More Kobolds!

Don’t you just hate it when you write a post and then discover more good stuff on the subject of your post?

It keeps happening to me. In this instance, I got a book called ‘Hausgeister!’ It is beautifully illustrated, but what really stuck out was the information about the house kobold. An archeologist even reported finding the little Kobold figurines that were supposed to act as home protectors.

So- New Origins for the Tricksy Kobold

Remember how I said that kobolds were believed to come from Greek house gods? That idea seems to have come from a monk by the name of Notker Labeo who wrote about them in the early 1000’s. He renamed them ingoumo- which were respected beings you saw in the house- and insgesid- which was a fellow occupant.

That was just his guess though. Missionaries would often try to exorcise them the way you would a ghost, but stories about kobolds often suggested they were the spirits of a place, like a meadow, that got carried into the house by accident. Still, the writers of ‘Hausgeister!’ stick by the notion that a kobold was the ghost of the first owner of hausvater of the house. Stories of kobolds also could start with them being the ghost of children who were looking to be saved through household chores and as the ghosts of murder victims.

The Church’s Hot Take on the Kobold and the Evidence that Brings Us

Just as the Church considered fairies demonic (or at least that believing that they had powers was heretical,) so the kobold was something to be condemned.

More particularly, in the early 1200’s, a priest by the name of Rudolf bin Schlesin wrote a sermon condemning locals for having statues by their hearth called stetewalidiu. This seems to be connected to the practice of burying pots of food upside down underneath a hearth, where people can’t get it, and sometimes throwing food behind the hearth. Was this an attempt to feed or attract a kobold, renamed stetewalidiu? Possibly. They were sometimes called that.

Before the 1800’s, kobolds went by a variety of local names. There was Niss, Woltekens, Hinzelmann, and Razen, just to name a few.

Sometimes they were part of the ‘hexe,’ which referred to any evil spirit before the 1500’s, when it became the name for witches.

Time Passes, and the Kobolds Become Curiosities

While in the time that my story takes place, many of the characters would have left a pot of gifts for the house kobold buried under their hearth or would have carefully buried a similar pot in a corner of a house they had just moved into, their descendants would have felt differently. During the 1600’s, big thinkers of the day inveighed against believing in the kobold as stupid superstition. This would have been shortly after Germany had broken into many principalities (it had a real tendency towards civil wars and feuds before this.) People stopped telling these stories and burying pots.

When nationalism took hold of the area in the early 1800’s, the likes of Jacob Grimm started looking for stories and beliefs that German-speakers held in common in order to make a case for being one country. This search led to the romanticization and resurrection of the kobold. There were even stories as to why the old place spirits had left. Romantic painters depicted kobolds watching trains from a distance, sadly receding into a shared (and somewhat imaginary) past.

I highly recommend ‘Hausgeister! Household Spirits of German Folklore’ for the artwork alone. They have a professional photographer and sculptor working with the historians. The in-depth research is also refreshing. Do check it out.