Florian Schäfers, Janin Pisareks and Hannah Gritsch’s band “Fabeltiere”

WWarning about the Hötzelstier! The calf-sized creature with a donkey's head, a pig's snout, sharp teeth and long claws primarily targets young girls who are out alone in the evening. The monster bites off their pigtails and sometimes even scalps its victims. After all – in the Westerwälder Wiedtal, where the Hötzelstier has his territory, there is gender equality. This is ensured by the Tholm, a combination of human and hunting dog with a tail like an ox whip. He uses it to spank aggressive young machos so badly that they lose their ability to hear, see and sit.

Tholm and Hötzelstier are just two of a huge menagerie of bizarre creatures that you can get to know in text and, above all, images in the volume “Fabled Animals”. The animal demons are presented not only in historical illustrations, but also in models that the author team made based on contemporary eyewitness accounts and placed in their natural environments. As you can read in the book, this ties in with the tradition of the early modern Chambers of Wonder, in which mythical creatures were exhibited that were assembled from plaster and the bones of various animals and caused the viewer to vacillate between amazement and skepticism.

Unicorn, dragon and werewolf

But despite all the joy in the fantastic and curious that permeates the book, the authors are not interested in presenting the outgrowths of superstition as a mere show of monstrosities. They take the winged snakes, predator-headed calves and child-eating night ravens seriously as reflections of collective worldviews, fears and values. They meticulously trace the genesis of the mythical creatures in sagas, fairy tales, legends and travel reports, localize their origins and trace the regional distributions, different names and diverse metamorphoses.

Excursions are dedicated to special topics such as demonic worms, monsters as border decorations in medieval books or the Palatinate Elwedritschen, which are said to have a chicken-like shape. Not much else is known about them, except that, like the Thuringian Rasselbock and the Bavarian Wolpertinger, they are among the neck creatures that were invented to fool strangers. Despite the wealth of information, the book is written in a clear and entertaining style. The sources – often collections of legends from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – which are quoted extensively by the authors, also provide lively descriptions with local color.

Human revenants who are cursed

The mythical animals portrayed also include classics such as the unicorn, the dragon, the werewolf and the basilisk, which is the king of snakes with its deadly poisonous gaze, but can be defeated by a weasel. Two other prominent mythical animals, the griffin and the phoenix, only appear in passing, as they hardly play a role in the folk tales of the German-speaking countries, on which the book focuses. Since the focus is on hybrid creatures whose animal parts outweigh the human ones in appearance and behavior, the strongly humanoid mermaids and their relatives are also excluded.

The reader is taken on a safari through legendary and fairytale landscapes, whose fauna leaves nothing to be desired in terms of exoticism. The species that can be observed there include, for example, the Habergeiß, which appears in the form of a three-legged bird with a croaking goat's voice, the rye cat, which jumps into children's faces, or the Aachen Bahkauv, also known as the Bach calf, which has glowing, bear-like eyes With paws and a scaly tail, it rises at night from the thermal springs of the imperial city, rattles heavy chains and jumps on drunks. This habit makes it, like Habergeiß, Krötenalp or Werewolf, a “stool” whose weight increases with every step the victim takes until it collapses.

However, not all mythical animal creatures are chimeras. The moo-calves, gray cats, bull toms or pea-bucks, which frighten people with fiery eyes and in changing forms, are demonic representatives of domestic animal species. Human revenants who are cursed are often hidden in their form. The most common of these creatures, which are referred to as “village animals” in mythical research, is the black ghost dog, which is known in East Frisia as Talwiespudel, in Münsterland as Swatte Rüen, in Rhenish as Zubbelsdeer and in Bavaria and Austria as Wauggl. Here, as with other mythical animals, maps show the exact geographical distribution of the names, which are often in dialect.

The animal monsters, once terror elements of a living folk belief, have largely been forgotten or become tourist folklore as marketplace statues and comic characters. With their book, the authors have now created a worthy protective space that protects the grouchy tomcat, truncheon dog, skull spider and all their fellow monsters from complete trivialization. But will they stay calm in their paper mythical animal park? You never know with the undead.

Florian Schäfer, Janin Pisarek and Hannah Gritsch: “Fabulous Animals”. Mythical animal creatures from German-speaking myths, fairy tales and legends. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2023. 256 pages, illustrations, hardcover, €39.