Apple shot
The motif of the apple shot is common to several European legends . They agree that the hero has to shoot an apple from the head of his child and that he has an arrow ready so that in the event of a miss, he will kill whoever gave him the order. In all the legends, the master shot succeeds.
The oldest version of the saga is passed down by Saxo Grammaticus about the Danish hero Toko . He should do the shot on behalf of King Harald Blue Tooth. When asked why he had a second arrow ready, he replied that he wanted to kill the king if he missed it. For this answer he is punished with the order to undertake a life-threatening ride on skis from a rock, and he also passes this test.
In the version of the Thidrek saga , Egil , Wieland's brother , the blacksmith, receives the order from King Nleid . Egil is supposed to shoot the apple from the head of his three-year-old son and has two more arrows ready to shoot the king. His statement that he wanted to kill the king with a miss is not punished.
In the legend of Wilhelm Tell , which is handed down in the White Book of Sarnen and by Aegidius Tschudi , Tell initially replies to the question that this is the Sagittarius' habit until he, on the guarantee that his life is safe, to himself the courageous answer resolves. The apple shot serves Friedrich Schiller to motivate the murder of Bailiff Gessler in his drama Wilhelm Tell .
The legend of the punk von Rohrbach is described in the Hexenhammer , who is supposed to prove his supernatural shooting skills to a prince by shooting a coin from the head of his son. He too has a second arrow ready to kill the prince if he had hit his son.
In the 1960s, the German TV station ZDF put on a popular game show called The Golden Shot based on the basic idea of the apple shot .
Individual evidence
- ^ English translation of the Hexenhammers, p. 242 ( Memento of March 9, 2010 in the Internet Archive )