A great collection of hauntings for any researcher of German folklore!
5 stelle
During my research of German folklore, I have read numerous old collections of folk tales of highly variable quality - and "Schlesische Sagen" does pretty much everything right. It draws from a very large number of sources (and gives proper citations!) to cover the folk tales of a particular region (Silesia, in this case) in great depth.
Furthermore, it actually has a good structure for the order in which it lists those tales, which is far from universal. Too many collections just add one tale after another without bothering to sort them into a proper context. Among those who do, the authors either list the tales by regional geography or by topic. A good argument can be made for either, but for research purposes I prefer the latter - which is what "Schlesische Sagen" is doing. Yes, this means that you will often read several rather similar tales in a …
During my research of German folklore, I have read numerous old collections of folk tales of highly variable quality - and "Schlesische Sagen" does pretty much everything right. It draws from a very large number of sources (and gives proper citations!) to cover the folk tales of a particular region (Silesia, in this case) in great depth.
Furthermore, it actually has a good structure for the order in which it lists those tales, which is far from universal. Too many collections just add one tale after another without bothering to sort them into a proper context. Among those who do, the authors either list the tales by regional geography or by topic. A good argument can be made for either, but for research purposes I prefer the latter - which is what "Schlesische Sagen" is doing. Yes, this means that you will often read several rather similar tales in a row, but I'd rather have such collections be comprehensive than leave interesting variants out.
This first of the three volumes, "Spuk- und Gespenstersagen", focuses on undead of all kinds - ghosts, revenants, hauntings, will-o'-wisps, and so forth. A particular highlight were the many local vampire variants, which are mostly absent in the more western regions of Germany which I had focused on before.
I can't wait to see what the other two volumes in this collection will unearth!