Golden skittles

The legend of the golden skittles is a treasure saga that is widespread in the German and French-speaking areas. It points to a place where a treasure in the form of a Kegelries (set of cones) should lie. However, no treasure of this kind has yet been found.

Limitation and delimitation of the type of saga

The saga of the golden bowling game is the main representative of a group of sagas that deal with treasures associated with bowling, namely kegelries, skittles, balls or a bowling alley made of gold and / or silver. This group is sometimes summarized under the term treasure skittles .

The saga differs from other treasure tales only through motifs that are directly related to the play equipment or the bowling, such as the bowling treasure motif and the ghost bowling motif. Common motifs associated with the treasure bowling saga, such as the wicked knight, the wicked squire, the hero's wages, the mountain blessing or the maiden to be redeemed, are typical treasure saga motifs.

Bowling is used in many treasure bowling sagas, but not in the plural. Nevertheless, in folklore the treasure bowling saga is mostly seen as a sub-case of the bowling legends, although the treasure bowling saga is probably older than today's bowling (see below).

Only in essence are almost all treasure bowling legends similar. In the stories, the bowling game is mostly hidden underground, almost always in a hill or mountain. This also includes the many skittles that lie under a castle, as these are themselves on a mountain. The ream is often in the water (well, spring, lake). Mostly it is considered unrecoverable, if then it can usually only be lifted by pagans .

Bowling has sibling games in Europe that have a comparable status in the respective peoples, but are only played with balls. The boules in France and the bocce in Italy. There are also treasure tales from both games, for example the boule en or (golden boules) or the boccia d'oro (golden boccia). Relationships have apparently not yet been investigated.

Distribution area

The saga of the treasure bowling game occurs in the entire German-speaking area, except in the northern third of Germany, the lowlands. The legend is told most often in the Alps and in Baden-Württemberg , especially in the Lake Constance area and in South Tyrol . There is still an accumulation in the Zittau Mountains ( Saxony and the Czech Republic).

In France the legend is called jeu de quilles en or (golden bowling game ) and is scattered all over the country. It also occurs there in lowland areas. The distribution area is possibly even larger, as there is also a legend of a golden bowling alley in northern Spain, for example.

backgrounds

Bowling as a picture for the thunderstorm

In popular belief, playing with the skittles is generally an image for thunderstorms . In the game the ball rolls on the track and the falling pins crash. Thunder rolls in a thunderstorm and lightning cracks. If there is a thunderstorm in the sky, supernatural people bowle.

In Switzerland, for example, the people mostly explained the noise of thunder by bowling. Rare by the similar bowls ( Ticino ), cheese rolls ( Wallis , central Switzerland ), goats bends ( Freiburg ), Fässer- or carriage wheels. The cause of the noise was mostly God , but also Peter - in Catholic areas sometimes the angels , in rare cases the apostles . Only occasionally did giants , witches or devils appear responsible for the storm noise, in Italian Ticino also la vecchia (the old woman). Behind it one suspects either original beliefs or a joke fiction.

Thunderstorms, bowling and the treasure bowling saga

There is also a lot of bowling in the legend of the golden skittles. The relationship to the thunderstorm is also evident in some stories through the glow of the golden skittles (lightning) and through cracks or great noise (thunder). Individual stories even establish a direct connection to the thunderstorm. Since the game of treasure skittles is in most cases assumed to be in a hill or mountain and often in water, a primal relationship between thunderstorm and mountain is revealed. The thunderstorm consists not only of the glow of lightning and the crashing and rolling of thunder, but also of the masses of water falling from the sky in the rain shower. The game of skittles in the water of the mountain is thus an image for the mountain, in which the force that the thunderstorm generates resides. If, however, bowling is used in the legend, it is not God or Christian saints, but knightly spirits, squires, dwarfs or giants who push the bowling pins.

The treasure saga character

To this day it has not been explained why the saga changed from bowling to a treasure saga and why this motif occurs so often. Bowling in its current form (with the background of the thunderstorms) did not originate until the late Middle Ages. It is not documented before the 12th century. It was not until the 13th and 14th centuries that it became a real folk game. It was only at that time that bowling took its prominent place in the general popular consciousness and had an effect on popular belief and thus on its role in the treasure saga. Treasure tales, however, generally refer to places that lost their original meaning even before the Middle Ages. Behind the legend of the golden skittles there seems to be an unknown, older treasure motif, which has been replaced or suppressed.

literature

Treasure skittles and skittles in legend

In the order of the year of publication.

Johann Wilhelm Wolf: Contributions to German mythology. 2 vols. Göttingen, Leipzig 1852. Vol. 2, pp. 118-121. (State of research in the 19th century.)

Ernst Ludwig Rochholz: Swiss legends from Aargau. 2 vols. Aarau 1856. Vol. 1, pp. 129-131. (State of research in the 19th century.)

Heinrich Bertsch: Weltanschauung, folk tale and folk custom. Dortmund 1910, pp. 216–223 (p. 221) “Kegelte Giant”. Online . (Interpretations of the treasure skittles game using limited source material.)

Concise dictionary of German superstition , Vol. 4. Berlin 1932, keyword: "Kegel, Kegelspiel". (Detailed description of the meaning of the bowling and the bowling objects in legend and superstition, which does not, however, go into the peculiarity of the treasure motif in the treasure bowling game saga.)

Matthias Zender: The legend as a reflection of folk art and life in the West German border region. Dissertation from 1938, Bonn 1940 (detailed on the treasure saga, on pp. 69–71, however, only briefly in relation to the treasure bowling saga.)

Hugo Neugebauer: Tyrolean legend motifs. In: Der Schlern - magazine for local history and folklore. June 1951, p. 250 f. Online . (Not a very well-founded interpretation of the treasure bowling saga, but quite typical in the way it is presented.)

Leander Petzoldt (Ed.): Deutsche Volkssagen. Beck Verlag, Munich 1970, ISBN 3406025420 . (Representative collection of legends on the topic of treasure sagas, but without a treasure bowling game.)

ASV = Paul Geiger & Richard Weiss (founders), Walter Escher, Elsbeth Liebl and Arnold Niederer : Atlas der Schweizerischen Volkskunde / Atlas de Folklore suisse. 2nd part, 7th delivery. Swiss Society for Folklore , Basel 1971, pp. 592–596. (Different forms of popular thunderstorm images in Switzerland and their area of distribution.)

History of bowling