Are there any folk/fairy tales that are specific to Austria?

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Lisa B

I haven't found English sites yet, but if you Google "Oesterreichische Maerchen", you will get several sites with collections in German. Some may have English translations, I didn't check them out in detail.

As you will notice, the tales tend to be regional more than "all-Austrian". There are always tales about local places.

For example, there is a lovely castle ruin on the Danube called Aggstein (it is unusual in that it is very well preserved in its medieval state). There is a story about Aggstein that prisoners were thrown out of the windows of the owner's private apartments, onto the rocky bottom of the cliff below, and that the owner's wife used to call the blood-covered rocks her "rose garden". Historians say this is absolutely untrue. Still, the story persists, and if you visit Aggstein (you should, it's an easy day trip by Danube ship from Vienna if you don't have use of a car), you will be shown where the "rose garden" of the story is supposed to have been.

Many folk tales are religious in origin. I've recently been researching Hemma of Gurk, who lived around 1000 AD and was recognized as a saint by the Catholic church in the 1930's. (Gurk is north of Klagenfurt in Carinthia.)

A wonderful story about Hemma is that, when she got pregnant after 10 years of marriage, she made a pilgrimage to three local sacred sites. She went barefoot, in pilgrim's dress, and carried nothing except a day's worth of bread. (She was a noblewoman who was the wife of a count, so this was pretty amazing.)

By the time she got to the third site, she was very tired and ill because of being exposed to bad weather. The chapel she was going to was a chapel high on a hill, with a very sacred image of the Virgin Mary. She got to the bottom of the hill, and was sure that she did not have the physical resources left to climb the hill. But she found that, because of all the rain, a landslide had carried the chapel to the bottom of the hill. She went into it with her last strength, embraced the statue of the Virgin, and basically passed out. When she woke up, she had been healed, and was able to walk home.

The only parts of this story that we know for sure to be true is that Hemma did go on a pilgrimage to the three sites, and that the chapel did come down the hill with a landslide (hard to say whether these things happened at the same time).

You don't have to believe the religious aspects to find such stories charming and interesting.

Another religious story comes from my home town in Carinthia. There is a very old chapel on a hill next to the town. It started out as a Celtic cult site, and was then Christianized. In the 1600's, a hermit lived there, and he was (actually, still is) revered for performing miracles such as curing sick people.

He built a wooden bell tower over the small chapel, and put up a bell. As a service for the local people, he kept track of time with either a candle or a water clock, and rang the bell to indicate the hours of the day. This was the first "clock" for the town, and much appreciated by the farmers. (This much is recorded history.)

The legend part is that when the hermit passed away, the bell kept ringing the hours for three more days in honor of his memory.

sannaparis

In the Wachau, a part of the danube valley, close to where I grew up, you can hear about the tale of "SÃ¤nger Blondel".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondel
I
On the way back from the Crusade, at the end of 1192, Richard the Lionhearted of England was shipwrecked in the Adriatic and he decided to make his way back overland to Normandy. He travelled disguised as a peasant, to avoid the attentions of Leopold of Austria and Henry of Germany, with whom he had quarrelled violently in the Holy Land. Unfortunately, spies discovered him and, when he was sitting in a tavern in the village of Eedberg (near Vienna), the Mayor of Vienna burst in and captured him. Richard was imprisoned in a castle some miles up the Danube, at the stronghold of the Kuenringers: the Robber Barons of the Wachau. This was at Durnstein, a dramatic fortress on a hill high above the village. One of the hotels there today is called the "Richard Lowenherz" and the other is the ''Sensor Blondel," which is also the name of one of the local wines. This latter name, of course, commemorates the well-known, and probably apocryphal, tale of Richard's troubadour, Blondel de Neale, who wandered about Europe singing Richard's favourite ballads outside every castle. He did this until he had a response from inside. The story tells how, by Richard singing the second verse, he was able to discover where his King was hidden. He would have had quite a job at Durnstein, as Richard was caged, not in the castle itself, but in a small chicken-coop-like cell amongst the boulders, a few hundred yards beyond.

John

The exorcisim of Annelise is quite spoken about in Salzburg.

harryd

Schnee Weiss und die sieben Ahnolds. Just kidding, I don't know of any, but I would imagine there are dozens. Send an email to an Austrian library.

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