Wolpertinger

Also Known As: also Wolperdinger, Woiperdinger, Woipertinger, Volpertinger, Walpertinger, Wulpertinger; Austrian counterpart Raurackl; related to the Rasselbock of Thuringia, the Dilldapp of the Alemannic lands and the Elwetritsch of the Palatinate
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Germanic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A composite woodland animal whose parts are drawn from whatever else lives in the same forest, so that no two specimens are alike.
Role in Mythos: It is the creature Bavarian innkeepers and hunters produce to test the credulity of outsiders, and the standing local answer to anyone who asks what lives up in the woods.
Relation to Humans: It exists almost entirely at the point of contact between locals and visitors, shown as a mounted trophy behind a bar or sold as a souvenir of regional wildlife. Nobody is afraid of it, and nobody who grew up with it has ever expected to meet one.

Behind the bar of an old Bavarian inn, above the taps and the row of stoneware steins, something small stands under glass. It has the face of a hare. Short roe antlers rise from between its ears, no longer than a finger, still carrying their pale burr. One pheasant wing is folded against a flank of squirrel fur that has gone the colour of weak tea, and the whole thing smells faintly of dust and old smoke. Every visitor looks at it twice. The landlord, if asked, will say it was taken in the woods above the village, and he will say it without moving a muscle in his face.

The Wolpertinger is the animal southern Germany keeps for guests. It belongs to Bavaria and to Baden-Württemberg, to the forested country where the land begins to climb, and it belongs there in a very specific way: not as a thing the villagers fear at night, but as a thing they put on a shelf. Its body is an assembly. A hare or rabbit usually supplies the head and the long hind legs, a squirrel the torso, a roebuck the antlers, a pheasant the wings and sometimes the scaly feet. From there the maker improvises. Fangs from a marten. A duck’s bill. A fox’s brush. Claws where claws have no business being. No two are the same, and the folklore has an explanation ready for that, which is that the creature results from the local wildlife interbreeding without regard to species, so that hares and roebucks and pheasants and ducks and foxes all contribute to a population in which every individual is a fresh accident.

The name itself is a puzzle nobody has fully solved. Bernd E. Ergert, who directed the Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum in Munich from 1990 to 2005 and knows the surviving specimens better than anyone, traced it to the glassmakers of Wolterdingen near Donaueschingen, who blew schnapps glasses in the shape of animals. The glasses were called Wolterdinger. Say that word enough times across enough tables, in enough dialects, and it wears down into Wolpertinger. The regional spellings that survive show the erosion in progress: Wolperdinger, Woipertinger, Volpertinger, Wulpertinger. It is a small, plausible, unglamorous origin story for a creature, and it fits a creature that was born in taverns.

The antlers, though, are much older than the taverns. Long before any Bavarian taxidermist picked up a needle, European naturalists were describing a horned hare as an ordinary if uncommon animal. Conrad Gessner put it in his *Historiae animalium* in the middle of the sixteenth century and located it in Saxony. John Jonston reproduced it in 1655, and his plates were copied onward for decades. Gaspar Schott gave it a place in the *Physica curiosa* of 1662, and put it on the frontispiece. In 1673 the English naturalist John Ray recorded seeing the head of a horned hare in a Delft apothecary’s cabinet, filed among the curiosities alongside a hippopotamus tooth he was not sure he believed in either. Rudolf II was said to keep specimens. In 1606 a French scholar travelled to Leuven to see two live horned hares owned by a widow, reportedly brought from Norway, and arrived to find that one had already died. For two centuries the thing had a Latin binomial, *Lepus cornutus*, and a place in the literature.

Then the literature quietly withdrew it. By 1777 Johann Christian Polykarp Erxleben was writing that the horned hare, if it was not some hybrid, was certainly a fable. Bonnaterre’s encyclopaedic tables of 1789 were among the last serious works to carry it as a real species. In 1855 a Dutch writer described the mechanism without any diplomacy at all: people had amused themselves by fixing roe antlers into the heads of stuffed hares, and that was where the fable of horned hares came from. He was right, and by then Bavarian taxidermists had turned the trick into a trade. Through the nineteenth century they built hybrids in workshops and sold them to travellers as examples of the local fauna, each one a little more baroque than the last, until the museum in Munich began collecting them not as zoology but as folk craft.

What makes the story better than a simple hoax is that horned hares exist. In 1933 the American virologist Richard Shope examined cottontails carrying hard, branching growths on their heads and found the cause: a papillomavirus that drives the skin to produce keratin in dark horn-shaped columns. An infected hare in a hedgerow at dusk really does carry something like a rack. Shope’s work established that a virus could cause a tumour in a mammal, which turned out to matter far beyond rabbits, feeding eventually into the research that produced vaccines against human papillomavirus. The joke creature on the shelf has a real cousin, and that cousin helped save lives.

The hunt is the other half of the tradition, and it is played on people rather than animals. A visitor who expresses too much interest is offered instructions. Wait for a full moon. Go up into the woods with a sack held open and a light. The creature will come, though the versions differ on what draws it, and one persistent line has it appearing only to a beautiful young woman brought to the right clearing by the right man, which tells you rather more about the men telling the story than about the animal. Somewhere in the dark the newcomer stands holding an open sack while the temperature drops and the sound of laughter carries down from the treeline. None of it is true, and everyone present knows it except one person.

Its powers, then, are exactly the powers a joke has. The Wolpertinger cannot be caught, because there is no procedure for catching it that was ever meant to work. It is impossible to describe consistently, which makes any specimen unfalsifiable, since a Wolpertinger with a duck’s bill and a Wolpertinger with a marten’s fangs are both correct. It survives in plain sight, mounted on a wall in a room full of people, which no genuinely secretive creature manages. Its weaknesses follow just as neatly. It cannot bear a second look, or a close one, or a stitch line found under the fur. It dies instantly the moment the person holding the sack works out what is happening, and it comes back to life the moment the next coach party arrives.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Wolpertinger?

A Wolpertinger is a hybrid creature from the folklore of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany, usually shown as a hare with roe-deer antlers, a squirrel’s body and pheasant wings. It exists physically as taxidermy, assembled from the parts of several real animals, and no two specimens are alike. Bavarian taxidermists produced them in quantity during the nineteenth century and sold them to travellers as local wildlife.

Is the Wolpertinger real?

No. The Wolpertinger is a deliberate fabrication, a practical joke made solid by taxidermy and kept up as a regional tradition. Horned hares do occur in nature, however, because a papillomavirus identified by Richard Shope in 1933 causes hard keratin growths that can look like horns or antlers.

Where does the name Wolpertinger come from?

The origin is uncertain. Bernd E. Ergert, longtime director of the Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum in Munich, traced it to the glassmakers of Wolterdingen near Donaueschingen, who made animal-shaped schnapps glasses known as Wolterdinger, a word that could wear down into Wolpertinger over time. Regional spellings such as Wolperdinger, Woipertinger and Volpertinger survive alongside it.

How do you hunt a Wolpertinger?

You do not, and that is the point. The traditional instructions given to visitors involve going into the forest at full moon with an open sack and a light, a set-up designed to leave a credulous outsider standing alone in the dark while the locals enjoy themselves. The Wolpertinger hunt is a prank with a very long service record.

What other creatures are like the Wolpertinger?

Southern Germany and its neighbours have a whole family of them. The Rasselbock belongs to the Thuringian Forest, the Dilldapp to the Alemannic region, the Elwetritsch to the Palatinate, and the Raurackl to Austria. Sweden has the Skvader, and the United States has the Jackalope, invented in Wyoming in the 1930s.