Perchta the belly-slitter and her kin: a view of some traditional threatening figures, threats and punishments

In Scottish lore, the gyre-carling is a powerful ogress reminiscent of Frau Perchta. Just as Perchta was notoriously ugly, and remarkable for her long nose, sometimes said to be made of iron, the gyre-carling was a witch of hideous appearance, and she may have been similarly long-nebbed, an epithet that means "long-nosed," but also has preternatural connotations in Scottish lore (Wright 1970, vol. 3, 647-9). Intriguingly, like Luzia the gyre-carling could wound her victims in the heel, using an iron club (Lindsay 1931-6, vol. 3, 12-13). In Fife, Briggs tells us, women were anxious to spin off all their flax on the last night of the year. If any was left unspun, the gyre-carling would carry it off before morning. Perchta imposes similar penalties on any female foolish enough not to have spun off her flax by Twelfth Night (Wolfram 1980, 47). To her account Briggs adds that in parts of Scotland it is still considered unlucky to leave a piece of knitting unfinished at the end of the year, although this is "not now with any reference to the Gyre-Carling" (Briggs 1977, 213). At John o' Groats, that demon was active rather between Candlemas and Fastern's E'en, disturbing and frightening the whole family with her own spinning if the spinning-wheel had not been put out of action and sained at night. Like Perchta, however, she would also reward spinsters with whom she was pleased (Banks 1939, 161-2).

Proceeding still farther northwards, to the Faroes, we find a counterpart to the gyre-carling known as the gryla. The gryla is associated with Lent, when children who hankered after meat were deterred with a rhyme that translates as follows:

   Down comes a gryla from the mountains,
   With forty tails,
   Bag on back,
   Sword in hand;
   Comes to cut out the stomachs of the children
   Who are crying for meat in Lent (Williamson 1948, 247-8; Jacobsen
   and Matras 1961, 131).

The aforementioned examples would seem to show that gastrotomy and related punishments are not a prerogative of Perchta. Moreover, now that we see such punishments in what seems to be their proper context of feasting or fasting, the search for prototypes in history and prehistory ceases to be a be-all and end-all. The punishment, having so to speak grown out of the corresponding offence, relates to it perfectly naturally in the here and now. The fact that punishment and offence are homorganic and congruous does not of course make the search for precedents irrelevant. The Striges were reputed to prey on their victims' intestines, St Erasmus had his ripped out on a windlass, and there are accounts of people who violated trees being disembowelled as a penalty (Hoffmann-Krayer and Bachtold-Staubli 1927-41, vol. 1, 938; Grimm 1955, vol. 2, 269-70; Ranke and Brednich 1977ff., vol. 5, 740-4; Wolfram 1980, 53). Just as Perchta herself may have inherited this or that facet of her character from something in prehistory or history, so the theme of gastrotomy may well have its remote or less remote prototypes. The point is that, seen in its proper, contemporaneous context, it makes sense.