served.

The bigger forms are worse company. Bohemia has the Heemann, a giant wood spirit named after his own call, he, he, who leaps onto the backs of travellers and kills anyone who answers him. There is the Wouze in his bear skin, kept for frightening children. There is the Pfiffer, giant-sized, whistling and clattering through the timber, who killed the charcoal-burner who went looking for him. The Waldmann of the Rosental came down to poor forest households for his dinner until somebody handed him a bowl of scalding porridge. The wild wood-men of the older tales take women by force, and the child of that is usually a changeling. Christianity took the whole rough end of the family and restyled it as Waldteufel, forest devils, which is roughly what you would expect.

Everything that can destroy them comes from the same place their power does. Their lives sit inside living wood, so bark-stripping kills them. Their service is a debt, so paying it off ends it: give a Holzfräulein new clothes and she weeps, says she had almost been released and must now suffer the whole term over again, and goes. Count the food, curse in the house, mock her, ask a forest wife her name after marrying her, strike her, and she is gone by morning. The Hunt takes the rest.

Nobody in those villages thought they were gods. Even so, the Waldfrau kept turning up in Perchta’s clothes, taking flax offerings in the twelve holy nights, keeping the woods empty of people for the length of them, bringing her broken wagon to a farmer’s yard to be mended and paying in shavings that became gold, until the folklorists were left arguing whether the wood-wife had picked up a goddess or the goddess had grown out of the wood-wife. The Moosfräulein even had a queen, the Buschgroßmutter, the bush grandmother, who lived deep in and showed herself rarely. What is left of her is a piece of weather talk. When the mist lifts off the hills after a thunderstorm in Silesia, the bush-wife is going home. Around Zittau, when the hills steam, she is making coffee.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Waldgeist?

Waldgeist is German for forest spirit, and in folklore it functions as a collective term rather than the name of one being. It covers the moss-clad wood-wives of Franconia and the Upper Palatinate, the wild folk of Hessen and Tirol, the shaggy Waldschrat, and giant forest spirits such as the Bohemian Heemann. Folklorists writing on the subject have admitted openly that the category has no firm borders.

What does a Waldgeist look like?

The female forest spirits are described as small, rarely over three feet tall, with faces wrinkled and cracked like bark, matted hair, heavily haired bodies, and clothing spun from grey beard-moss. The male forms are rougher: the Waldschrat is shaggy and half animal, with eyebrows grown together and teeth like a wolf’s. Forest giants such as the Wouze appear wrapped in bear skin.

How is a Waldgeist killed or driven away?

A wood-wife’s life is tied to living wood, so twisting a young tree on the stem until the bark springs loose is said to kill one. More often they are driven off rather than killed: a gift of new clothes ends their service, and counting the bread or dumplings, cursing, or mocking them will make a Waldgeist leave a household permanently.

Why did people cut three crosses into tree stumps?

Three crosses cut with an axe into a stump, or into a wagon pole, gave the forest spirits a place of sanctuary from the Wild Hunt. In the Giant Mountains the night huntsman chased the moss-wives, and in the Upper Palatinate the Holzhetzer rode inside the Wild Hunt for the sole purpose of running them down. A wood-wife who was caught was torn apart.

What did people leave out for the Waldgeister?

Households paid them in food offered a particular way: flour and water poured into the oven before baking, the first Krapfen out of the fat, the first slice off the loaf, and the scraps left round the rim of a dish. Outdoors they were paid in the field, with a bundle of flax or corn left standing at harvest and a few seeds thrown into the bushes at sowing time.

Related Entries

Moss Maiden, Moss people, Erlking, Wild Hunt, Perchta, Kobold, Heinzelmännchen, Changeling, Woodwose, Wild man, Green Man, Leshy, Skogsrå, Ghillie Dhu, Dryad