St. Gallen is a City and Canton in North East Switzerland that has a rich culture and diverse, dramatic landscape. It is a hidden gem, overlooked by the tourist hoards that flock to Luzern, the Matterhorn and Jungfrau.

I’ve always been interested in how people relate to their environments and landscapes and the deepest expression of this complex relationship can often be found in myths and legends.

Since emigrating to St. Gallen from the UK in 2011 I have been keen to connect with my new home and its culture. It has not been easy because I am rubbish at languages, despite my interest in them, and I have found that Swiss German is particularly challenging.

However, through my exploration into local lore I found an amazing book “Sagen des St. Gallen” (1903) by Jakob Kuoni.

It is amazing collection of stories and snippets of beliefs and oral customs that deserves and broader audience. While many of the entries are very local, some are pan-European, as Jakob Kuoni remarks in his Foreword there are many veiled or explicit references to the old German/Norse gods after which our days of the week are named, in both English and German, and link to some of the ancient Anglo-Saxon-Jute traditions of post-Roman England.

I originally headlined this website “The Wild Hunt” because tantalising fragments appear in many forms, with many similar names around the Canton so it is an archetype with deep local roots and it is found in folklore across Northern Europe. Many people will be familiar with the Wild Hunt from the fantasy world of The Witcher books, games and Netflix series, whose original author, Andrzej Sapkowski, drew heavily on Polish folklore. So I find that interesting how some ideas spread and evolved over centuries and hooked the imaginations of our ancestors.

Ok, I’ll be honest, I also thought the name was more likely to attract attention from who like the Witcher and want to explore some of its mythic roots. I recommend anyone who has played the Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, in particular, to visit and explore St. Gallen Canton (ok and the rest of the Alps if you must) because in many parts it has a dramatic landscape of snow-capped mountains, ruined towers and ancient castles perched on craggy outcrops. You will feel right at home, as if you were in Kaer Morhen.

The purpose of this website is to open up the world of this amazing book and the beautiful St. Gallen Canton to a wider audience by bringing it into English and attempting to categorise and tag the stories to make them easier to navigate. En guete!

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Translation Disclaimer

This has been a Covid lock-down project as an enthusiastic amateur and still work in progress. I have been gradually translating the stories with a lot of help from DeepL (which is much better than Google Translate and can even handle some Swiss German that Google doesn’t even attempt). I am slowly going through them and editing them for readability in English and trying to decode some of the more esoteric St. Galler-düütsch. If you want to read texts in their original German, please visit the excellent Sagens.at website.

I am not linguist or a folklorist, so I welcome constructive feedback, which you can leave in the comments section below or on the relevant post to improve them.

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CONTENT WARNING: Sagens des Kantons St. Gallen was published in 1903 and contains stories and folk beliefs that undoubtedly much older. Some values in society have thankfully changed but please be aware that some stories contain views that are offensive today – in particular the portrayal of foreigners, particularly Jews and Gypsies (and pretty mistrustful of Venetians too, oddly). Gender roles are of their time as well, such as the portrayal of witches, which varies from supernatural beings, to independent women, to slightly annoying or nosey neighbours. Some folkloric elements are more open to interpretation as to whether the reveal a particular prejudice or not, such as where a figure/person is described as black or white, which I do not interpret as a racial description in the contexts where it is found. 

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Copyright

The book on which this website is based is 120 years old so out of copyright for the authors and publishers. The aim of this website is give new life to his work by bringing into the public domain for an English-reading audience, and I hope it will inspire further creativity. The modern photos are my own, but they are hardly professional so I’m not precious about them.

In 2023, I started experimenting with the emerging AI art creation tools which are astonishing and I settled on using Midjourney to quickly create illustrations in a range of styles. I think the most amazing are the ‘photos’ of Wildmannli in a 1940s style (I tried other decades as well, with mixed results).

A more legal version of this is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

No warranty is given for any mistakes I may have made.

S. G. Furey
St. Gallen