Untitled - Centrostudirpinia.it

502 WIGHTS AND ELVES.
bring kobolds out from under their cloak, kobolds are painted
on the wall, the heathen gods were nothing but kobolds and
tatermen, to stare at each other like kobold and taterman,
all through, the kobold appears as the tiny tricky home- sprite.
In writers of the 1 7th century I find the remarkable phrase to
laugh like a kobold/ Ettner s Unwiird. doct. p. 340, and App. p.
53; you laugh as though you d empty yourself, like a kobolt,
Eeimdich p. 149. This must either mean, to laugh with mouth
agape, like a carved kobold, who may have been so represented,
or simply to laugh loud and heartily. 1
Again, to laugh like a
hampelmann/ Deutschfranzos p. 274; ho, ho, ho! the loud
laugh of Robin Goodfellow/ Anecd. and Trad., ed. by W. J.
Thorns, Lond. 1839, p. 115. In the poem
of Zeno 867. 1027
this daemonic laughter is expressed by skraken (Brern. wb. 4,
686 schrachtern). Schweinichen 1, 260 tells of an unquiet spirit
laughing loud and shrill; it may be a laugh of mirth or mockery.
In the Netherlands too we find at an early time the form
koubout (pi. coubouten, Horae Belg. 1, 119) ; now kabout, and in
Belgium kabot, kabotermanneken. 2 The Scandinavian languages
have not the word.
It is a foreign word, sprung no doubt from the Gr. fcd/3a\o<;
(rogue), Lat. cobalus, 3 with a t added, as our language is partial
to forms in -olt for monstrous and ghostly beings.
From cobalus,
in Mid. Lat. already gobelinus, the Fr. has formed its gobelin,
whence the Engl. goblin, strengthened into hobgoblin. Hanka s
0. Boh. glosses render 79 b
gitulius (getulius, gaetulius) by koboltt and directly after, aplinus (1. alpinus, i.e. alphinus, the fool
or queen in
chess) by tatrman : here are kobolt and tatrman
together, just as we saw them staring
at each other in the
Eenner; hence also the Cod. pal. 341, 126 speaks of einen
taterman malen/ painting a t., and the Wahtelmgere 140 of
guiding him with strings, (
rihtet zuo mit den sniieren die later-
1 Hlahtar UscntitazJ laughed till he shook, K. 24\ Notk. Cap. 33 has : taz
lahter scutta sia ; Petronius, cap. 24, risu dissolvebat ilia sua ; Eeinardus 3,
1929, cachinnus viscera fissurus ; or, as we say, to split with laughing, laugh
yourself double, short and small, to pieces, to a holzlin (Gryphius p. m. 877), brown,
out of your senses ; einen schiibel voll lachen ; perish, die with laughing, MHG-.
man swindet under lachen, Ben. 330. A Breton song in Villemarque 1, 39 speaks
of the loud laugh of the korred (see Suppl.).
2
Schayes sur les usages et traditions des Beiges. Louvain 1834 p. 230
3 Lobeck s Aglaoph. 1308-1328.