MANNHARDT, WILHELM

MANNHARDT, WILHELM (1831–1880), pioneer of scientific folklore in Germany. He was born on March 26, 1831, in Schleswig, the son of a Mennonite pastor; five years later the family moved to Danzig. Mannhardt was always in very poor health, having been afflicted with curvature of the spine at about the age of seven. Unsuited to active life, he read assiduously and showed an early interest in both Germanic mythology and folklore. The shape of his early thinking was established by 1848, when he read Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (Göttingen, 1835). While still at school he began his inquiries into the oral traditions of northern Germany, and was on one occasion suspected by one of his informants of being one of the dwarfs about which he was asking—he was at the time only one and a half meters tall.

Mannhardt studied German language and literature at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin, receiving his doctorate at Tübingen in 1854 and his habilitation at Berlin three years later. In 1855 he assumed the editorship of the Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde, a journal which survived only four years. In autumn 1855 he came into contact with the brothers Grimm, whose work he admired greatly, and in 1858 he published his first book, Germanische Mythen, extending his inquiries to cover not only European but also Indian material. He was perhaps the first scholar to compare the Germanic Ρórr (Thor) with the Vedic Indra as two deities associated with thunder. In the early 1860s Mannhardt was forced by ill health to return to Danzig; there he obtained a librarian's post, which he held until 1873.

It was in Danzig that Mannhardt began the research work for which he was to become famous. He planned a comprehensive work to be called Monumenta mythica Germaniae, to be based not only on written sources but on firsthand information from the rural community (which was, however, even then beginning to change under the impact of scientific farming). The great work was never completed, but in its preparation Mannhardt circulated a questionnaire, and in so doing created a technique. The original questionnaire contained twenty-five questions (later expanded to thirty-five) concerning popular beliefs and practices connected with the harvest (Erntesitten). His methodology was in general that of the emerging sciences of geology and archaeology, and was aimed at uncovering lower "layers" of belief, which might finally contribute to a "mythology of Demeter." Mannhardt also traveled widely in search of material in northern Europe, and interviewed prisoners of war in and near Danzig. After writing two preliminary studies, Roggenwolf und Roggenhund (1865) and Die Korndämonen (1867), he published in 1875 and 1876 the work for which he is chiefly known today, the two volumes of Wald- und Feldkulte. But his health was unequal to the sustained effort which his program required, and on Christmas Day 1880, at the age of forty-nine, he died, leaving behind a vast collection of material that has been little used.

Perhaps intimidated by the thoroughness of Mannhardt's methods, scholars for many years tended to accept his results virtually unaltered. His work provided most of the European material for James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, and in general was used more by scholars of comparative religion than by folklorists. And certainly his studies marked an epoch in comparative study. In recent years scholars have begun to examine Mannhardt's material afresh. The emphasis is in process of shifting from beliefs in "spirits of the corn" to the function of harvest rituals in preindustrial, agrarian societies, but the irreplaceable material that Mannhardt collected remains a lasting memorial to his pioneering effort.

Bibliography

Schmidt, Arno. Wilhelm Mannhardts Lebenswerk. Danzig, 1932.

Sydow, C. W. von. Selected Papers on Folklore. Copenhagen, 1948. See the papers on pages 89–105 and 146–165.

Weber-Kellermann, Ingeborg. Erntebrauch in der ländlichen Arbeitswelt des 19. Jahrhunderts auf Grund der Mannhardtbefragung in Deutschland von 1865. Marburg, 1965. Includes a biographical sketch on pages 9–24.

New Sources

Tybjerg, Tove. "Wilhelm Mannhardt: A Pioneer in the Study of Rituals." In The Problem of Ritual, edited by Tore Alhbäck, pp. 27–37. Stockholm, 1993.

Eric J. Sharpe (1987)

Revised Bibliography