Headless rider
The headless rider is originally an undead revenant who appears in the folk tales of German-speaking countries. Similar figures also exist in other areas, such as the Dullahan of Irish mythology .
The headless rider in the German folk tale
In the folk tales of West Germany, the headless rider is a feared figure whose appearance is often associated with immediate or imminent death for those who meet him. The main area of distribution of these legends seems to have been the Rhineland , but it cannot be ruled out that the legends recorded in the 19th century, the focus of which is the headless rider, only reflect a remnant and this figure in earlier centuries also reflects the legends of others Populated parts of the German-speaking area.
According to tradition, the headless rider was sighted at night. In some legends it is said that he appeared out of nowhere, while in other traditions he gallops on his horse out of a grave or a tomb. In contrast to the "headless horseman" in Tim Burton's film adaptation Sleepy Hollow , the headless horseman of the west and north-west German legends did not cut off his victims' heads, but killed them by touching them with the hand. The folklorist Will-Erich Peuckert recites a legend from Northern Germany in which a few young people are suddenly faced with a funeral procession. You can see immediately that they are ghosts - or rather: revenants - because none of the people has a head, and even the horses in front of the hearse are headless. One of the boys received a severe slap in the face that made him die after a few days. Just touching the undead makes the living sink into the grave. Behind this is apparently the conviction that direct contact with the revenant leads to the loss of life force. However, this also makes it clear that it must have been an undead returning in full physicality, a “living corpse”, and not a material spirit.
In the Rhineland, the headless horsemen were often revenants who, according to the beliefs of the people, had to atone for a specific sin. Either they were suicides, whose corpses were beheaded by the executioner until the 17th century and buried at a crossroads or some other unconsecrated place, often nailing them to the ground with a long hawthorn post ( donkey burial ). The other group were boundary stone relocators who had enriched their neighbors' farmland. In an ancient, if only rarely performed, execution ceremony, the victim was allowed to bury the deceiver up to his neck at the point where the boundary stone had originally been and to steer the plow over the culprit until nothing was left of his head . After his death, according to the people, the headless man had to go around at night, whereby he no longer primarily caused harm to the living, but rather prevented them from committing a mortal sin through his terrifying appearance. This change in meaning from the injurious to the atoning revenant is probably due to the formative influence of the Christian belief in purgatory , how the belief in recurring dead appearing in full corporeality in Western Europe has been completely Christianized and transformed into a belief in non-corporeal spirit beings.
Since the headless rider in his West German expression was primarily a penitent, he could be redeemed. Often a prayer or a greeting in which God or Christ was mentioned was sufficient. Then the headless man, who was mostly dressed in black, turned himself into a white shroud and thanked the living man. But he was not allowed to take the hand of the revenant, but at best hold out a stick. This was rotten by touching the dead, which meant that the living who touched the dead should have died despite his act of redemption.
Related to the headless rider is the headless Junker who walked both in the area between the Rhine and Ruhr and in Bohemia. It was said that he stood in the way of young women or girls who were on their way home at night and touched their chests, robbing them of their vitality. After a few days the victims died, and in the hour of their death they saw the headless man standing by their bedside as a demonic bridegroom, invisible to everyone else present. Apparently different types of legends are incorporated here, such as the motif of the dead groom in the Lenor saga . The figure of the headless junker was popularly interpreted as a recurring rapist who had escaped just punishment during his lifetime and now had to go without a head, as if he had received the punishment after his death that would have been due to his crimes. Here we are dealing with the motif of the “reflective punishment”. In terms of the history of the motif, the proximity to the injurious revenant of the vampire type cannot be overlooked, because both rob their victims of vitality. Sometimes the headless one merges with the figure of the fireman, a revenant who is enveloped in flames - a walking purgatory, so to speak, which is intended to serve as a warning to the living.
The missing head of this revenant has recently been interpreted as a sign of the just punishment that the sinner received in purgatory , such as the headless Junker. This interpretation is understandable if one takes into account that in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, beheading was the most common type of execution for men. In fact, behind the figure of the headless hides the notion that goes back deep into human history that the head represented the seat of life force or - in Christian terms, although not quite correctly expressed - the soul. In the Christianized view of the Middle Ages and early modern times, this meant: While the soul - and with it the head - remained in purgatory, the sinner was allowed to return to earth for a short period of time to warn the living.
In the 19th century legend of Postmichel from Esslingen , someone wrongly executed around 1500 reappears as a headless rider on St. Michael's Night .
The headless rider in literature
Literary fame reaped the figure of the Headless Horseman by Washington Irving's short story The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow ( The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , 1809). In this early work of American literature, the rider, a German mercenary during his lifetime, appears as a kind of ghost who plays all sorts of tricks on the residents of the village of Sleepy Hollow . Irving had probably met the figure of the rider on a trip along the Rhine (1806) and - similar to the monk von Heisterbach , who became Rip Van Winkle - moved the scene from West Germany to the Dutch hinterland of New York.
Film adaptations
The story of Sleepy Hollow has been filmed several times, most recently by Tim Burton with Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane and Christina Ricci as Katrina Van Tassel. However, the “headless horseman” in Sleepy Hollow turns into a demonic revenant who cuts off the heads of respectable citizens and hides them in a forest. In this respect, this villain bears more resemblance to the German legendary characters than to Irving's rather joke-like specter. The film, which apart from the names of the setting and the main characters shows little resemblance to the literary source, was primarily intended as an atmospheric homage to the horror film classics of the 1950s and 1960s, and so Johnny Depp does not play one, as in the original quirky village school teacher, but a young, modern-thinking police officer sent by a New York justice of the peace , played by Christopher Lee , to solve the terrifying series of murders in Sleepy Hollow.
In 2007 the Sci-Fi Channel produced a horror film entitled Headless Horseman .
literature
- Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli (ed.): Concise dictionary of German superstition . Ten volumes. de Gruyter, Berlin 1927–1942 (Unchanged photomechanical reprint. Ibid 2000, ISBN 3-11-011194-2 ).
- Dieter Feucht: Pit and pile. A contribution to the history of German execution customs (= Legal Studies. Vol. 5, ISSN 0449-4369 ). Mohr, Tübingen 1967
- Heinrich Hoffmann (ed.): On the folklore of the Jülich country. 2 volumes. Dostall, Eschweiler 1911–1914, important collection of sagas;
- Volume 1: Legends from the Rur area.
- Volume 2: Legends from the Indes region.
- Peter Kremer: Where horror lurks. Terrifying stories of bloodsuckers and headless riders, of werewolves and revenants on Inde, Erft and Rur. PeKaDe-Verlag, Düren 2003, ISBN 3-929928-01-9 (collection of sagas ).
- Peter Kremer: Dracula's cousins. On the trail of the vampire belief in Germany. Self-published, Düren 2006.
- Will-Erich Peuckert (Ed.): Bremer Sagen (= memorials of German folk poetry. Vol. 5, ZDB -ID 504250-1 ). Schwartz, Göttingen 1961 (2nd, unchanged edition. Ibid. 1988, ISBN 3-509-01491-X ).
