Legend of the Bremen hen
The saga of the Bremer Gluckhenne (also: The saga of the hen with the chicks ) is the most famous Bremen folk tale and is considered the founding legend of the Hanseatic city .
legend
After allegedly hundreds of years of oral tradition, the author Friedrich Wagenfeld wrote the legend down in his book Bremens Volkssagen in 1844 .
content
Around the year 778 a small group of homeless people, men, women and children, drove their boats down the river Weser . They lived by fishing and had fled attacks from their powerful neighbors. Now they had nothing but their boats and nets and some material for building wooden huts. But they would also have been willing to give up their last belongings, they could replace them quickly. But they were attached to one good like no other - their freedom .
So they lay in the broad lower reaches of the river in the marshland . Towards evening a storm was brewing and people did not know where to turn. They desperately waited for a sign from their nature gods , because actually they didn't want to move on so quickly because the water at that place was very rich in fish. In the last gleam of the evening light, the fishermen discovered a hen with her chicks, which was looking for a safe place for the night and protection from the storm on a high dune on the right bank of the river . They took this as a sign and followed the animal. The hen finally hid in the heather with her chicks . As if in a mirror, the refugees recognized their own situation and decided to settle on the dune as well, as this apparently guaranteed security. From then on, the dune on the Weser should be the refuge of freedom. Huts were built, the first buildings of what would later become Bremen.
Idol
Wagenfeld used an architectural feature of the Bremen town hall as a template for writing the legend . Since 1612 there has been a stone hen on a nest in the right gusset of the second arch of the arcades from the left, held by a woman in a waving robe. Four chicks sit in the nest .
Other interpretations
There are a few more attempts to explain the importance of the hen at the town hall. It is often assumed that they should be understood as symbols of fertility and protection, together with a rooster sitting in the left gusset of the arch. A more well-known thesis assumes that the hen (and perhaps also the rooster) were signs of artisans. When the journeymen traveling across the country applied for work and stated that they had worked on the town hall in Bremen, they were often asked what one could see in the second arcade or where the hen was. If they knew the answer, it was proof that they were telling the truth. It was probably similar with the mouse in Bremen Cathedral .
If you see the figures as part of a complex picture program in the form of reliefs , which were created according to the specifications of the mayor Heinrich Krefting when adding to the town hall arcade, then they are personifications of virtues. The cock stands for Vigilantia ( Latin for “alertness”, “cunning”), the hen for Custodia (from custodire , Latin for “guard”, “protect”).
Others
In 1957/1958 the sculptor Alfred Horling created an image of the hen in Bremen's Böttcherstraße . The almost correct-scale bronze sculpture sits together with its chicks on a protruding wall near the carillon. The panel below the hen, which describes the saga, was also made by Alfred Horling.
literature
- Dirk Böhling: Bremen legends and stories . Edition Temmen, Bremen 2005, ISBN 3-86108-574-7 .
- Will-Erich Peuckert (Ed.): Bremer Sagen . Otto Schwartz, Göttingen 1961 ( Monuments of German Folk Poetry . Volume 5).
- Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
- Friedrich Wagenfeld: Bremen's folk tales . Bremen 1844.
- Peter Meyer-Odewald: Chicken sweet and sour . Niebank-Rusch-Fachverlag, Bremen 2013, ISBN 978-3-939-56446-1 .