I hadn’t heard of Germanic field spirits before but i gotta tell ya, Germany has a LOT of them. Don’t go into the fields in Germany, especially if you are a child. You’re gonna get stolen by something.
I hadn’t heard of Germanic field spirits before but i gotta tell ya, Germany has a LOT of them. Don’t go into the fields in Germany, especially if you are a child. You’re gonna get stolen by something.
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is the Kornkater a cat or a dog?
Kater, pronounced “kotter”, is German for tomcat. In older usage, Korn (or corn in English) refers to any cereal grain, and not just maize.
“Muhme” means “Aunt” or “Cousin” but not “Mother”
In Denmark, don’t go near wells, ponds, pools, marshes, or bogs, if you’re a child — and especially don’t go near churchyards after dark.
Have we seen an American alligator totem? Our Everglades tour guide was telling us that some people believe the hardwood islands there were made by female alligators gathering plant matter to make their nests at high points in the grass river
Are there any bee-based mythical creatures in Skin Deep?
I’ve been trying to find Haitian cryptos and mythological creatures, and all I can seem to find are the yeho and the lougarou. What do you do when you want to write about or draw a mythic creature and no one seems to know what it looks like?
I mean it totally tracks why so many of these myths were created. Kid runs into a big field surrounded by tall crops, gets lost, can’t find their way home, and starves. There were no helicopters when these stories were created, and they couldn’t mount an effective search and rescue from the ground. You definitely can’t tell a child not to do something and expect them to not do it. I can think of infinite games I could have played with my friends in a cornfield. But you tell child-me that if I go in a cornfield, an old granny with lanky iron tits and flaming fingers will whip me into her bosom and make me suck hot tar from said titties till I die? You bet your ass I’m not even going to LOOK in the direction of a cropfield.
I’m thinking that’s where Kappa came from. There’s a lot of water-based ones, it seems.
In the south of France the ramponneau waits for children going to the well to devour them. In Britanny the buguinoz terrifies children, targeting especially the orphans. We also have the galipote with a taste for tender meat and in the north the Marie-Groëte waiting in the ditches to grab children.
Poor kids, seems that in every country there are monsters waiting for them.
That gives me La Llorona vibes. I was told her story as a child as a reason to avoid the arroyos in the city.
Miss Tick from Terry Pratchett’s “Wee Free Men” called these “Prohibitory Monsters,” creatures designed to keep kids away from dangerous places. They have them in almost every culture around the world. The Inuit have things that live in cracks in the ice.
Spice and Wolf, or justification about why crop-circles aren’t a think in the Skin Deep verse.
So I grew up in Colorado for over 25 years and I just found a post today about a folklore creature of the Rocky Mountains called the Slide-Rock Bolter. Go figure I find out about this, three years after moving out of Colorado.
This makes me wonder if Germany has a lot of sinkholes/cave systems, that could explain why people would go out and never come back ^^;
… I’m not sure whether it qualifies as “a lot“, and there have been about 4500 years of mining with the possibility of sinkholes, but what makes you think it unlikely that we would go search for those missing persons and find out what actually happened to them?
I read somewhere once that a LOT of the stories in the US about Reasons To Stay Out Of The Corn/Fields came from German immigrants bringing these very stories with them to America. When you consider entire parts of the country is just the Land of Land, you can kinda understand how they so easily took root
Oh my! I’m so happy to see my question answered! :D
Thank you!!!
And yeah I know Roggenmuhme is actually rye aunt and not mother. But there is also the term of “Roggenmutter” (mutter = mother) XD So I thought that’s fine to call her “Rye Mother”~