Wolpertinger
Pronounced VOL-per-ting-er — [ˈvɔlpɐtɪŋɐ]
The Antlered Hoax of the Bavarian Alps
“A horned, winged jackrabbit stitched together from every animal a Bavarian taxidermist ever met.”
The Wolpertinger is Bavaria's house chimera: a rabbit, mostly, wearing a roebuck's antlers, a pheasant's wings and whatever fangs the teller's imagination supplies. It haunts the alpine forests and beer-lit taverns of southern Germany in equal measure — glimpsed, allegedly, in moonlit clearings, and displayed, definitely, in glass cases above bar counters, stitched together by taxidermists with a straight face and a sense of humour.
No two Wolpertinger are alike; lore explains this as the result of promiscuous crossbreeding among foxes, roebucks, hares, ducks and pheasants in the deep woods. The joke has a long pedigree and an uncannily biological footnote: seventeenth-century engravings show horned rabbits that scholars now suspect were real animals disfigured by the Shope papilloma virus, which grows horn-like tumours on a hare's skull. Bavaria simply refused to let the marvel die.
The Legend
As the mountain folk tell it, the Wolpertinger is painfully shy and native to the most secluded corners of the Bavarian Alps. It shows itself only under precise conditions: tradition insists that a beautiful young woman walking the forest at full moon, in the company of the right man, may catch a glimpse — a rule that says rather more about Bavarian hunters than about Bavarian wildlife. For everyone else there are the stuffed specimens, posed mid-snarl in tavern corners.
The standard specimen wears the head of a rabbit, the body of a squirrel, the antlers of a deer and the wings — occasionally the legs — of a pheasant, but the recipe is negotiable. Duck feet, fox tails and fangs all appear in the record, since the creature's essence is precisely that it has no fixed form. Locals sold the beasts to credulous visitors with elaborate accounts of their habits, and the trade in mounted 'specimens' continues in Bavarian souvenir shops and inns to this day.
The Record
The paper trail begins in the seventeenth century, when woodcuts and engravings of horned hares circulated in Europe — images plausibly drawn from rabbits infected with the horn-producing Shope papilloma virus. The name itself may descend from the village of Wolterdingen, whose glassmakers blew animal-shaped schnapps glasses known as Wolterdinger; how the word hopped species to a stuffed chimera is exactly the sort of question the creature seems designed to defeat.
The taxidermy tradition proper flowered in the nineteenth century, when Bavarian craftsmen began assembling composite animals for the entertainment of locals and the fleecing of tourists. The Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum in Munich — the German Hunting and Fishing Museum, housed in a former Augustinian church — keeps a permanent Wolpertinger exhibition, its glass cases holding the definitive specimens of an animal that has never existed.
The Lore
The Wolpertinger belongs to a whole family of regional impossibilia: Thuringia has its Rasselbock, the Palatinate its Elwedritsche, the Alemannic south its Dilldapp, Austria its Raurakl. Across the Atlantic the jackalope carries on the same joke in American, and Sweden's skvader — half hare, half wood grouse — was mounted in earnest. Folklorists read them all as hunter's humour: initiation pranks for the gullible, told with the solemnity that makes a tall tale work.
The beast has long since hopped from the tavern into popular culture — World of Warcraft players can adopt one as a pet during the game's beer-festival event, and Walter Moers built a novel around Rumo, a horned Wolpertinger hero. At home it remains a working piece of Bavarian identity: part mascot, part tourist trap, part gentle test of how much a visitor is willing to believe after the second litre of beer.
Field Notes
- ✦ Mounted fakes are sold in Bavarian souvenir shops and inns to fool tourists — a trade dating to the 19th century.
- ✦ Said to be visible mainly to beautiful young women out walking with the right man at full moon.
- ✦ Body parts borrowed from squirrels, deer, pheasants and rabbits, depending on the telling; no two are alike.
- ✦ Munich's Deutsches Jagd- und Fischereimuseum keeps a permanent exhibition of Wolpertinger specimens.
- ✦ 17th-century engravings of horned rabbits may record real animals disfigured by the Shope papilloma virus.
Case File
- Classification
- Composite woodland beast
- Category
- Beast/Hybrid
- Territory
- Bavaria
- First Sighted
- 19th century (popularized)
- Habitat
- Alpine forests and meadows of Bavaria
- Reported Size
- Rabbit-sized
- Also Known As
- Wolperdinger · Woibbadinga · Crauwüstel