The Valleys of Tirol: Their traditions and customs and how to visit them

146

Called by the French Philippe ‘le Beau,’ in distinction from their own ‘Philippe le Bel.’

147

This monument earned Ferdinand the title of the Lorenzo de’ Medici of Tirol.

148

St. Anthony being the patron invoked against accidents by fire; also against erisypelas, which in some parts of England even is called ‘St. Anthony’s fire.’

149

Weber, Das Land Tirol, vol. i. p. 218.

150

Zoller Geschickte der Stadt Innsbruck, p. 272; and Weiesegger, vol. vi. p. 61.

151

I have met the same hyperbole in a piece of homely Spanish poetry.

152

‘Now he knows how the just monarch is beloved of Heaven; his beaming countenance yet testifies his joy.’

153

Nork, Mythologie der Volkssagen, p. 419.

154

Exactly the story of the fisherman and the Genius in the copper vessel of the Arabian Nights. It is found also in Grimm’s story of the Spirit in the bottle, in the Norse tale of the Master Smith; in that of the Lad and the Devil (Dasent); and in the Gaelic tale of the Soldier (Campbell).

155

Von Alpenburg, Mythen u. Sagen Tirols.

156

See pp. 194, 270, 324–5.

157

They accepted their position with the usual Tirolese loyalty, and never attempted to found any claims to power on the circumstance of their birth.

158

Holy Trinity Church.

159

Patron saints against pestilence: viz. SS. Martha (because according to her legend she built a hospital and ended her life tending the sick), Sebastian (because a plague was stayed in Rome at his intercession), and Rocchus (because of the well-known legend of his self-devotion to the plague-stricken).

160

Mentioned in the chapter on Vorarlberg, p. 23.

161

Thirteen volumes were filled with the narrations of such ‘answers’ received between 1662 and 1665.

162

Picture of Mary ‘Help of Christians’ —Auxilium Christianorum.

163

Inglis says that Schor was the architect of this church, and that he had assisted in building the Vatican.

164

It is painted on panel, thirty inches by twenty-one; the figure of our Lady is three quarter-length, but appears to be sitting, as the foot of the Divine Infant seems to rest upon her knee. The tradition concerning it is, that it represents an episode of the Flight into Egypt, when, as the Holy Family rested under a palm-grove, they were overtaken by a band of robbers, headed by S. Demas, the (subsequently) penitent thief. The Holy Child is indeed represented clinging to His Mother – not as in fear, or even as if need were to suggest courage to her, but simply as if an attack sustained in common impelled a closer union of affection.

165

See pp. 123–4.

166

She was on her way to Rome, where she spent the rest of her life. Alexander VII. commissioned Bernini to rebuild the Porta del Popolo, and adorned it with its inscription, Felici, faustoque ingressui, in honour of her entry.

167

See p. 280.

168

Kreidenfeuer– alarm fires, from Krei, a cry.

169

A leading spiritualist, who has also a prominent position in the literary world, tells the story that one day he had missed his footing in going downstairs, and was within an ace of making as fatal a fall as Professor Phillips, when he distinctly felt himself seized, supported, and saved by an invisible hand. The analogy between the two convictions is curious.

170

Consult Cesare Cantù Storia Universale, § xvii. cap. 21.

171

Since writing the above, I have been assured by one who has frequently conversed with her, that the concealment of her name arose from her own modesty; it was Katharina Lanz. To avoid public notice, she went to live at a distance, and up to the time of her death in 1854, bore an exemplary character, living as housekeeper to the priest serving the mountain church of S. Vigilius, near Rost, the highest inhabited point of the Enneberg. When induced to speak of her exploits, she always made a point of observing that, though she brandished her hay-fork, she neither actually killed or wounded anyone. She had heard that the French soldiers were nothing loth to desecrate sacred places, and she stationed herself in the church porch determined to prevent their entrance; the churchyard had become the citadel of the villagers. From her post of observation she saw with dismay that her people were giving way. It was then she rushed out and rallied them; in her impetuosity she was very near running her hay-fork through a French soldier, but she was saved from the deed by her landlord, who, encouraged by her ardour, struck him down, pushing her aside. The success of her sally and her subsequent disappearance cast a halo of mystery round her story, and many were inclined to believe the whole affair was a heavenly apparition.

172

Celebration of the Resurrection.

173

Spare your bread for the poor, and escape the fate of Frau Hütt. See some legends forming a curious link between this, and that of Ottilia Milser in Stöber Sagen des Elsasses, pp. 257–8.

174

The dog’s church or chapel.

175

His well-known daring, emulating that of the chamois and the eagle, was of no avail now; for straight under him sinks the Martin’s Wall, the steepest cliff of the whole country-side.

He gazes down through that grave of clouds. He gazes abroad over that cloud-ocean. He glances around, and his gaze recoils.

With only the thunder-roll of the people’s voices beneath, there stands the Kaiser’s Majesty. But not raised aloft to receive his people’s homage. A son of sorrow, on a throne of air, the great Maximilian all at once finds himself isolated, horror-stricken, and small.

176

‘With him,’ says a Hungarian ballad, ‘Righteousness went down into the grave: and the Sun of Pest-Ofen sank towards its setting.’

177

Primisser, who took great pains to collect all the various traditions of this event, mentions a favourite huntsman of the Emperor, named Oswald Zips, whom he ennobled as Hallaurer v. Hohenfelsen. This may have been the actual deliverer, or may have been supposed to be such, from the circumstance of the title being Hohenfelsen, or Highcliff; and that a patent of nobility was bestowed on a huntsman would imply that he had rendered some singular service: the family, however, soon died out.

178

See chapter on Schwatz.

179

To the Editor of the ‘Monthly Packet.’

Sir, – I think it possible that R. H. B. (to whom we owe the very interesting Traditions of Tirol), and perhaps others of your readers, may care to hear some of the particulars, as they are treasured by his family, of the defence of Scharnitz by Baron Swinburne. R. H. B. speaks of it in your number of last month. That defence was so gallant as to call forth the respect and admiration even of his enemies, and Baron Swinburne was given permission to name his own terms of surrender.

He requested for himself, and those under him, that they might be allowed to retain their swords. This was granted, and the prisoners were sent to Aix-la-Chapelle, where everyone was asking in astonishment who were ‘les prisonniers avec l’épée a côté.’

The Eagles of Austria, that had been so nobly defended by the Englishman and his little band, never fell into the hands of the French. One of the Tirolese escaped, with the colours wrapped round his body under his clothes, and though he was hunted among the mountains for months, he was never taken; and some years after he came to his commander in Vienna and gave him the colours he had so bravely defended. They are now in possession of Baron Edward Swinburne, the son of the defender of Scharnitz, who himself won, before he was eighteen, the Order of ‘the Iron Crown,’ by an act that well deserves to be called ‘a golden deed;’ and ere he was twenty he had led his first and last forlorn hope, when he received so severe a wound as to cost him his leg, which has incapacitated him for further service.

His father received the highest military decoration of Austria, that of ‘Maria Teresa;’ he fought at Austerlitz and Wagram; on the latter occasion he was severely wounded. Later in life, he was for many years Governor of Milan.

Hoping that a short record of true and faithful services performed by Englishmen for their adopted country, may prove of some interest to your readers, and with many thanks to R. H. B. for what has been of so much interest to us,

I am, Sir, yours faithfully,

September, 1870. A. Swinburne.

180

Häusergruppe.

181

Such offerings are met with in other parts of Tirol; in one place we shall find a candle offered of equal weight to an infant’s body. They present a striking analogy with the Sanskrit tulâdâna or weight-gift; the practice of offering to a temple or Buddhist college a gift of silver or even gold of the weight of the offerer’s body appears not to have been infrequent and tolerably ancient. Lassen (Indische Alterthumskünde, vol. iii. p. 810) mentions an instance of the revival of the custom by a king named Shrikandradeva, who offered the weight of his own body in gold to the temple at Benares (circa 1025); and (vol. iv. p. 373) another in which Aloungtsethu, King of Birmah, in 1101, made a similar offering in silver to a temple which he built at Buddhagayâ. He refers also to earlier instances ‘in H. Burney’s note 19 in As. Res. vol. xx. p. 177, and one by Fell in As. Res. vol. xv. p. 474.’

182

I have occasion to give one of the most remarkable legends of the Oetzthal in the chapter on Wälsch-Tirol.

183

See a somewhat similar version in Nork’s Mythologie der Volksagen, pp. 895–7.

184

Circle.

185

The sunnier and less thoughtful tone of mind in which the Italian particularly differs from the German character, is often to be traced in their legendary stories. Those of the Germans are nearly always made to convey some moral lesson; this is as often wanting in those of the Italians, who seem satisfied with making them means of amusement, without caring that they should be a medium of instruction.

186

The Passion Plays of the Brixenthal, however, are reckoned the best. The performers gather and rehearse in the spring, and go round from village to village through the summer months, only, as amphitheatres are improvised in the open.

187

It may be worth mentioning, as an instance of how the contagion of popular customs is transmitted, that on enquiring into some very curious grotesque ceremonies performed in Trent at the close of the carneval, and called its ‘burial,’ I learnt that it did not appear to be a Tirolean custom, but had been introduced by the soldiers of the garrison who, for a long time past, had been taken from the Slave provinces of the Austrian Empire, and thus a Slave popular custom has been grafted on to Tirol. Wälsch-Tirol, however, has its own customs for closing the carneval, too. In some places it is burnt in effigy; in some, dismissed with the following dancing-song (Schnodahüpfl) greeting,

Evviva carneval!Chelige manca ancor el sal;El carneval che vienLo salerem più ben!

188

A centenary celebration of the Council was held at Trent in 1863, at which the late lamented Cardinal von Reisach presided as legate a latere.

189

This chapel has lately been restored by Loth of Munich.

190

A variant of this tradition takes the more usual form of applying it to the architect of the edifice, as with the Kremlin. As Stöber gives it from Strasburg, it was there the maker of the great clock.

191

Laste is dialectic for a smooth, steep, almost inaccessible chalk cliff.

192

Hence Kaiser Max was wont to call Tirol ‘the heart’ and ‘the shield’ of his empire.

193

St. Ingenuin was Bishop of Säben or Seben, A.D. 585. The See, founded by St. Cassian, had been long vacant, and great errors and abuses had taken root among the people, who in some places had relapsed towards heathen customs. His success in reforming the manners of his flock was most extraordinary. He built a cathedral at Seben, where he is honoured on February 5, the anniversary of his death. St. Albuin, one of his successors, was a scion of one of the noblest families of Tirol; he removed the See to Brixen, A.D. 1004.

194

This is a local application of the widespread myth of the tailor, who kills ‘seven at one blow,’ identified by Vonbun (p. 71–2) with the Sage of Siegfried. Prof. Zarncke has also written a great deal to show Tirol’s place in the Nibelungenlied.

195

Anciently Anaunium, and still by local scholars called Annaunia, a possession of the Nonia family, not unknown to Roman history.

196

The white mulberry, whose leaves feed the silkworm, rearing which forms one great industry of Wälsch-Tirol, is called the Seidenbaum, the silk tree.

197

Stammort, Cradle of his race.

198

See Un processo di Stregheria in Val Camonica, by Gabriele Rosa, pp. 85, 92; and Il vero nelle scienze occulte, by the same author, p. 43; and Tartarotti Congresso delle Lammie. lib. ii. § iv. It is one of the only four such spots anywhere existing where Italian is spoken.

199

A mithraic sacrifice with several figures, sculptured in bas-relief, in white Carrara marble, in very perfect preservation, bearing the inscription:

ILDA MARIVSL. P

has just been found at this very spot.

200

See pp. 164–6.

201

Too many such remnants, which the plough and the builder’s pick are continually unearthing, have been thus dispersed. It has been the favourite work of Monsignor Zanelli, of Trent, to stir up the local authorities to take account of such things, and so form a museum with them in Trent.

202

Padre Tarquini – one of the rare instances of a Jesuit being made a Cardinal – died, it may be remembered, in February last, only about two months after his elevation. He had devoted much time to the study of Etruscan antiquities; he published The Mysteries of the Etruscan Language Unveiled in 1857, and later a Grammar of the language of the Etruscans.

203

‘(1.) Or it might be ‘ad introductionem viri.’ (2.) ‘Vulcano’ here (precisely as in another Etruscan inscription found a few years before at Cembra, and translated by Professor Giovanelli) for ‘ignis.’ (3.) An allusion to the custom of first piercing (sforacchiare) the bodies of persons to be burnt in sacrifice, which appears from the inscription found at S. Manno, near Perugia, and again from the appearance of the figures of human victims represented in the Tomba Vulcente. (4.) The deity of the place to which the key belonged, probably, therefore, Saturn.’

204

A Tag-mahd, or ‘day’s mowing,’ is a regular land measure in North Tirol.

205

There is no record of her summit ever having been attained before the successful ascent of Herr Grohmann, in 1864. Mr. Tucker, an Englishman, accomplished it the next year.

206

I have given some of the most curious of these in a collection of Household Stories from the Land of Hofer.

207

There is no tradition more universally spread over Tirol than that which tells of judgments falling on non-observers of days of rest. They are, however, by no means confined to Tirol. Ludovic Lalanne, Curiosités des Traditions, vol. iv. p. 136, says that the instances he had collected showed it was treated as a fault most grievous to heaven. ‘Matthieu Paris, à l’année 1200, raconte qu’une pauvre blanchisseuse ayant osé travailler un jour de fête fut punie d’ une étrange façon; un cochon de lait tout noir s’attacha à sa mamelle gauche.’ He relates one or two other curious instances – one of a young girl who, having insisted on working on a holiday, somehow got the knot of her thread twisted into her tongue, and every attempt to remove it gave intolerable pain. Ultimately she was healed by praying at the Lady-altar at Noyon, and here the knot of thread was long shown in the sacristy.

I well remember the English counterpart in my own nursery. There were, indeed, two somewhat analogous stories; and I often wondered, without exactly daring to ask, why there was so much difference in the tone in which they were told, for the one seemed to me as good as the other. The first, which used to be treated as an utter imposture, was that a woman and her son surreptitiously obtained a consecrated wafer for purposes of incantation (we have had a Tirolean counterpart of this at Sistrans, supra pp. 221–2), and in pursuit of their weird operation had pierced it, when there flowed thereout such a prodigious stream of blood that the whole place was inundated, and all the people drowned. The second, which was told with something of seriousness in it, (‘and they say, mind you, that actually happened,’) was of a young lady who, having persisted in working on Sunday in spite of all her nurse’s injunctions, pricked her finger. No one could stop the bleeding that ensued, and she bled to death for a judgment; and whether it was true or not, there was a monument to her in Westminster Abbey. Dean Stanley, who seems to have missed nothing that could possibly be said about the Abbey, finds place, I see, to notice even this tradition (pp. 219–20 and note), and identifies it with the monument of Elizabeth Russell (born 1575) in St. Edmund’s Chapel. Madame Parkes-Belloc tells me she has often seen a wax figure of a lady (in the costume of two centuries later than Elizabeth Russell) under a glass case in Gosfield Hall, Essex (formerly a seat of the Buckingham family), of which a similar tradition is told

208

It is significant of a symbolical intention that the story should thus allude to the Valle del Orco; the more so as I cannot hear of any such actual locality in Val Sugana, though ‘Orco’ has lent his name to more than one spot, as we shall see later. There is, however, a Val d’Inferno between this valley and Predazzo.

209

Settepergole– Seven Pergolas – the name of several farms in Wälsch-Tirol. Pergola is the name for a vine trellised to form an arbour, all over Italy.

210

This effect has often been noticed here by travellers.

211

Two bronze statuettes of Apollo were found here in June 1869.

212

Very like and very unlike the legend of S. Giuliano I met in Rome (Folklore of Rome), where he was supposed to be a native of Albano, and to have passed his penitential time at Compostella. G. Schott, Wallächische Märchen, pp. 281 and 375, gives a similar legend applied to Elias in place of St. Julian.

213

Folklore of Rome, p. 320.

214

I need not repeat the characteristics of the Tirolean Norg, which I have given in the translation of the ‘Rose-garden’ in Household Stories from the Land of Hofer.

215

Thorp’s Northern Mythology, vol. ii. pp. 20–2.

216

Though of course mere similarity of sound may lead one absurdly astray; as if any one were to say that the old fables of rubbing a ring to produce the ‘Slave of the ring’ was the origin of the modern substitute of ringing to summon a servant!

217

Again, Mr. Cox (Mythology of the Aryan Nations, vol. ii. p. 221 et seq.) says, ‘the Maruts or storm winds who attend on Indra … became the fearful Ogres in the traditions of Northern Europe … they are the children of Rudra, worshipped as the destroyer and reproducer and … like Hermes, as the robber, the cheat, the deceiver, the master thief.’

218

Etruscan Researches, p. 376 and note.

219

Stöber, Sagen des Elsasses, p. 30.

220

Cities of Etruria, vol. ii. p. 65–8.

221

Selvan, at all events, is a word which, Mr. Isaac Taylor observes, is of frequent occurrence in Etruscan inscriptions (Et. Res. pp. 394–5), and its signification has not yet been fixed. And may not Gannes have some relation with Kan or Khan (p. 322)?

222

It is very disappointing that he has translated the great bulk of his vast collection of fiabe (‘fiaba’ in North Italian answers to the ‘favola’ of Rome) so utterly into German that, though we find all our old friends among them, all the distinctive expressions are translated away, and they are rendered valueless for all but mere childish amusement. Thus it is interesting to find in Wälsch-Tirol a diabolical counterpart of the Roman story of ‘Pret’ Olivo,’ but it would have rendered it infinitely more interesting had the collector told us what was the word which he translates by ‘Teufel,’ for it is the rarest thing in the world for an Italian to bring the personified ‘Diavolo’ or ‘Demonio’ into any light story. In the same way it is interesting to find all the other tales with which we are familiar turn up here, but the real use of printing them at length would have been to point out their characteristics. What was the Italian used for the words rendered in the German by ‘Witch?’ Was it ‘Gannes’ or ‘strega?’ or for ‘Giant’ and ‘Wild man:’ was it ‘l’om salvadegh’ or ‘salvan’ or ‘orco?’ I cannot think it was ‘gigante.’ But all is left to conjecture. Among the few bits of Italian he does give are two or three ‘tags’ to stories, among them the one I met so continually in Rome ‘Larga la foglia’ – (it was still ‘foglia’ and not ‘voglia’) word for word.

223

Dr. Steub, in his Herbsttagen in Tirol, shows that the Beatrick may be identified with Dietrich von Bern.

224

Though nothing would seem simpler than to suppose the word derived from the Euganean inhabitants who left their name to Val Sugana.

225

It is curious to observe the story pass through all the stages of the supernatural agency traditional in the locality; first the good genius of the Etruscans merging next into the Germanic woodsprite, then assuming the vulgar characteristics of later imaginings about witchcraft, and then the Christian teaching ‘making use of it,’ as Professor de Gubernatis says, ‘for its own moral end.’

226

A collection of the ‘Costumi’ of Tuscany I have, without a title-page, but I think published about 1835, laments the growing disuse in Lunigiana (i. e. the country round the Gulf of Spezia, so called from Luna, an Etruscan city, but ‘not one of the twelve,’ and including Carrara, Lucca, and Pisa) of the practice of recounting popular traditions at the Focarelli there. These seem to be autumn evening gatherings round a fire, but in the open air, often on a threshing-floor; while the able-bodied population is engaged in the preparation of flax, and some are spinning, the boys and girls dance, wrestle, and play games, and the old crones gossip; but now, says the writer, they begin to occupy themselves only with scandalous and idle reports, instead of old-world lore.