Now that I have Rag & Muffin out of the house, I am turning to research for my next book, Son of Hel. For that reason, the blog is, appropriately, turning Christmasy as I present some of the fruits of my research.
My thoughts from the beginning were that I would combine together as many folkloric characters as I could, both to keep the cast from getting unwieldy and because I work on the assumption that if folklore were real, many disparate but similar legends would probably have the same origins. However, when it comes to weird Christmas characters, so many of them are so bizarre that they deserve to stand as individuals.
One such is Hans Trapp, a character from the French-German border, which is a breeding ground for crazy Christmas legends. I’ve only begun to think of what use I’ll put him to in Son of Hel, but he definitely has to go in there.
The story is that Hans Trapp was an evil sorcerer who practiced witchcraft and served the devil. Excommunicated by the pope, he either went mad or gave his evil full reign: Disguising himself as a scarecrow, he murdered a young boy by skewering him on a stake and took him home to devour him, but died from a lightning bolt before he got his first taste of human flesh. Now, he roams the countryside at Christmastime in search of naughty children to devour.
Like most of the “companions of Saint Nicholas,” as they’re sometimes known, this a variation on the bogeyman, a character to frighten children into being good. A few essayists identify Trapp with Le Pére Fouettard, “Father Whipper,” another French Christmastime bogeyman I’ll discuss in a later post. Although their supposed origin stories are different, Trapp and Pére Fouettard certainly share a penchant for cannibalism.
Interestingly, Hans Trapp appears to be based loosely on a real individual. The real man is Hans von Trotha, who, at least according to Wikipedia, was a nobleman of the fifteenth century who got into a land dispute with an abbot. The act that turned him into a folkloric villain was probably his decision to dam a river above Weissenburg, cutting off the water supply. After the abbot complained, he tore down the dam—and flooded the town.
Regardless of who was in the right in the initial land dispute, he does sound like kind of a jerk. Pope Alexander VI summoned him to Rome; he refused to go, accused the pope of certain crimes, and got an excommunication for it. He died a natural death, after which the excommunication was posthumously lifted.
He is supposed to have stood two meters in height, which might explain why he became depicted, at least sometimes, as a scarecrow. In other depictions, he is similar to other of St. Nicholas’s companions, with ragged clothes and a full beard—that is, basically a dark version of the saint.
Trapp’s exact role in Son of Hel is yet to be determined, but a war between good and evil elves forms part of the background, so I might have Trapp in an alliance with the villains, making him a sort of counterpart to Krampus and the other misfit heroes.
