Giritzenmoos

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Under the Giritzenmoos , popular belief imagined a desolate moor, where the old maids stayed, and more rarely the old bachelors who had been turned into lapwings , Swiss German Giritz, as punishment for being celibate .

The Giritzengericht, Giritzenmoosgericht or Giritzenspiel, also known as the Giritzenmoosfahrt , was the Swiss type of reprimand , in which the unmarried people are ridiculed every year at Carnival . According to the Swiss Idiotikon, the custom was known in large parts of German-speaking Switzerland in the 19th century, but was already disappearing. It was last observed in the Lucerne hinterland around the mid-1870s.

The entertainment was organized by the young boys in the villages. The Giritz father, who was assigned a clerk and a guard, was in charge . This “court” summoned the unmarried women and - less often - unmarried men, carried out a “procedure” in which all sorts of private matters from the past year had to be revealed to the hooting public, and then executed the “convicts” as punishment for their celibacy on a cart out of the village, where they had to be "auctioned off" or bought free.

The Swiss folklorist Richard Weiss saw a pre-Christian fertility myth as the starting point for the custom , according to which unmarried women should be taken to a distant area in spring so that their sterility would not be transmitted to other people, animals and plants.

literature

  • JL Arnold: The "Giritzenmoos" in Dagmersellen (Canton Lucerne). In: Swiss Archives for Folklore, Vol. 7 (1903), pp. 295–298.
  • Baldino (= Johann Baptist Bandlin): Mimosa. Novellas and stories from the Bund. Folk life. Volume II. Brodtmann, Schaffhausen 1858, p. 73.
  • Hans Koch: The Giritzenmoos. A folklore study. In: Innerschweizerisches Jahrbuch für Heimatkunde 17/18, 1954, pp. 183–188.
  • Christoph Landolt : The Giritzenmoos. In: «Word History» from October 30, 2015, ed. from the editors of the Swiss Idiotikon.
  • Schweizerisches Idiotikon , Volume IV, columns 470–472, Article Girizen-Mos ( digitized version ).
  • Ludwig Tobler : The old maids in the beliefs and customs of the German people. In: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 14 (1883), pp. 64–90.
  • Richard Weiss : Folklore of Switzerland. Rentsch, Erlenbach 1946, p. 201/2.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schweizerisches Idiotikon, Volume II, columns 407/8, Giriz article ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ a b Schweizerisches Idiotikon, Volume IV, columns 470–472, Article Girizen-Mos ( digitized version ).
  3. ^ JL Arnold: The "Giritzenmoos" in Dagmersellen (Canton Lucerne). In: Swiss Archives for Folklore, Vol. 7 (1903), pp. 295–298, here p. 295.
  4. ^ So in Dagmersellen in Lucerne , see JL Arnold: Das "Giritzenmoos" in Dagmersellen (Canton Lucerne), in: Swiss Archives for Folklore, Vol. 7 (1903), pp. 295–298. Further descriptions can be found in the Schweizerisches Idiotikon, Volume IV, columns 470–472.
  5. ^ Richard Weiss: Folklore of Switzerland. Rentsch, Erlenbach 1946, p. 201.