Legendary footprints!

The name suggests that legends are “said”, i.e. something passed down orally. Told from generation to generation, from grandma at the spinning wheel or grandpa on the stove bench. This is what an idea that originated in early Romanticism wants. The reality was more diverse, as shown by the example of a historical legend from Surselva.

In Laus, in a meadow called Martgiuna, there is a stone with a footprint. In the year of the Reformation, Abbot Christian von Castelberg hurried preaching all over Cadi in one day, making this journey in three major steps. At the first step he stepped on the stone of Martgiuna and left his footprint there.

This is one of 72 legends collected from the “vernaculars” that the Truns politician and cultural scientist Caspar Decurtins published in 1895 in the second volume of his Romansh Christomathy has published. Unfortunately, the publisher has not given us any information about the narrator, about the place and time of recording this legend from the era of religious strife in the Free State of the Three Leagues.

What is available in black and white, on the other hand, is the Romansh elementary school reader “Cudically educational”, which the school inspector and printer Placidus Condrau published in 1857 in Disentis – the same place where the Benedictine monastery still stands, from where Abbot Christian von Castelberg went to defend the old faith and took his legendary three giant steps. There we read:

«He hurried from one parish to another, preaching in one day in five different places, which are about seven miles apart. In Medel, Disentis, Sumvitg, Trun and Breil he preached on the same day, and with his zeal and eloquence he won all hearts».

In 1884, about the same time that Caspar Decurtins and his helpers collected legends in the villages and hamlets of the Surselva with notebook and pencil, we find the same story in the popular one, also published in Disentis bei Condrau «Calendar Romontsch»one of the few profane reading materials accessible to the general public at the time.

School book and calendar history, on the other hand, goes back almost verbatim to the Disentis monastery chronicle «Cuorta memoria» («Short memorandum») yield. Although never printed, it has circulated in numerous copies as literature in the Cadi since the early 18th century. The «Cuorta memorial» was an attempt to defend the feudal rights of the Prince Abbey. What ultimately failed: the “Disentiser Tithe Dispute” ended nationwide taxes in 1737.

Incidentally, due to the repeated copying and circulation of manuscripts, quite a few translated profane texts and stories found their way to the Rhaeto-Romanic speaking area, which was not an interesting market for printers and publishers of non-religious literature due to its small size and size. population.

But back to Abbot Castelberg, whose efforts to keep the Cadi in the old faith met with more success than his monastery’s struggle for feudal privileges. The swift man of God did not stay in the second part of the Romansh Christomathy got stuck, but in further steps overcame the period from 1895 to 1939.

In the trilingual canton of Graubünden, the district teacher of Aargau, Arnold Büchli, had been busy collecting legends since the 1930s. In 1939 he was traveling in the Val Tujetsch, and in the hamlet of Camischolas, the future lawyer Carli Berther told him the following story, which can be found in part 2 of Büchlis «Mythological Geography of Graubünden» finds:

«The Disentis abbot of Castelberg, who at the time of the Reformation campaigned for the preservation of the old faith, preached in four places in Sedrun, and it is said that he then went from Tujetsch to Danis in three steps. There in Danis they show the stone where he put his foot. »

From the handwritten monastery chronicle, the story of Abbot Castelberg’s sporting zeal found its way into the school textbook, later into the calendar and from there into the oral narrative tradition, where it was enriched with the motif “footprint in stone”. Qualified as a legend, ennobled as it were, we find it in the early collection of Caspar Decurtins, which was distributed to all schools in the area.

From there, the “vernacular” takes over again, until the next collector of legends comes along, takes out his pencil and publishes another collection of legends. In other words, writing belongs to legend, legends are a “communicative mixture” of oral and written form.

The genre-typical local coherence of sagas almost always involves a localization of wandering motifs. This is also the case with the footprints of Laus/Martgiuna and Danis, where striking indentations in large stones demanded explanation. Footprints of mythological and historical figures are certainly not only found in the upper Surselva, they are widely distributed in terms of time and geography.

The ancient demigod Heracles, Buddha, Christ, the Prophet Muhammad, the Archangel Michael, and his adversary, the Devil, all immortalized themselves in stone in the same manner as the Abbot of Disentis, along with many, many others. And, not surprisingly, also the reformer Martin Luther, whose work motivated Christian von Castelberg to take his literally impressive giant steps.