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

A more general point is that it can be hard to distinguish between members of Widdowson's Classes A and Class B. Santa Claus is, for instance, a supernatural or fictitious figure, but he can also be translated into everyday reality, as any young father donning red suit and white beard at Christmas will know full well. Newfoundland mummers rather similarly model themselves on supernatural figures (Widdowson 1977, 233-7). In this, and in the fact that they act in socially abnormal ways and look abnormal, they very much resemble the Perchten, those lads and men in grotesque disguises who emerge during the Twelve Days of Christmas in parts of Germany and Austria (Rumpf 1991, 94ff.). There is also a parallel with the Shetland skekkels or gruliks, the Orkney gyros (Jacobsen 1897, 52; Marwick 1975, 106-7), and the Faroese Shrovetide grylas--these last, once presumably disguised to represent the monster of that name, having more recently dressed up as Redskins "or anything else that takes their fancy" (Williamson 1948, 247; Jacobsen and Matras 1961, 131). The monsters that seem originally to have inspired the guisers have, incidentally, much in common. If the gryla was a two-legged sheep with forty tails, perhaps reflected in the Orkney gryllyan (Marwick 1929, xxxv-vii and 62-3), the Shetland skekkel alias grulik was "a monstrous coalescence of horse and rider," with fifteen tails and fifteen children on each, while the Orkney gyro had many horns and several tails (Marwick 1975, 32). [5] In fact, the Orcadians representing gyros on Gyro Night, early in February, were dressed up as old women, thus owing less to the mythical horned animal from which they apparently took their name, than to the ogress whose name, gyre-carling, is similarly derived (Marwick 1975, 107; Grant and Murison 1929ff., vol. 4, 341-2).

Such Figures and the Social Control of Children

The Irish biddies cited by Davidson are in some ways analogous. They are fantastically arrayed youths who terrify children. However, they get their name from the saint whose festival they mark, biddy being a form of Brigid (Simpson and Weiner 1989, vol. 2, 176), and they can hardly be seen as mimicking her putative behaviour. Nor can we make the direct link between Brigid and Perchta that Davidson seems to imply (Davidson 1993, 116-7). It is possible that the biddies and their Continental counterparts known as Perchten predate both Brigid and Perchta, but on becoming associated with these figures were named after them (Rumpf 1973, 131-2). The most we can say in the present context is that in parts of Europe, the winter months see disguised lads and men processing, visiting houses, and, through their abnormal behaviour, frightening children in particular. Their antics may be modelled on behaviour attributed to local threatening figures, and one function or by-product of such antics may be the social control of children.

Threats, Congruous and Incongruous

We now need to look at some of the actual threats directed by Newfoundland parents at their offspring and recorded by Widdowson. My main aim in considering these threats will be to show that, although offence and allegedly impending consequences will in principle, as one might expect, be well matched, cultural attrition and/or variation can lead to incongruities, much as when Perchta is, rather confusingly, said to slit the stomachs of idlers and insert the rubbish they have not swept up (Wolfram 1980, 46). The preoccupation with rubbish makes perfect sense in the circumstances; strictly speaking, gastrotomy does not, except to the extent that that is what Perchta is well known for. Where the relationship between offence and punishment has become skewed in this way, a comparative approach can sometimes help us glimpse what the original relationship must have been. Even our view of apparently appropriate punishments can sometimes benefit from such an approach. For instance, it "makes sense" that in Urbersdorf Luzi cuts open the knees of children who will not wash their legs, and then inserts salt (Wolfram 1980, 52). In fact, a process akin to that of popular etymology seems to have been at work, rationalising Luzia's usual activity of heel-cutting, which may in turn, as I have already suggested, derive, by a similar process of unconscious adaptation, from that of belly-slitting.