172

THE PAGEANTS

as a "Kinderfresser," for he too is eating naked boys, putting one
headfirst into his mouth and holding up another by the leg. He is,
however, a fool himself: his costume is striped red, blue, yellow,
and orange, and his red foolscap is ornamented with the telltale
asses' ears and bells. That in our miniature he is consuming chil-
dren instead of fools is due to the same disregard of the chronicle
on the part of the artist as we have noted before. The Holle itself
was no doubt a pageantic representation of the fool-eating monster
envisioned so vividly by Hans Sachs in his Spruch, "Der narren-
fresser'':218
Sah ich ein wagen gehn mir gan.
Darauff saB noch ein grosser man,
Sehr faist und groB uber die maB,
Sein bauch groB wie ein fiidrich faB . ..
Da will ich waidlich narren hetzen
Und mich irs flaisch recht wol ergetzen,
Gesotten, praten und geschmaltzen.
Was ich nit mag, will ich einsaltzen,
Das gar lang hab zu essen ich.219
The theme was also suggested, a few years before the date of our
pageant, in Murner's Die Miille von SchwyndelBheim, in the chap-
ter entitled "Ein rohen narren fressen,"220 in which Murner satir-
izes himself as a fool eating other fools. The woodcut illustrating
this process is analogous to our miniature, showing a giant fool
eating a smaller one, head first.221
Back of these "Narrenfresser," as of the ogres who ate children
and witches, there is doubtless a long tradition of grotesque
creatures which fed on humans and their foibles.222 The existence
of such a tradition seems to be indicated by the presence of the
character Croquesots, cruncher of fools, in the thirteenth-century
218 Hans Sachs, Werke, V, gooff. (1530).
219 For several sixteenth-century imitations of this poem cf. F. Zarnke, Narrenschiff,
(Leipzig: 1854), p. cxxxii. Related to this motif is also the extraction of fools
from a patient's stomach by the doctor in Hans Sachs' carnival play "Das narren-
schneyden" (1557), Werke, V, gff.
220 Murner, Schriften, IV, 23f.
221 Cf. also Geisberg (Holzschnitt) Nr. 162 (Barthel Beham: Zwei grosse Narren-
fresser, um 1524).
222 Related themes in the sixteenth century are the "Pfriindenfresser," "Kronen-
fresser," and "Totenfresser"; on these cf. K. Goedeke, Pamphilus Gengenbach,
op. cit., pp. 619-26.