animiert magazin nummer14 sommer

Das Arniloch, um das sich eine Engelberger Sage rankt. The Arniloch cave is home to a well-known Engelberg legend.

While spending the summer of 1816 in Switzer- land, famed English poet Lord Byron became pro- foundly drawn to the Alps and the legends and stories surrounding them. His experiences inspired him to pen the dramatic poemManfred, an important piece of Romantic era poetry. Byron succeeded in integrating substantial elements of Alpine mythology into this work: “I wrote a sort of mad drama […] the scene is in the Alps and the other world.” By ron wrote his poem at the right time. In the wake of the f ina l bat tles of the Na-

wrote The enchanted v irgin in the ’Virgin Hole’ of Ga ltiberg by Engelberg, one of the sole contemporar y literar y works f rom the found- ing cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy. Af ter Kuster, a good dea l of time passed before anyone bothered with the legends of Engelberg. It was not until 1842 that Got- tlieb Samuel Studer, notar y public of Berne, recorded the legend of the Monk in P faf fen- haufen while on a mountaineering trip on the Titlis. The publication of this ta le as par t of an account of his A lpine expedition was typica l at the time, for preva lent Lü lof of Luzern initiated an endeavour to col- lec t and publish a comprehensive edition of Swiss legends and sagas for scholarly purposes. Trusted indiv idua ls f rom ever y parish – pri- marily priests and students – began searching for such ta les. In Engelberg, Hans von Mat t was the main champion of this ef for t, which largely completed the compilation of the Engelberger Sagenkorpus. Af ter 1865 a lmost no more legends were gathered in Engelberg; instead, those that were known were passed on and recast. When solicitor Franz Nieder- berger published his collec tion in 1909/10, and monk Georg Dufner his in 1982, their main aim was to enter tain interested readers and to prov ide them with a chance to peek be- hind the scenes and into the “other world ”. bourgeois at titudes v iewed even such things as A lpine ventures as oppor tunities to expand one’s cu ltura l con- sciousness. This changed in the 1860s when Father A lois

poleonic Wars (1813–1815), nationa l consciousness was growing throughout Europe. In German-speaking nations in par ticu lar, this went hand in hand with the “discover y” of folk ta les, especia lly my ths.

Myths provide a chance to peek behind the scenes and into the “other world”.

Whereas indiv idua l examples of such sagas had prev iously been noted down purely as curiosities, now scholars f rom various disci- plines were sudden ly growing interested in them: jurists hoped to deduce f rom them the people’s idea of justice; my thologists sought in them traces of pre-Christian belief systems; writers believed they cou ld prov ide a deeper understanding of human emotions. At the time, literature with my thologica l themes was popu lar reading materia l in high society. A compilation of the legends and sa- gas of Engelberg f rom that era at tests to this development. In 1702 the scholar Johann Jakob Scheuchzer of Zurich recorded the legend of the Bu ll of Uri, as a curiosity of sor ts, and proceeded to give scientif ic explanations of the supernatura l events contained in it. In 1823, the clerk of Engelberg, Melchior Kuster, took an entirely dif ferent approach in com- posing two legendar y poems. Inf luenced by Romantic German and English writers, he

Book recommendation: Mike Bacher, Sagen und Legenden aus Engel- berg, edition höch li, 2014 (in German)

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