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480 WIGHTS AND ELVES.
skr^ti (celare, occulere) is worth considering. [A compound of
kr^ti, to cover, root kr$, krov, /cpvirTO).
AS. scrud, shroud ?] .
If Slav. skr$, why not
Going by the sense, schrat appears to be a wild, rough, shaggy
wood-sprite, very like the Lat. faun and the Gr. satyr, also the
Roman silvanus (Livy 2, 7) ; its dimin. schratlein, synonymous
with wichtel and alp, a home-sprite, a hill-mannikin. But the
male sex alone is mentioned, never the female ; like the fauns,
therefore, they lack the beauty of contrast which is presented by
the elfins and bilwissins. We may indeed, on the strength of
some similarity, take as a set-off to these schrats those wild women
and wood-minnes treated of at the end of chapter XVI. The
Greek fiction included mountain-nymphs (yvp$ai opecr/coioi) and
dryads (SpuaSe?, Englished wuducelfenne in AS. glosses), whose
life was closely bound up with that of a tree (loc. princ., Hymn
to Aphrodite 257-272 ; and see Suppl.).
Another thing in which the schrats differ from elves is, that
they appear one at a time, and do not form a people.
The Fichtelberg is haunted by a wood-sprite named the Katzen-
veit, with whom they frighten children : Hush, the Katzenveit
will come ! Similar beings, full of dwarf and goblin-like
humours, we may recognise in the Gubich of the Harz,
in the
Eubezal of Eiesengebirge. This last, however, seems to be of
Slav origin, Boh. Rybecal, Eylrcol. 1 In Moravia runs the story
of the seehirt, sea-herd, a mischief-loving sprite, who, in the shape
of a herdsman, whip in hand, entices travellers into a bog (see
Suppl.). 2
The gloss in Hanka 7 b . ll a has vilcodlac faunus, mlcodlad
faunificarii, incubi, dusii ; in New Boh. it would be wlkodlak,
wolf-haired; the Serv. vukodlac is vampire (Vuk sub v.). It is
not surprising, and it offers a new point of contact between elves,
bilwisses, and schrats, that in Poland the same matting of hair is
ascribed to the skrzot, and is called by his name, as the skrjtek is
in 3 Bohemia ; in some parts of .
Germany schrotleinzopf
1 Ir Slav ryba fish bu * >
S \ If
cal, or col (I think) has no meaning. The oldest
r^i T 5? V Kub zagi1 -za
?> t ^e1 z& 1 % (-tail ) 5 Eube may be short for the
ghostly knecht Kuprecht, or Robert. Is Kubezagel our bobtail, of which I have
seen no decent etymology? TKANS.
2
Sagen aus^der
vorzeit Mahrens (Briinn, 1817), pp. 136-171.
The plica is also called koltun, and again koltki are Polish and Eussian home-