Wild man - WikiHQ

thumb|Wild men [[supporter|support coats of arms in the side panels in (1499) by Albrecht Dürer

"Wild man" and its cognates in some languages are the common terms for the creature in most modern languages; it appears in German as , in French as . However, in Italian, ("forest man") is often used (var. ).

The German wild man () also occurs in a more modern folklore tradition, localized in a region spanning from Switzerland to Carinthia, Austria (and often Hesse in Germany) according to the (HdA), registered under such names as , , , There are also the forms (holzwîb), and in the same work, the title hero must deal with the advances of ("Shaggy Else"), classified as a wild woman (cf. below).

In the epic Laurin the wild man is referred to as a (). The same term is used in Iwein to characterize the herdsman as a wild man, and he is also described as being as hairy as a () (Cf. Iwein discussed below under ).

A group of OHG glosses for wild woman (lamia, etc.) was already discussed above. In MHG, an attested synonym for wild woman is ().

In modern regional folklore, the creatures with sylvan (wood-related) names that correspond to the Alpine wild folk are the or (wood- or moss people) of Central Germany, Franconia, and Bavaria; aka , of the Bohemian Forest and the Upper Palatinate; the Waldweiblein and () of the Harz mountains region; the (; ) of Halle further east in Saxony; and the () of Westphalia. Usage of names such as Lohjungfer, Holzfräulein, extends further south in Saxon Vogtland. The variant form is also given in commentary. As for ("goatherd") or ("cowherd"), the wild man may be designated by the name of his profession in a narrative where he is engaged in the herding of livestock.

The wild man is called a (corruption of "wild man"), , or in Wälsch-Tirol (present-day Trento Province), which may be spelt or , with usage extending to Lombardy. The wild man is called by Ladin language-speakers in Folgrait (Folgaria) and Trambileno; this is readily recognizable as equivalent to French , where Old French derives from Latin "sylvan, pertaining to forest". Hence the names in this grouping are related to Silvanus, the Roman tutelary god of gardens and the countryside. The (medieval Latin) term was in fact used in the sense of "wild woman" by Burchard of Worms in the 10th century, and it has been suggested he was referring to beings who would have been called in dialect according to modern-day folklore.

The local name or was supposedly current either in Ronchi near Ala, or the aforementioned Folgrait and Trambileno areas.

It is contended that the