Earth hen
The earth hen , which is also called Coluber domesticus , Erdhühnlein , Erdglucke , Erdglutsch and Herdhendl , is a household spirit from the Alpine region , Upper Palatinate and Bavaria .
The voice of this spirit being should come from the ground or a dark corner of the room and sound like the chuckling or peeping of a hen that leads Küklein, which earned him the name. The erdhenne to how the toad or Hausotter be a benign guardian spirit, which warns the inhabitants of the house before anbahnendem misfortune. It was once said that whoever saw the earth hen had to die within the same year, which the author I. G. Schmidt ridiculed in his collection of superstitions published in 1718 . He took this right because he once wanted to have an alleged mound of earth caught in a cellar, that earth hen, but which turned out to be a simple mouse. JA Schmeller also writes disparagingly in his Bavarian dictionary : The Erdhuenlein, a phenomenon which, according to the theory of old women, likes to be seen at night in the nursery like a round, bright glow, in the middle of which there seems to be something darker. Presumably generated by the moonlight falling through so-called buzz disks.
literature
- Erich Hupfauf: Legends, Customs and Dialects in the Zillertal , (= Schlern-Schriften; Volume 148), Innsbruck 1956
- Leander Petzoldt : Small lexicon of demons and elementals . 3. Edition. Munich 2003, pages 66-67, ISBN 3-406-49451-X
- Siegfried W. de Rachewiltz: "Schragl" and Erdglutsch , in: The window. Tiroler Kulturzeitschrift 26/1980, pages 2634–2642