Grey Tales

Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: ancient German folk tales, passed down by old peasant women at the spinning wheel? Not quite. In the first episode of our five-part Grimm series, we ask who actually told the Brothers Grimm their fairy tales. We follow a manuscript that traveled through a Trappist monastery in Alsace all the way to Geneva, watch Heinz Rölleke bury a star witness who never existed, and look behind the most famous portrait in German fairy-tale history.

📚 Sources and Further Reading

Heinz Rölleke (ed.): Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm. Synopse der handschriftlichen Urfassung von 1810 und der Erstdrucke von 1812. Cologny-Genève: Fondation Martin Bodmer, 1975. → The standard edition of the Ölenberg manuscript, setting the 1810 manuscript beside the 1812 first edition. Replaced the older Lefftz edition.

Heinz Rölleke: "Die 'stockhessischen' Märchen der 'Alten Marie'. Das Ende eines Mythos um die frühesten KHM-Aufzeichnungen der Brüder Grimm." Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift N.F. 25 (1975), pp. 74–86. → The article that dismantled the "Old Marie" attribution and identified Marie Hassenpflug as the contributor. (German)

Heinz Rölleke: Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004. → Concise overview of how the collection came about, who contributed and how the texts were edited. (German)

Joseph Lefftz (ed.): Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Urfassung nach der Originalhandschrift der Abtei Ölenberg im Elsaß. Heidelberg: Winter, 1927. → The first complete edition of the Ölenberg manuscript. Superseded by Rölleke 1975, but important for the history of research. (German)

Holger Ehrhardt (ed.): Dorothea Viehmann. Kassel: Euregio, 2012. → Collected volume on Viehmann's life and tales, with contributions by Heinz Rölleke and others, including an essay on French influences in her stories. (German)

Holger Ehrhardt: "Ein übersehenes Märchen von Dorothea Viehmann." Fabula 64 (2023), no. 3–4, pp. 243–281. → Argues that "The White Bride and the Black Bride" goes back to Viehmann, based on newly found early manuscripts. (German)

University of Kassel: press release on the discovery of 54 previously unknown early Grimm manuscripts, December 2023. → Background on the new manuscript finds. (German)

Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbuch zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. → Standard reference on every tale in the collection, its sources and versions. (German)

For English-language readers: Jack Zipes' translation of the 1812/1815 first edition, "The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm" (Princeton University Press, 2014), includes the tales later removed, such as Bluebeard and Puss in Boots.

The Ölenberg manuscript can be viewed in digitized form at e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland.

Last week we told the old stories. Today we ask who wrote them.

The leprechaun probably isn't named after his "little body" at all, but after Roman priests whom Irish monks took for a race of wolf-men. His oldest story is a teaching tale about the law of distraint. In the nineteenth century he wore red, not green. The book that made him famous was lost by its editor and rewritten by his friends, and then translated by the Brothers Grimm. And when Walt Disney was offered Ireland's greatest folklore archive, he chose an American children's book instead.

Sources

— Jacopo Bisagni, "Leprechaun: a new etymology", Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 64 (2012), pp. 47–84. The core source for this episode. Shows that the oldest manuscript form is lupracán, argues that the "little body" reading is linguistically very hard to sustain, and derives the word from the Luperci, whom Irish scholars, via Augustine, understood as a race of shapeshifters. Also contains the critique of Binchy's eighth-century dating of the Fergus saga.

— D. A. Binchy, "The Saga of Fergus mac Léti", Ériu 16 (1952), pp. 33–48. The standard edition of the Fergus saga; source of the traditional etymology and dating.

— Neil McLeod, "Fergus mac Léti and the Law", Ériu 61 (2011), pp. 1–28. Shows that the Fergus saga was constructed as a legal teaching tale on distraint.

— Simon Rodway, "Mermaids, Leprechauns, and Fomorians: A Middle Irish Account of the Descendants of Cain", Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 59 (2010), pp. 1–17. Edition of the tale of Ambia the siren and Becnait, mother of the leprechauns.

— Diarmuid Ó Giolláin, "An Leipreachán san Ainmníocht", Béaloideas 50 (1982), pp. 126–150, and "The Leipreachán and Fairies, Dwarfs and the Household Familiar: A Comparative Study", Béaloideas 52 (1984), pp. 75–150. The foundational folkloristic study, based on more than three hundred manuscripts from the Irish folklore archives; places the leprechaun with dwarfs and household spirits rather than the fairy host.

— Maureen Murphy, "Croker, Thomas Crofton", Dictionary of Irish Biography. Source for the lost manuscript, the co-authors, the edition history and the later criticism.

— Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology (later edition). Contains Keightley's admission that he invented The Soul Cages from a legend collected by the Brothers Grimm.

— Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (trans.), Irische Elfenmärchen, Leipzig 1826. Translation of Croker's collection with the introduction "Über die Elfen".

— Frank Kinahan, "Armchair Folklore: Yeats and the Textual Sources of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry", Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 83C (1983), pp. 255–267. Traces Yeats's fairy classification back through McAnally to O'Hanlon.

— Tony Tracy, "When Disney Met Delargy: 'Darby O'Gill' and the Irish Folklore Commission", Béaloideas 78 (2010), pp. 44–60. The main source for the Killarney chapter.

— Diane Negra (ed.), The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, Durham 2006. Background for reading the modern leprechaun as a descendant of anti-Irish caricature.

— General Mills, "The History of Lucky Charms"; Atlas Obscura on Waldo the Wizard. Sources for the launch and temporary replacement of the Lucky Charms mascot.

— Dáil Éireann, debate of 11 December 1963. John A. Costello's criticism of Irish tourist advertising.

Next episode: the start of our series on the Brothers Grimm.

Forget the green suit. Forget the rainbow.

In his oldest stories the leprechaun isn't a mascot. He's a solitary, cunning and occasionally murderous creature. He comes out of the sea to drown sleeping kings. He lives in the wine cellar and refuses to move out. And he wins every single time, not through strength, but because he knows exactly where a human being looks when you distract them.

Part 1 of the Ireland Special is an extended story hour. No analysis, no context, just the tales, the way people in Ireland told them. The analysis comes in Part 2.

Sources

— D. A. Binchy, "The Saga of Fergus mac Léti", Ériu 16 (1952), pp. 33–48. The standard edition and translation of the Old Irish tale in which the lúchorpáin appear. Binchy's translation underlies the retelling in chapter I, including the bellows comparison, the seven years of concealment, and Fergus's last words.

— Thomas Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, London 1825. The earliest major collection of Irish fairy legends. Three of tonight's stories come from it: "The Haunted Cellar" (Ballinacarthy and Naggeneen), "The Field of Boliauns" (Tom Fitzpatrick) and "The Little Shoe" (Molly Cogan). Croker uses the word Cluricaune throughout for all of these beings.

— Thomas Crofton Croker, "Seeing is Believing", ibid. Source for Moirna Hogaune's account, and for the notes on the spré na skillenagh and the trick with the two purses.

— Lady Morgan, O'Donnel: A National Tale, London 1814. Quoted by Croker in his notes; contains the description of the creature as a guardian of treasure buried "in the troubles", and the explanation of why any marker you leave behind multiplies overnight.

— D. R. McAnally Jr., Irish Wonders, Boston 1888. Source for the regional variants in chapter VI: the northern Irish leprechaun, the Lurigadawne of Tipperary, the Luricawne of Kerry, the Cluricawne of Monaghan, and the frieze-coated west coast version.

— W. B. Yeats (ed.), Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, London 1888. Groups the Lepracaun together with the Cluricaun and the Far Darrig among the "solitary fairies" — a classification we'll return to in Part 2.

Last time, I only told the stories. This time, we open our eyes. Part 2 of our Norway special asks the why behind the troll legends: where does the troll come from? Why does the sun kill him? Why does he flee the church bell? What really stood at that cradle – and why does this overwhelming creature lose in almost every story? A journey through etymology, National Romanticism, and the most honest, darkest folk belief in Norway.

📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING– Ármann Jakobsson, work on the meaning of the word "troll" in the Middle Ages (incl. The Troll Inside You, 2017) – on the breadth of the Old Norse term.– Vladimir Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology (2003) – on the origin of trǫll and its relation to jötunn and þurs.– Andreas Faye, Norske Folke-Sagn (1833/1844) – the early foundational collection of place-legends.– Peter Christen Asbjørnsen & Jørgen Moe, Norske Folkeeventyr (from 1841); Asbjørnsen, Norske Huldreeventyr og Folkesagn (1845–48) – the origin of the distinction between eventyr and sagn/huldreeventyr.– Oscar J. Falnes, National Romanticism in Norway (1933) – on the link between folklore and national identity after 1814.– Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends (1958) – the standard catalogue of Norwegian migratory legends (petrification, church legends, the changeling).– D. L. Ashliman, studies and text collection on the changeling – on reading the belief as an explanatory model for failure-to-thrive and disabled children.– On the visual tradition: Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914) and Erik Werenskiold (1855–1938).

🎧 Grey Tales is also available as a podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

#Trolls #NorwegianLegends #Folklore #Mythology #Norway #Changeling #GreyTales

Norway is full of trolls. You just have to know how to read the mountains. In this first part of our Norway special there's no analysis, no explaining – only stories. A full story-hour at double length: the great petrification legends of the coast, the classic troll tales of Asbjørnsen & Moe, and the ancient belief about the child in the cradle. The interpretation follows in Part 2.

Sit down, turn the lights low, and come up into the mountains.

📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READINGTonight's tales come from the classic collection by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen & Jørgen Moe, Norske Folkeeventyr (from 1841 onward): "De tre bukkene Bruse" (The Three Billy Goats Gruff), "Askeladden som kappåt med trollet" (The Boy Who Had an Eating Match with a Troll), "Risen som ikke hadde noe hjerte på seg" (The Troll/Giant with No Heart in His Body), and "Kjetta på Dovre" (The Cat on the Dovrefjell).– Andreas Faye, Norske Folke-Sagn (1833/1844) – the early foundational collection of Norwegian place-legends and folk belief.– Reidar Th. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends (1958) – the standard catalogue of Norwegian migratory legends, including petrification, the changeling and church-bell motifs.– The Torghatten / Seven Sisters legend is the well-known place-legend of the Helgeland/Nordland coast (Brønnøysund, Alsten, Leka, Lofoten).– On the visual tradition: Theodor Kittelsen (1857–1914), who still shapes how we picture Norway's trolls.Note: this episode retells the legends. Their origin, interpretation and source-criticism are covered in full in Part 2.

In November 1610 the Spanish Inquisition burns people from the Basque village of Zugarramurdi at Logroño as devil-worshippers – the climax of the largest witch trial in history, in which some 7,000 people ultimately fall under suspicion. In this episode we follow how a neighbour returning with a story becomes an avalanche of fear, confession and burning stakes – and how, of all people, one inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, "the witches' advocate," brings the madness to a halt with nothing but evidence and a single question. A story about who invents the witch, why people confess to things they never did – and how rare the courage to doubt really is.

📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING

• Gustav Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate. Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614 (University of Nevada Press, 1980) – the foundational study of the case; established the epithet "the witches' advocate."
• Gustav Henningsen (ed.), The Salazar Documents. Inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías and Others on the Basque Witch Persecution (Brill, 2004) – Salazar's five reports to the Suprema (1612–1614) in a bilingual edition.
• Emma Wilby, Invoking the Akelarre. Voices of the Accused in the Basque Witch-Craze, 1609–1614 (Sussex Academic Press, 2019) – recent close reading of the confessions and the pre-Christian Basque layer.
• Lu Ann Homza, Village Infernos and Witches' Advocates. Witch-Hunting in Navarre, 1608–1614 (Penn State University Press, 2022) – the village social dynamics and the logic of confession.
• Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (1612) – the French judge's influential, lurid account of the sabbath; source for the era's "script."
• Instructions of the Suprema, 1614 – the directive, shaped by Salazar's reports, that effectively ended witch executions in Spain.
• On Basque mythology (Mari, Akerbeltz, sorginak): the ethnographic collections of José Miguel de Barandiarán (1889–1991).

Wiltshire, 1662: a magistrate takes a travelling beggar's drum away — and afterwards his house drums for two years. Out of nowhere. The "Drummer of Tedworth" is remembered as the first documented poltergeist in England. But behind the haunting lies a far bigger fight: over God, over the soul, and over who gets to decide what really happened.

In this episode we dig beneath the ghost story and ask the question that holds this whole series together: who tells a story — and why?

Sources & further reading (selection)

• Joseph Glanvill, A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668) and Saducismus Triumphatus (posthumous, 1681, ed. Henry More) – the central contemporary accounts that made the case famous in the first place.
• John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) – the sceptical rebuttal to Glanvill.
• Samuel Pepys, Diary, entry for 25 December 1667 – contemporary reception of the case.
• Increase Mather, An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences (1684) and George Sinclair, Satan's Invisible World Discovered (1685) – the onward spread of the case, as far as New England.
• Joseph Addison, The Drummer; or, The Haunted House (1716) – the comic, rationalising stage version.
• Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) – the reading of the case as fraud.
• Michael Hunter, "New light on the 'Drummer of Tedworth': conflicting narratives of witchcraft in Restoration England," Historical Research 78 (2005), pp. 311–353 – the definitive modern study, uncovering the early, partly unprinted versions of the case.
• Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (2007) – historical context for the poltergeist tradition.

She waits at the roadside, she is beautiful, she loves you — and she is fattening you to drink your blood. The Lamia is one of humanity's oldest bogeys and one of its saddest. In this episode we follow her from an ancient vampire bride in Corinth, back to a queen of Libya whose children were all taken by a jealous goddess, and down to the rivers of Mesopotamia, where her ancestor Lamashtu was feared a thousand years earlier. And we ask what this demoness reveals about a fear that never went away — the fear for our children, of death without reason, and of the woman who was given the face of the monster.

📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING

• Duris of Samos (c. 280 BC), fragment (FGrH 76 F 17) – transmits the archetypal Lamia legend of the Libyan queen, daughter of Belus.
• Aristophanes, Peace (421 BC) and its scholia – earliest literary mentions; the scholiast derives the name from laimós ("gullet").
• Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 20.41 (c. 30 BC) – rationalized version of the Lamia as a cruel, hard-drinking queen; explanation of the "removable eyes."
• Plutarch, On Curiosity 2 (c. 100 AD) – the fable of the eyes the Lamia sets in a vessel.
• Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.25 (c. 220 AD) – the vampire bride of Corinth and Menippus; calls the creature empousa/lamia.
• Antoninus Liberalis, Metamorphoses 8 (c. 150 AD, after Nicander) – the legend of the Lamia/Sybaris on Mount Cirphis near Delphi and her killing by Eurybatus.
• Statius, Thebaid 1.562–669 (92 AD) – the child-killing monster Apollo sends against Argos, slain by the hero Coroebus.
• Byzantine Sisinnios/Gyllou incantation texts – the demoness is forced to reveal her "twelve and a half names"; the background to protective amulets against infant death.
• Sappho, fragment 178 (c. 600 BC) – earliest naming of the related Gello.
• Jerome, Vulgate, Isaiah 34:14 (c. 400 AD) – translates the Hebrew Lilith as Lamia.
• Walter Farber, Lamaštu. An Edition of the Canonical Series (Eisenbrauns, 2014) – standard edition on the Mesopotamian precursor Lamashtu.
• Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead. Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (University of California Press, 1999) – reads Lamia, Gello and Mormo as "reproductive demons," the ghosts of those who died too young or in childbirth.
• John Keats, Lamia (1819), after Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) – shapes the modern image of the serpent-bodied seductress.

Note: the ancient sources contradict one another on many details. This video presents the main strands of the tradition.

At the edge of a spring, on the shortest night of the year, a woman of unearthly beauty sits combing her golden hair. She offers you a treasure — for a single kiss, without fear. Almost no one passes the test. The Moura Encantada is one of the best-known figures of Portuguese and Galician folklore — and one of the most misunderstood. In this episode we follow her from the spring all the way into real, excavated graves, and discover that her name tells a very different story from the one about the Moorish princess: a story about the dead, about the renaming of the defeated — and about why some boundaries must not be crossed.

📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING

• José Leite de Vasconcelos, Tradições Populares de Portugal (1882) – foundational work of Portuguese ethnography; gives the classic definition of the Moura as a being under "state of siege" and the hypothesis that she absorbed older spring and nature deities.

• José Leite de Vasconcelos, Etnografia Portuguesa (posthumous, 1933–1988) – multi-volume standard work placing the Moura in the wider context of folk belief.

• Zófimo Consiglieri Pedroso, Contribuições para uma Mitologia Popular Portuguesa (1882) – describes the Mouras as "feminine water genies."

• Teófilo Braga, Contos Tradicionais do Povo Português (1883) – early collection of the tale material, including variants of the disenchantment legends.

• Alexandre Herculano, Lendas e Narrativas (1851) – literary treatment of the Reconquista legend of the Moorish princess.

• Francisco Martins Sarmento – excavations at the Citânia de Briteiros (from 1875); used Moura legends and place-names as clues to Lusitanian and Celtiberian sites.

• Isidoro Millán – philological derivation of Mouro/Moura from the Celtic root mrvos ("the dead"), cognate with Latin mortuus.

• Isabel Cardigos, The Enchanted Calendar of the Mouras Encantadas – reads the serpent-woman as the "unavailable" woman and analyses why disenchantment structurally has to fail.

Note: Folk legends exist in countless regional variants. This video presents the most widespread motifs.

In the autumn of 1589, near Bedburg in the German Rhineland, a wealthy farmer is broken to death as a werewolf. His name: Peter Stubbe. His case was printed across Europe and shaped our image of the werewolf to this day. But the closer you look, the less the story adds up — right down to a guest at the scaffold who had no business being there. An investigation across the records, the pamphlet, and the war that explains it all.

📚 Sources & further reading (selection):

• "The Damnable Life and Death of one Stubbe Peeter," London 1590 (trans. George Bores) – the central primary source; the German original print is lost.
• Diary of Hermann von Weinsberg, Cologne alderman – independent contemporary attestation.
• Woodcut/broadsheet attributed to Lukas Mayer (Nuremberg); engraving by Franz Hogenberg.
• Montague Summers, "The Werewolf" (1933) – reprint of the pamphlet, rediscovered 1920.
• Rolf Schulte, study of men in the witch trials (c. 2000) – the werewolf as the male counterpart to the witch.
• Elmar Lorey (1945–2019), research on early modern werewolf trials – the werewolf as an instrumentalised variant of the charge (elmar-lorey.de).
• On the political context: the Cologne / Truchsess War, 1583–1588.

⚠️ Note: Several details of this case (birth year, the reading of the name, the question of guilt, the political motive) are uncertain or scholarly interpretation.

#Werewolf #PeterStubbe #Bedburg #History #Folklore #WitchTrials #TrueCrime #Medieval #EarlyModern #Cologne