“A shaggy, hulking wild-woman of the Alpine woods who may snatch a child or, if caught, reward a clever farmer.”
In the high forests of the German-speaking Alps — the Tyrol above all, but also the Swiss Grisons, Vorarlberg and the Bavarian ranges — herders and woodcutters told of the Fänggen: wild women built on the scale of trees. A Fängge is a giantess covered in hair and bristle, black-maned, her locks strewn with strands of beard lichen, dressed in tree bark and the pelts of wildcats and foxes, with a mouth reaching from ear to ear and black eyes said to flash like lightning.
She is the she-ogre of the Alpine 'wild folk' tradition, the female answer to the moss-grown wild man, and her stories run from horror to housework. Fänggen eat children, swap newborns for changelings and tear intruders apart; yet their daughters also hire themselves out to farms as maids of superhuman strength, faithful for years — until the day word comes out of the forest that one of their kind has died, at which they drop everything and go home to the trees.
The Legend
Tyrolean tales give them names like a grim family register: Rauhrinde, 'Rough-Bark'; Hochrinta, 'High-Bark'; Stutzfärche, 'Pruned-Fir'; Langtüttin, 'Long-Breast', who suckled captive boys with one breast of milk and one of venom. Around Nassereith a Fängge the size of a middling tree preyed on young boys; in the Paznaun a Fängge tore apart a new mother and tried to take her place at the hearth, betrayed only by her shaggy, bearded face.
The wild women could also be beaten at their own game. In a Tyrolean tale of the old Polyphemus type, a peasant seized for the pot suggested he would taste better cooked, and while his captor split firewood he knocked the wedge from the log so the trunk snapped shut on her hand. When she howled to her kin that 'Saltton' — 'Did-it-myself' — had hurt her, the joke answered itself: she had suffered it herself, and the peasant walked free from the mountain.
The Record
The tradition entered print through the great nineteenth-century collectors, above all Ignaz Vincenz Zingerle, whose Sagen aus Tirol (1859) preserved the Fänggen tales of the Inn valley and the high side-valleys, and Wilhelm Mannhardt, who set the wild folk into comparative mythology in his Wald- und Feldkulte. An eighteenth-century account from Furna in the Grisons recalls wild folk dwelling in the Davos valley until they were driven away by the sound of Furna's church bells.
The scholarship reads the Fänggen as tree-souls in giant form. Their lives are bound to particular old trees — when the tree falls or dies, its Fängge dies with it, and when a forest is logged wholesale the Fänggen of that valley vanish altogether. Later legend shrank them, from tree-tall wood-mothers to dwarfish 'fänkenmannli' living in holes in the ground, a diminishment folklorists compare to the death of Pan: the old forest powers dwindling as the bells and axes advanced.
The Lore
The Fänggen sit inside the wider Alpine order of wild people — the wilde Leute — alongside the salige women who guard the chamois. The chamois are the Fänggen's own livestock, which is why hunters of them fare especially badly in the tales. Variants shade by region: the Fengge of Vorarlberg is smaller and less sinister, the Swiss Waldfänken verge on dwarfs, and in Bavaria the related word Fankerl slid over the centuries into meaning the Devil himself.
The maid stories carry the tradition's strange tenderness. In Fließ, a farm family's inhumanly strong servant girl worked faithfully for years, always refusing baptism, until a traveller called out that 'Hoachrinta is dead' — and she fled to the forest at once to take up her dead mother's place. The tale is the whole tradition in miniature: the wild blood serves the farm but belongs to the trees, and the forest never fully releases what was born to it.
Field Notes
- ✦ Found from the Swiss Grisons across Tyrol into the Bavarian Alps.
- ✦ A subtype of the Alpine 'wild people' (wilde Leute) tradition, opposite the wild men.
- ✦ Tales run from child-eating horror to loyal, superhumanly strong farm maids.
- ✦ Each Fängge's life is bound to an old tree — when it falls or dies, so does she.
- ✦ Collected in Ignaz Vincenz Zingerle's Sagen aus Tirol (1859).
Case File
- Classification
- Wild giantess / wood sprite
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Grisons and the Alpine region
- First Sighted
- Alpine folk belief
- Habitat
- Forests and high mountains
- Reported Size
- Hairy giantess
- Also Known As
- Fängge · Fanggen · Wild women