The Holler-Frau: Elder in European Folk Belief

There is a tale that sounds almost the same right across Europe, in different languages, under different names. In the elder, so the belief goes, a being dwells. Most often she is female, a woman, a mother, a lady, and she guards the shrub. Anyone who wished to cut, break, or dig it up did well to ask her permission first. If he did not, he had her displeasure to reckon with.

Following Austrian usage, we call this figure the Holler-Frau. In the Scandinavian north she bears her own names, in England others again, in the Slavic east still more. Before we follow her through the regions, a plain word about what this text is and what it is not. It tells a documented folk belief as cultural history. It does not say that a spirit truly dwells in the elder, and it does not turn the belief into an effect. A modern ethnobotanical study from Sweden records that in many districts the shrub was held to be inhabited by a guardian spirit; that is the statement, a handed-down belief, cleanly reported as such.[1]

Nor is the motif confined to a single culture. A Polish study of the folk conception of the black elder shows that in the Slavic world too beings are said to dwell in the shrub, feared ones as well as benevolent ones, and that a general prohibition held against cutting, digging up, or breaking it.[2] The guardian spirit in the elder is thus a broadly spread European image, not an isolated local tradition.

The figure is most extensively documented in Scandinavia. The Swedish study already mentioned names her directly: In many districts of Sweden it was believed that the elder shrub was inhabited by a mythical female being or guardian spirit, the hyllefrun, the elder lady.[1]

Alongside it stands the form hyllemor, the elder mother, and in Danish the kindred Hyldemoer[3][1]. A folklore collection of the late nineteenth century, Thiselton-Dyer's folklore of plants, records the Danish belief thus: the elder is protected by a being called the elder-mother, so that it is not safe to harm it in any way. Reverence for the shrub has, this older source surmises, its roots in the old heathenism of the north. We render that as what it is, a nineteenth-century observation, not as settled history of religion.[3]

What matters is the limit of the evidence. What the sources document is the name, the image of the guarding figure, and the observation that one does not harm her unpunished. What they do not provide is any statement about a healing power of the shrub. The elder mother guards, she does not heal; whoever confuses the two makes folklore into a claim it never was.

From the belief in the figure follows a custom, and the custom is the best documented piece of the whole tale. One asked the elder for permission before taking anything from it. The Swedish study hands down an invocation in its very wording, and it refers expressly to the flowers.

The formula describes an exchange, rather than a simple request. One takes and promises a return, the shrub is addressed as a being whose wishes matter. In this Swedish version it is the flowers that are at issue; let us stay with the plant part the source names, and invent no others for it.[1]

In Lincolnshire, England a closely kindred formula is handed down, where it applies to the wood. A printed folklore collection of 1908 records the words with which one asked the Old Gal, the Old Woman, for her wood, along with the promise to give her back some of one's own growth, once one became a tree oneself. The same collection tells the reverse side: a man fashioned new cradle rockers out of elder wood without asking the Old Lady, and according to the tradition she came and pinched the child in the cradle, because that did not please her.[4]

Two formulas, two regions, two plant parts: in Sweden the flowers, in England the wood. The agreement at the core, that one asks first and promises a return, is the truly remarkable thing. It shows a shared way of dealing with the shrub across language borders, without one's having to fuse the customs into a single one.

The guarding figure rarely stands alone. She belongs to an elder that often grows close to the house, and thereby to a second motif, the sheltering shrub at the threshold. The Swedish study reports a vivid example: the old men refused to help a man remove a self-sown elder that grew at the foundation of his house. The shrub, which had settled itself against the house of its own accord, remained standing.[1]

From the Polish-Slavic world comes, in addition, the notion of benevolent house spirits. In Pomerania, in Kashubia, and in Greater Poland it was believed that good spirits too dwelt under the black elder, dwarfs, house spirits, and kindly beings that watched over the farmstead on which the elder stands. Bound up with this, as a general rule, was the prohibition against digging up, cutting, or breaking the shrub.[2]

A third variant is the elder deliberately set in a place of significance. Thiselton-Dyer's older folklore collection reports a Tyrolean custom: onto a freshly raised grave an elder shrub was often planted. Here the shrub does not grow of its own accord but is set, at the threshold between the living and the dead.[3]

Self-sown at the foundation, accepted as guardian of the farmstead, planted on the grave: three ways in which the elder becomes the tree of the threshold. Common to all of them is that one does not handle it carelessly. What people hoped to gain from it belongs to the realm of belief, and there we leave it.

It would be convenient to ascribe the motif to the Germanic north alone, to the Hyldemoer and the Holler-Frau. Convenient, but wrong. The Polish study shows the image in its own Slavic coloring, and those differences deserve to be preserved.

In the Polish folk conception the elder shrub is inhabited by a range of demonic beings, an evil spirit, the devil, a witch; for this reason its fruit was not gathered in eastern Poland. That is the dark side, which stands opposite the Swedish guarding lady, without one's being allowed to make the two into a single figure.[2]

Alongside it, in the same cultural world, the good spirits under the shrub already mentioned and the prohibition against digging it up, cutting it, or breaking it; this prohibition held, as the source expressly records, as a general rule, from which one might depart under certain circumstances. Feared and revered at once, then, depending on the district.[2]

So a more precise picture emerges: the spirit in the elder and the rule not to cut it up carelessly are pan-European. The names, however, Hyldemoer, hyllefru, Old Lady, the Slavic house spirit, belong each to their own culture, and we do not blend them into a single Holler-Frau, who in that form never existed.

Now the delicate core that one reads everywhere in popular texts: that the elder is the tree of Frau Holle, that its name derives from the goddess Holda. It sounds lovely and closes the circle back to the Holler-Frau too neatly. For exactly that reason one must go slowly here, for this conclusion is not established by linguistic evidence.

Heinrich Marzell, the authoritative voice for German plant names, holds the reading of the word Holunder as the tree of Frau Holle to be etymologically unfounded, and calls it a mythologizing fancy. He derives Holunder from the Old High German forms holuntar[5] and holantar, that is, from the plant name itself, not from the name of a goddess.[5]

And Jacob Grimm, on whom people like to lean for the equation, will not serve as a star witness for it. In his Deutsche Mythologie Grimm derives the name of the goddess Holda herself from hold, that is, from gracious, kind, mild, and calls her the kindly, gracious goddess. He does not cite a tree as its source. The bridge from the elder to Frau Holle is therefore a later folk reading, not a derivation of Grimm's.[6]

Finally, the lines we deliberately do not cross. Everything in this text is belief and custom, not effect. That one asked the Holler-Frau for permission is a striking testimony to how people met a shrub, and no indication that the elder brings about anything. Medicinal notes, such as what medieval monastic medicine wrote about the elderberry, belong to another strand and are left out here.

We have honestly separated the motif by region and by source, the Nordic mother in the elder, the English Old Lady, the Slavic spirits, and marked the Frau Holle reading clearly as a hypothesis. Where a primary German-language source text was lacking, we have said so, instead of filling a gap with a pretty tale. And we do not invent our own family Holler-Frau: In 1968, Christiane began making herbal recipes for friends and family. That is family history, not a plant legend.

Anyone who wishes to dive deeper into the documentable cultural history of the elder, from classical antiquity into the early modern age, will find it in the heritage anchor of this series. Anyone who wishes to get to know the shrub itself, species and plant parts, is served by the encyclopedia entry on the elderberry. And anyone who wishes to cut and tend the elder in their own garden, with no legend at all, but gladly with a friendly thought for the Holler-Frau, is helped further by our piece on cutting and thinning.