I’ve covered a few tales of the Holle/Hulda/Perchta myth-complex in my translations.

(I see these three as fundamentally the same entity, even if there are major regional variations.)

I’ve covered a few of these tales in my translations.

I suspect that there is quite a lot of overlap with kobolds and household spirits in German folklore.

I suspect that there are quite a few of these in German folklore. I have collected more than a hundred German folk tales of saints and holy people over the last few years, but I haven’t cross-referenced these with the list of canonical saints yet.

Thanks for this information!

The way I see it, folk tales are basically a bundle of narrative tropes that can be switched out depending on the needs of the storyteller. So when the Wild Hunt narrative spread across Europe, people always tried to make it relevant to their local region. And in regions where there were still fragments of belief in Odin, it is not surprising that he appeared in one form or another - while in others, the Wild Hunt takes on rather stranger forms.

Ultimately, their main commonality is the strange noises you can hear in the countryside at night.

There are a number of tales - Wild Hunt or otherwise - where there is an explicit mention of a “Wode”. I don’t think linking that to Wodan/Odin is too much of a stretch.

Still, the connections to Hulda are far more numerous, which I find fascinating. I mean, in modern discussions you almost never hear of the Wild Hunt being led by a woman, yet I have encountered quite a few such tales.

I have already started a few such thematic maps, although there is still a lot of work to do.

Oh, there are lots of tales missing. I estimate that there are more than one hundred thousand German folk tales that have been published in the 19th century alone, and there are a bare 755 of them on the wiki (as of this writing).

While I try to translate as many as I can, I am just one guy who does this in my free time. So yeah, there will be gaps.

I’ve read some other books by Claude Lecouteux, and I am looking forward to reading this one.

They are! Click on the link under “Source” in each article.

Curse this mobile interface!

Sorry, I accidentally deleted the link to the article. You should be able to check it out now!

Sorry, I messed up the link. It should be fixed now.

It’s on the big link list at Wikisource:

https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Sagen

I’m on ttrpg.network, which is a lemmy platform. Feel free to upgrade me to mod!

If I had the means to do folklore research on a full-term basis (and maybe a few research assistants as well), then this would be the kind of project I’d love to tackle for German folk tales.

However, until then I’ll only map the tales I actually translate.

It warms my heart to see the link list I created get around. 😉