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Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World

Volume 26
Edited by Graham Low, Zazie Todd,Alice Deignan and Lynne Cameron
Editorial Advisory Board
Melissa F. Bowerman
Nijmegen
Wallace Chafe
Santa Barbara, CA
Philip R. Cohen
Portland, OR
Antonio Damasio
Iowa City, IA
Morton Ann Gernsbacher
Madison,WI
David McNeill
Chicago, IL
Eric Pederson
Eugene, OR
François Recanati
Paris
Sally Rice
Edmonton, Alberta
Benny Shanon
Jerusalem
Lokendra Shastri
Berkeley, CA
Paul Thagard
Waterloo, Ontario
Human Cognitive Processing (HCP)
Human Cognitive Processing is a book series presenting interdisciplinary
research on the cognitive structure and processing of language and its
anchoring in the human cognitive or mental systems.

Researching and Applying
Metaphor in the Real World
Edited by
Graham Low
University of York
Zazie Todd
University of Leeds
Alice Deignan
University of Leeds
Lynne Cameron
The Open University
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam/Philadelphia

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Researching and applying metaphor in the real world / edited by Graham Low ... [et al.].
p. cm. (Human Cognitive Processing, issn 1387-6724 ; v. 26)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Metaphor. I. Low, Graham.
P301.5.M48R48 2010
808--dc22 2010026150
isbn 978 90 272 2380 7 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8777 9 (Eb)
© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
8
TM

Table of contents
Editors’ introduction vii
Graham Low, Zazie Todd, Alice Deignan and Lynne Cameron
1. The wonderful, chaotic, creative, heroic, challenging world
of Researching and Applying Metaphor: A celebration of the past
and some peeks into the future 1
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr
Section 1. Metaphor and language learning
2. Can people be cold and warm? Developing understanding
of figurative meanings of temperature terms in early EFL 21
Ana M. Piquer-Píriz
3. Grasping the point: A study of 15-year-old students’ comprehension
of metaphorical expressions in schoolbooks 35
Anne Golden
4. “Drugs, traffic, and many other dirty interests”:
Metaphor and the language learner 63
Gill Philip
5. The gaps to be filled: The (mis)treatment of the polysemous senses
of hand, cool and run in EFL text books 81
Elisabet Amaya Chávez
6. A cross-cultural study of metaphoric understanding 105
Chongying Wang and Ann Dowker
Section 2. Capturing and analysing metaphors
7. Love, metaphor and responsibility: Some examples
from Early Modern and Present-Day English corpora 125
Heli Tissari
8. A critical look at the desktop metaphor 30 years on 145
Marina Terkourafi and Stefanos Petrakis

vi Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World
9. Pragglejaz in practice: Finding metaphorically used words
in natural discourse 165
Gerard J. Steen, Ewa Biernacka, Aletta G. Dorst, Anna A. Kaal,
Irene López-Rodríguez and Trijntje Pasma
10. Mapping principles for conceptual metaphors 185
Kathleen Ahrens
11. Systematicity in metaphor and the use of invariant mappings 209
Alan M. Wallington
12. Attitude, style and context: Matching cognitive and aesthetic
accounts of poetic interpretation 245
Elsbeth C. Brouwer
13. A genre approach to imagery in winespeak: Issues and prospects 265
Rosario Caballero and Ernesto Suarez-Toste
Section 3. The function of metaphor in discourse
14. Wot no similes? The curious absence of simile in university lectures 291
Graham Low
15. Metaphor marking and metaphor typological and functional ranges
in business periodicals 309
Hanna Skorczynska Sznajder
16. Critical analysis of creative metaphors in political speeches 321
Ralph Mueller
17. Metaphor in physical-and-speech action expressions 333
Lynne Cameron
18. The evaluative properties of metaphors 357
Alice Deignan
Index of names 375
Index of terms 381

Editors’ introduction
Graham Low*, Zazie Todd**,
Alice Deignan** and Lynne Cameron***
*University of York, UK / **The University of Leeds, UK /
***The Open University, UK
Few researchers in applied language studies and related disciplines can be un-
aware of the explosion of interest in metaphor in the last three decades. Metaphor
is now studied in a wide range of academic disciplines, using data from many di-
verse contexts, and in many languages. This current interest in metaphor was ini-
tially driven by work within the cognitive linguistics tradition, still probably the
dominant strand within metaphor research today. With the publication of Meta-
phors we live by (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and related articles, George Lakoff
and his fellow cognitive linguists advanced the framework known as ‘conceptual
metaphor theory’, or ‘cognitive metaphor theory’. Much metaphor research still
either works within this framework, or, increasingly, is testing its boundaries as
an explanatory and predictive theory.
Although many of the stronger claims put forward by the developers of con-
ceptual metaphor theory are still the topic of debate and challenge, the theory has
offered insights that are central to metaphor research, and which underpin most
current work, across many disciplines. These insights include:
– The ubiquity of conventional metaphor;
– The central importance of metaphor to the expression of abstract ideas;
– The ideological role of metaphor;
– The systematicity of much metaphor.
However, cognitive linguists do not – directly – set out to offer explanations for
the social aspect of human behaviours, discourses and language, and many ap-
plied researchers therefore view their work as partial, albeit immensely valuable.
In recent years, the gap in research that takes a social as well as a cognitive ap-
proach is gradually being reduced. There has been a slow but steady increase in
the number and range of studies that explore metaphor in use in social interaction

viii Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World
and studies that are concerned with the implications and applications of meta-
phor. This developing strand is termed here ‘real-world metaphor research’.
What characterises real-world metaphor research is its determination to take
account of the importance of two key factors in theorising and empirically inves-
tigating metaphor: use in context, and language. Firstly, metaphor is assumed to
be shaped by its use in contexts of human communication; how people use meta-
phor, for particular purposes and in specific situations, gives rise to the nature of
metaphor. Furthermore, because use in context often involves other people, either
directly or indirectly, social factors must take their place alongside cognitive fac-
tors. Secondly, the language of metaphor is assumed to be much more than simply
the verbal expression of a conceptual mapping; the language resources available
to a language user in a particular context will influence how metaphor is formu-
lated and what can be done with it. The commitment of real-world metaphor
research to these two assumptions influences the kind of research that is carried
out. Real-world metaphor researchers often select research questions or problems
in order to bring about positive change in contexts of use. They will try to collect
naturally occurring data in the context of use, or, if doing more quantitative or
experimental work, will attempt to maximise ecological validity. Research reports
will include justification for the choice of data, methods of data collection, analy-
sis and interpretation in terms of maintaining connections with the context of
use. Metaphor identification procedures will be designed or chosen to cope rigor-
ously with metaphor as it is actually used. The commitment to the importance
of language in metaphor use leads real-world metaphor researchers to question
some of the assumptions of conceptual metaphor theory, particularly those about
the pre-existence of conceptual metaphors in the minds of individuals. No single
united response to conceptual metaphor theory has yet emerged, however; as will
be clear from this volume, real-world metaphor researchers deal with the issues
raised by conceptual metaphor theory in different ways. A further implication of
taking language seriously is the need to investigate metaphor at all levels of lan-
guage, from genre to lexeme, and in all types of language, from poetry to the most
prosaic, since it cannot be assumed that metaphor takes the same shape or works
in the same way. Cross-linguistic studies of metaphor in use may suggest helpful
interventions in language-learning contexts.
The eighteen chapters in this collection reflect this drive in the range and va-
riety of their approaches to real-world metaphor research. They were written by
researchers working within their various contexts to address practical problems
in their own disciplines. The researchers are from diverse academic and applied
fields, including language teaching, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, literary
studies, and computational linguistics.

Editors’ introduction ix
While the chapters by Cameron, Deignan and Low were specially written
for this collection, the remaining fifteen started life as conference presentations
at the sixth conference on Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM), held at
the University of Leeds, England, in April 2006. This was the tenth anniversary
of a conference that has grown from small beginnings, and it is worth briefly
summarising its history at this point. The first event in the RaAM series was also
held in Yorkshire, England, at the University of York, in January 1996. A seminar,
which brought together about 20 metaphor scholars and was made possible by
a grant from BAAL (the British Association for Applied Linguistics) and Cam-
bridge University Press, was organised by Lynne Cameron and Graham Low.
The collection Researching and Applying Metaphor, edited by Lynne Cameron
and Graham Low (1999), was developed from some of the papers from that first
event. The second RaAM conference was held at Copenhagen, in May 1997, fol-
lowed by the third at the University of Tilburg, the Netherlands, in July 1999.
RaAM ventured outside Europe, to the University of Manouba, Tunisia, for the
fourth conference, in April 2001. The fifth conference was held at the University
of Paris in September 2003. Each successive conference has attracted more del-
egates and presenters; RaAM 6 had six parallel sessions, with over 100 delegates.
A number of publications have resulted from RaAM conferences after 1996, in-
cluding Collin (1999), Steen (2004) and Maalej (2005).
Raymond Gibbs has given a plenary paper at each of the six conferences up
to and including 2006. He is the author of Chapter 1 in this collection, where he
establishes a set of basic criteria for real-world metaphor research and hazards
a glimpse into the future concerning research problems that need solving or
which researchers are starting to explore. It is perhaps more usual to preface an
edited collection of papers with a longish overview of the field by the editors,
but in this case it was felt that Gibbs’s chapter, based on his plenary talk, covered
much of the relevant ground and could serve as the intellectual springboard for
the other chapters.
Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World is then divided into
three sections, each reflecting central strands of interest. The first comprises six
papers on aspects of language learning. The processes involved in learning to use
metaphor in a foreign or second language are explored, as are the selection and
presentation of metaphors in language teaching materials and cross-cultural re-
sponses to metaphor. Researchers with experience of English Language Teach-
ing (ELT) practice have contributed importantly to the development of metaphor
within applied linguistics (for example, Low, 1988; Littlemore and Low, 2006).
They have a concern with central and typical language use, as that is what their
students need to learn. They are also concerned with the processes involved in

learning metaphors in a foreign language; a deeper understanding of these will
help teachers to support learning more effectively. As well as the more familiar
ELT world of the teenage and adult learner (Chapters 3 and 4 by Golden and
by Philip), the newer and expanding field of young foreign language learners is
represented in these papers (Chapter 2 by Piquer-Píriz, with Amaya Chávez in
Chapter 5 covering both primary and secondary levels). This section also includes
a comparative study of Chinese vs English speakers (Chapter 6 by Wang and
Dowker). The chapters also cover a range of approaches. While Piquer-Píriz and
Golden report studies which involved working directly with learners, Wang and
Dowker compare children with adults, Philip uses examples of learners’ writing as
evidence for her thesis and Amaya Chávez examines textbooks that learners use.
The second section consists of studies that in different ways develop research
methodology and classifications. They attempt to identify and analyse metaphors
in a way that is robust, explicit, systematic and reliable, and they point to the inher-
ent difficulties that are raised. They also reflect the interest of metaphor scholars
in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural issues, here interpreted in the widest sense.
The section begins with comparative studies of metaphor use between cultures
separated by time (Tissari in Chapter 7 on Early vs Modern English; Terkourafi
and Petrakis in Chapter 8 on the evolution of the computer ‘desktop’ metaphor
over 30 years), and between different modes of communication (Terkourafi and
Petrakis). The use of introspective studies with a small number of informants has
sometimes led to comparative metaphor studies which are simplistic and even in-
accurate. These contributions avoid that danger by employing data from language
in use, as well as experimental data; and their findings point to the key role of
context in shaping metaphor use.
Ahrens (Chapter 10) notes methodological problems with going ‘below’ the
level of conceptual metaphor (and using, for example, Grady’s primary metaphors),
while Wallington (Chapter 11) argues conversely that analysts would be better off
restricting the complexity of the sets of correspondences they attach to individual
conceptual metaphors. Studies in this section contribute to addressing a range of
weaknesses in some previous work in metaphor, including the fact that the frame-
works put forward were rarely falsifiable, and that reliability checks have, until
recently, rarely been undertaken outside psycholinguistic research (both points,
as Steen and colleagues argue in Chapter 12, simply reinforcing the need for trans-
parent, theory-neutral metaphor identification procedures). Caballero and Suarez-
Toste in Chapter 13 pursue questions of appropriateness by suggesting the value of
pairing insider and outsider perspectives in the analysis of specialised discourse,
thereby removing some of the tension between -emic and -etic research (see Lillis,
2008). Brouwer too in Chapter 14 is concerned about appropriate analysis of

Editors’ introduction xi

specialist discourse, but for her the problem is how to isolate and describe the po-
etic, if conceptual metaphor theory sees ‘poetic’ metaphor everywhere, including
in non-specialist discourse.
The third and final section attends to metaphor in specific types of discourse,
with each chapter making use of corpus data to understand more about the specific
nature of metaphor in use. Although conceptual metaphor theory contributed to
opening up research into metaphor in discourse and in particular the ideological
role of metaphor, it fails to offer a sufficiently specific theoretical account for the
intricate patterns revealed by new data analyses. Low in Chapter 14 finds no sup-
port for the assumption that metaphoric similes would appear frequently and in
explanatory analogies when he examines four spoken university lectures. Similes
in fact occurred very rarely, mainly in the more conversational style lectures, and
when they did occur they were not global or overarching, but used to manage local
interaction problems. Skorczynska Sznajder (Chapter 15) investigates the mark-
ing of metaphor in the discourse of business periodicals, in which various expres-
sions around metaphor appeared to be designed to signal or anticipate metaphor
use. Metaphor marking is found not to be related to the novelty or conventionality
of metaphors but rather to their function in the specific discourse context and
cotext. Mueller (Chapter 16) explores metaphor creativity in the genres of politi-
cal speeches, and finds it often generated by creative combinations of metaphors.
His close examination of particular metaphors reveals the difficulty of identifying
mappings from discourse data, in turn raising doubt about theory which requires
metaphors to be based exclusively on underlying mappings. Cameron’s chapter
(17) examines how people engaged in face-to-face conversation make use of a
particular kind of expression related to metaphor that she calls “physical-and-
speech-action” expressions. She traces the complex relations between language
and context, moving between particular discourse settings and a larger corpus.
Like Deignan in the following chapter (18), she finds conceptual metaphor theory
too broad to account for the particulars of real-world language use, and suggests
an alternative theoretical account. Deignan investigates the discourse phenom-
enon of metaphor evaluation using corpus techniques that she has developed for
metaphor research. Corpus analysis shows multiword figurative expressions to be
important numerically, and possibly more important than individual words as the
locus of metaphoricity. Again, theoretical explanations of metaphor in discourse
are required to take account of the highly specific characteristics of the evaluative
force that metaphorical expressions develop through use.
Together, the collection provides a snapshot of real-world metaphor studies that
attempt to uphold the highest standards of empirical research and to address,

xii Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World
without compromise, data of real-world phenomena, qualities that we hope char-
acterise RaAM conferences and the recently established association that the con-
ferences have led to. As ever, successful research studies, such as those reported
here, open up possibilities for further work. The dynamic and ever-changing na-
ture of human communication means that, while we are unlikely ever to reach
a full understanding of it, researching metaphor use in human communication
remains an intriguing and exciting venture.
References
Cameron, Lynne and Low, Graham (Eds.) (1999). Researching and applying metaphor. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collin, Finn (Ed.) (1999). Special edition of Metaphor and Symbol, 14 (1).
Lillis, Theresa (2008). Ethnography as method, methodology, and “deep theorizing”: Closing
the gap between text and context in academic writing research. Written Communication,
25, 353–388.
Littlemore, Jeannette and Low, Graham (2006). Figurative thinking and foreign language learn-
ing. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Low, Graham (1988). On teaching metaphor. Applied Linguistics, 9, 125–147.
Maalej, Zouhair (Ed.) (2005). Metaphor, cognition and culture: Selected papers from the fourth
conference on researching and applying metaphor. Manouba, Tunis: Faculty of Letters, Arts,
and Humanities.
Steen, Gerard (Ed.) (2004). Researching and applying metaphor across languages, special issue
of Journal of Pragmatics, 36 (7).

chapter 1
The wonderful, chaotic, creative,
heroic, challenging world of Researching
and Applying Metaphor
A celebration of the past and some peeks
into the future
University of California, Santa Cruz
This chapter provides a brief overview of the many intellectual accomplish-
ments of real-world metaphor scholars during the past ten years, and offers my
personal speculations about the course of future research on metaphor in the
real world. I pay particular attention to methodological advances and the will-
ingness of current metaphor scholars to address difficult problems in trying to
study metaphor in various real-world contexts. This attention to methodological
problems has direct implications for contemporary theories of metaphor, and
several questions will likely attract the attention of metaphor scholars over the
next ten years, many having to do with understanding the complexity of meta-
phoric meanings in context.
Keywords: metaphor, real world, future research
1. Introduction
Soon after I entered graduate school in cognitive psychology back in the late
1970s, I decided to study the topic of metaphor. Although I had support on this
from my academic advisor, there were many people, both at my university and
from elsewhere, who tried to dissuade me from starting out on this journey.
“Metaphor is too hard”, “Metaphor is just poetry”, or even “Metaphor is a career-
killer” were among the many pessimistic phrases I heard from others. But there
was something about the topic that I found fascinating and I was convinced that
understanding how metaphor worked and was interpreted could offer significant

challenges to contemporary theories of language processing and human cognition,
more generally. So I persevered, and after my first year, discovered the first bibli-
ography that listed virtually every notable article that had ever been published on
metaphor (Shibles, 1974). I took it upon myself to find every one of those articles,
read them, and learn what I could about the topic. At this time, I spent hundreds
of hours alone in a special area of my university library, digging deep, and think-
ing hard about what I soon discovered was indeed a difficult topic.
During this time “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, finding intellectual friend-
ship only through the metaphor scholars whose work I read. But my reading of this
work gave me several distinct impressions about the nature of metaphor research.
First, people in my own field of experimental psycholinguistics were primarily
studying people’s learning and understanding (and sometimes memory for) iso-
lated metaphorical expressions apart from realistic social and linguistic contexts.
Philosophers were also interested in isolated metaphorical expressions, yet even
worse, in my view, focused their attention on only a few treasured examples such
as “Man is wolf” or “Juliet is the sun”. Linguists generally studied the ways that
individual verbal metaphors did, or did not, violate selectional restriction rules.
In all of these cases, the debates concentrated mostly on the ways that the tenor
and vehicle terms contrasted, compared, or interacted, as well as on the ways that
verbal metaphors literally deviated from potential pragmatic contexts of use. The
rise of cognitive linguistic research in the early 1980s significantly reoriented the
study of metaphor and alerted people to the possibility that systematic patterns
of metaphorical language directly reflected enduring patterns of metaphorical
thought. Yet here too, the strong emphasis was on individual linguistic expres-
sions apart from their real-world contexts, or what speakers/writers might intend
to communicate by the use of these expressions.
Most generally, the interdisciplinary study of metaphor treated the topic as if
it were (in Eliot’s words) “like a patient etherized upon a table”. Like pathologists
hovering over a corpse, metaphor scholars would poke at “Man is wolf” or “kick
the bucket” wondering if these were really dead or alive, sometimes turning the
body over or around, to see if it looked different; does “Man is wolf”, for example,
mean something different than “Wolf is man”? But, again, there was little concern
with where metaphor came from, or what metaphor actually does when bouncing
around in the real world of human speakers and interaction. Even as I, and oth-
ers, began to conduct experimental studies in the late 1970s and 1980s, looking at
the effect of context on different aspects of figurative language interpretation, the
emphasis was really on how short discourse contexts facilitated people’s compre-
hension of some statement (like “Regardless of the danger, the troops advanced”)
as having metaphoric as opposed to literal meaning. What metaphors actually
communicated in real-life situations, the roles that metaphors had in structuring

Chapter 1. Some peeks into the future
certain domains of thought, and how metaphors shaped and reflected culture,
were not topics that attracted much attention.
In 1995 Lynne Cameron and Graham Low invited me to attend a conference
in York, England entitled “Researching and applying metaphor”, that gathered
together a small set of metaphor scholars from a variety of fields and perspectives
to share their common interests in understanding metaphor in research and ap-
plied contexts (Cameron Low, 1999). I was excited to receive this invitation and
was delighted when I attended the conference, met these other metaphor scholars,
and realized that there were others out there who shared my interest in studying
metaphor in the real world, and wanted to openly discuss some of the challenges
that an ecologically-valid study of metaphor entailed.
My aim in what follows is to review some of the accomplishments within this
tradition, note some of the enduring issues that metaphor scholars continue to
struggle with, and offer some speculations on the future directions in interdisci-
plinary and real-world metaphor research.
2. The scope of real-world metaphor research
I want to begin by suggesting a number of general propositions about what is
needed to research the way(s) in which metaphor is used in the real world, or can
be applied to real-world issues.
Firstly, there is the simple point that speakers/writers use a whole variety of
metaphor types when they speak or write; real-world metaphor research cannot
be limited to the analysis of just certain types of metaphor.
Secondly, there is a similar need to expand theoretical perspectives to ac-
count for empirical data that is encountered (I shall deal further with this point
below). It is fair to say in recent years that a significant amount of discussion and
criticism has been focused around Conceptual Metaphor Theory (with about as
much negative evidence presented against this perspective, as positive evidence
shown to support it). Many real-world metaphor research programs, have how-
ever, embraced more than one theoretical perspective, or at least included some
discussion of how particular data, whether they be linguistic examples/corpora,
or psychological results, relate differently to different theoretical perspectives.
Both the above propositions derive from the more general requirement that
real-world metaphor research should aim to be ‘ecologically valid’. By this I mean
that it should not base its conclusions purely on constructed, decontextualized
examples. What is good is that real-world researchers have begun to study meta-
phor in virtually every type of discourse, in fields as diverse as politics, the law,
music or food. At the very least, such research collectively provides evidence on

the incredible ubiquity of metaphor in language, and just as importantly, shows the
particular functions that metaphor has, often in different ways, across a variety of
discourses. In a related way, this research reveals the incredible extent that meta-
phor infiltrates, and indeed significantly structures, a large variety of linguistic
and non-linguistic domains, from conversation and musical lyrics, to dance and
synaesthesia.
Thirdly, there is a need to examine metaphor across and within many differ-
ent languages and cultures, and here the interests of real-world metaphor research
coincide with those of ‘traditional’ research perspectives. The good news is that a
vast number of languages have in fact been studied. Indeed, no language has ever
been found to not use metaphor, and this research provides additional evidence
on the ubiquity of metaphor in language and thought. A real-world approach has
also made clear the extent to which language differences are rooted in varying
conceptual or thought patterns, or conventional aspects of culture.
Fourthly, a real-world approach to metaphor needs to relate psychological
states and processes, such as ‘understanding’, closely to the actual contexts in
which those understandings are constructed, are used and/or are constrained.
I argued in 1994 that, as regards understanding at least, researchers need to dif-
ferentiate between four things:
Metaphor processing: The very fast, mostly unconscious processes that lead to
metaphor comprehension in real-time listening and reading.
Metaphor interpretation: The slower, sometimes conscious, reflective process-
es associated with richer, deeper metaphoric meanings being understood.
Metaphor recognition: Both the processes by which ordinary people some-
times, but not always, recognize that a particular word or phrase conveys met-
aphorical meaning, and the strategies by which analysts identify metaphors in
speech and writing.
Metaphor appreciation: The processes that lead to metaphors being appreci-
ated or evoking affective responses.
It has sometimes been mistakenly assumed that the study of just one of the above
can provide a comprehensive overview of metaphor understanding, and that a
theory of metaphor recognition is equivalent to one of metaphor understanding.
Perhaps the most serious error occurs when theorists embrace their own con-
scious intuitions about metaphor interpretation as if they were a direct insight
into all parts of metaphor understanding. Real-world metaphor studies have,
however, begun to examine all four aspects of how metaphors are understood,
recognized, and appreciated.

Lastly, real-world metaphor research needs to explore situations which are as
much social as psychological and to try and examine how both aspects interact.
Thus there needs to be, and has been, research into: the neuropsychology of meta-
phor comprehension and use, metaphor use in different bi- or multilingual con-
texts (including the role of metaphor in translations), the development of meta-
phor understanding and use in children, and developing control over metaphor
in second/foreign language acquisition.
3. Ongoing struggles
As researchers have struggled to put some or all of the above propositions into
practice over the last decade or so, a series of themes have emerged, involving
questions about the following six contrasts:
Diachronic–synchronic
To what extent are linguistic analyses of metaphors in speech and writing
reflective of diachronic as opposed to synchronic processes?
Language as system – language as use
To what extent are linguistic analyses of metaphor reflective of generaliza-
tions about the language system as opposed to actual language use?
Idealized speaker/hearer – real speaker/hearer
Similar to the previous contrast, to what extent are analyses of metaphor in
speech/writing reflective of idealized speaker/hearers or actual speaker/hearers
in the real world?
Context and conceptual metaphor
How does one identify conceptual metaphors in real discourse? What repli-
cable, reliable procedure can be developed to do this?
Intuitions of the analyst – objective assessments
Should judgments about metaphor (e.g., the identification of metaphorically-
used words and phrases, the identification of conceptual metaphors) be per-
formed relying on the intuitions of individual metaphor analysts, as opposed
to through the application of a more objective procedure or assessment?
Mind–language/language–culture
What kind of inferences about human cognition and culture can analysts
make from linguistic analyses of metaphor?

The enduring nature of these issues do not reflect any sort of failure on the part
of real-world metaphor scholars, but demonstrates the care with which they typi-
cally do their work and their resistance to making glib generalizations, sometimes
seen in other areas of metaphor studies.
4. Important analytic advances
Despite the continued existence fundamental questions, real-world metaphor re-
search has, I would argue, made advances in at least seven areas:
4.1 The messy reality of metaphor use
Metaphor is evident throughout language, thought, and culture. But metaphor
does not always appear in nice, neat packages that can be easily plucked out from
some context for analysis. Speakers use metaphorical language, and engage in
metaphorical thought, in complex, often-contradictory patterns that make sim-
ple conclusions about both the ubiquity and structure of metaphor difficult to
make. Rather than retreat back to made-up, isolated examples, real-world meta-
phor scholars have exhibited great enthusiasm for uncovering the messy reality
of metaphor use, and, again, focused attention on the benefits and limitations of
different methods for doing such analyses.
4.2. Attention to discourse, not single utterances
The study of metaphor has advanced considerably through studies that give
proper attention to metaphor in real discourse, and to see how metaphor gets
extended across discourse (e.g., across several conversation turns or throughout
and across texts).
4.3 Importance of corpus research
One of the greatest advances, in my view, in metaphor research over the past ten
years is the development of corpus research. Many claims about the existence,
prevalence, and structure of different metaphorical patterns seen in the interdis-
ciplinary metaphor literature, have been shown, through analyses of metaphor in
real corpora, not to be true, or at the very least to be less credible than initially
thought (Deignan, 2005). Metaphor scholars are increasingly turning to avail-
able corpora to better test various hypotheses about the frequency and form of


metaphors, which has resulted in greater caution in scholars relying solely on
their own intuitions within the metaphor community. Indeed, I would urge that
all metaphor scholars incorporate corpus analyses within their respective work.
4.4 Attention to reliability of analyses
An increasing concern with the variability of analysts’ intuitions in making judg-
ments about linguistic matters has been a major worry for metaphor researchers.
Many metaphor scholars now seek to establish more objective criteria for deter-
mining instances of metaphor, and for drawing links between patterns of meta-
phoric language use and metaphorical thought, to take one notable example. The
work of the Pragglejaz Group (2007), for instance, has been devoted to trying to
find a reliable procedure for identifying metaphorically-used words in discourse.
4.5 Greater attention to quantitative analyses
Claims about the importance or ubiquity of particular metaphorical patterns, in
either language or thought, are often made without adequate empirical support.
One trend in recent real-world metaphor research is that more scholars are trying
to show data in a quantified form by either, for example, reporting the frequen-
cies with which different metaphors are seen in particular texts, or comparing the
findings from one’s own textual analysis with those seen in large corpora.
4.6 Questions about language and thought links
The major development in metaphor research over the past 25 years has been
the idea that metaphors are not just linguistic devices, but are reflections of fun-
damental structures of human thought and cognition. But most of these claims
have been made from linguistic analyses, where the existence of a conceptual
metaphor is postulated as a motivating link for different systematic patterns of
linguistic expressions. Real-world metaphor scholars are clearly interested in
such language and thought links, but are often critical of asserting associations
between language and thought, especially in terms of ‘thinking’ in the minds of
actual speakers producing conventional and novel metaphors, without some fur-
ther evidence to support such a contention. Among the questions discussed have
been (a) what kind of linguistic evidence is sufficient for drawing links between
language and thought, and (b) how does a scholar infer whether actual speakers
are thinking metaphorically, and not just using a metaphoric scheme of thought
without thinking that way?

4.7 Complexity of body, mind, language and culture interfaces
Finally, in the interdisciplinary metaphor community, scholars have become in-
creasingly interested in the bodily foundations for metaphorical language and
thought, and try to infer the contribution of cultural norms and knowledge to the
creation and use of metaphorical language. Cross-linguistic studies, particularly,
have been very helpful in showing what aspects of metaphor are motivated by
universal aspects of bodily experience and those that are specific to individual
cultures and cultural communities.
5. Some peeks into the future
For the second part of the paper, I offer my own thoughts on the future of meta-
phor research over the next ten years. These comments are clearly speculative,
and personal to an obvious extent. But at least some of the themes mentioned
below address important issues that I sincerely believe all metaphor scholars will
have to acknowledge, and struggle with, in their own future work.
5.1 How do you do your analyses?
Perhaps the most controversial challenge metaphor scholars face today concerns
the limitations of individual linguistic intuitions and the increasing desire for
more objective methods for identifying metaphorical language in real discourse
and drawing inferences from metaphoric language patterns to possible concep-
tual (primary) metaphors. Cognitive linguistic analyses of conceptual metaphor,
for instance, infer the presence of an underlying metaphorical mapping, or con-
ceptual metaphor that presumably motivates the existence of different conven-
tional expressions. Hundreds of articles on metaphor posit literally hundreds of
different conceptual metaphors for dozens of target domains. Consider one clas-
sic example, ideas are people:
(1) He is the father of modern biology.
The father corresponds to the person who had the idea / creative insight.
(2) Einstein gave birth to the theory of relativity.
To originate an idea corresponds to give birth to a child.
(3) Those ideas died off in the Middle Ages.
Ideas correspond to the body alive.

One question that immediately arises is how does one get ideas are people from
seeing these three different conventional expressions? Thus, when saying “Those
ideas died off in the Middle Ages”, why must we think of “those ideas” as people as
opposed to some other biological entity? For the first expression, “He is the father
of modern biology”, why is it that the idea of “modern biology” is assumed to be
a person, rather than the creator of modern biology being the only metaphorical
element here, namely the “He” being referred to as “the father”? Questions like
these arise for many classic cognitive linguistic analyses, which raise additional,
general questions, about the specification of the source domain: how many in-
dividual expressions must systematically relate to one another to be sufficient to
posit an individual conceptual metaphor, and how do other conceptual metaphors
for ideas (e.g., ideas are plants, ideas are objects) relate to one another?
Judging the empirical adequacy of any individual analysis is usually done as a
matter of belief in one’s own intuition, something supported by counter-examples.
Yet what is needed is a clearer description of how the metaphor analyst came up
with their classification. What were the criteria for determining what counts as a
metaphorical expression in the language? Following this, what are the criteria for
positing that a conceptual metaphor of some sort underlies the creation and use of
a set of systematically-related linguistic expressions? With a few exceptions (e.g.
Cameron, 2003; Pragglejaz Group, 2007), metaphor scholars have not provided
criteria or guidelines by which they conduct their individual analyses of meta-
phor in language and thought. Providing such criteria will be essential toward
placing interdisciplinary metaphor research on a firm empirical footing, which
implies that the results of our analyses can be verified and replicated.
5.2 Different metaphors – different theories?
A decade ago, I raised one issue that still today hampers interdisciplinary debate
in theories of metaphor. One of the great differences in approaches to metaphor
lies in the type of metaphoric language scholars wish to account for. Although
many traditional theories of metaphor typically study classic A is B or resem-
blance metaphors, such as “Lawyers are sharks” or “My job is a jail”, cognitive
linguists, following the pioneering work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), have fo-
cused on metaphors that have implicit source domains, often ones rooted in cor-
relations with bodily experience, such as “My marriage is on the rocks” or “I don’t
see the point of your argument”. The primary emphasis in understanding resem-
blance metaphors is to recognize, usually for the first time, the way that the source
and target domains interact to give rise to novel metaphorical meaning. On the
other hand, understanding a conventional expression like “I don’t see the point

10 Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr
of your argument” is thought to depend on accessing a well-established concep-
tual metaphor, or in this case a primary metaphor such as knowing is seeing.
Not surprisingly, then, work on resemblance metaphor emphasizes the novelty
of metaphorical mappings, while work on correlational metaphors focuses on the
possible existence of enduring patterns of metaphorical thought.
The difficulty with theoretical debates about metaphor is that scholars embrac-
ing different positions are really looking at rather different kinds of metaphori-
cal language, with quite different messages about the possibility of metaphorical
thought. But these debates rarely acknowledge these differences and incorrectly
assume that certain theories (e.g. Conceptual Metaphor Theory) can be refuted
because they are incapable of explaining how, for example, novel resemblance
metaphors are understood. There are at least two possibilities for how this situa-
tion should be dealt with. First, scholars must begin to more openly acknowledge
the limits of their preferred theories in accounting for only one kind of meta-
phoric language. Under this view, there will never be a single theory capable of ac-
counting for how all metaphorical language is used, or all metaphorical meanings
are expressed, or all metaphorical thought is conceived. Different theories will
be required to handle different types of metaphor. Second, there may be a single
theory of metaphor, and anyone advocating such a position must openly account
for how different aspects of metaphor (e.g., resemblance and correlational) meta-
phors are understood. Many cognitive linguists contend that Conceptual Blend-
ing Theory (Fauconnier Turner, 2002) has the greatest power and flexibility to
provide this kind of comprehensive account. Yet most psychologists view Con-
ceptual Blending Theory with some scepticism, given its lack of falsifiable predic-
tions, and insist that a theory grounded in experimental evidence is needed (e.g.
Career of Metaphor Theory, or Attributive Property Theory). Whether the first
(multiple solutions) or second (single solution) of these two general possibilities
becomes most evident, a key challenge for the future is to address the ‘different
metaphor – different theory’ issue seriously. I hope that the next 10 years will see
more progress in this area than the last 10 years.
5.3 What do metaphors mean?
One of the most remarkable aspects of much contemporary metaphor research
is the fact that little attention is given to what metaphors actually communicate in
discourse. Scholars from many different fields are concerned with issues related to
how metaphors are understood, and their possible functions in language, but there
is not sufficient attention to the range of meanings readers/listeners infer when
understanding various kinds of verbal metaphor. For instance, psycholinguists

Chapter 1. Some peeks into the future 11
often study how context determines whether a particular statement expresses lit-
eral or metaphorical meaning, but the description of the literal or metaphorical
meaning is rarely specified in any detail other than through rough simple para-
phrases. Metaphor is known to be ‘pregnant with meaning’ but it is often unclear
which of the many potential meanings a metaphor may communicate are actually
inferred by people in different circumstances. This is surely an important issue to
study, especially, in my view, because of the trade-off in metaphor understanding
between maximizing cognitive effects, or meanings, while simultaneously mini-
mizing cognitive effort (from Sperber Wilson, 1995).
Let me give an example from one ongoing research project in psycholinguis-
tics that shows differences in the amount and possibly kinds of meanings people
infer from simple metaphorical expressions in context (Lonergan Gibbs, 2010).
Consider what the speaker intends to communicate by “Marriage is an ice box” in
the following conversational exchange:
Mary said to John,
“We exchanged marriage vows ten years ago.”
“We have been married a long time.”
Mary continued,
“We are still hanging in there.”
She then said,
“Marriage is an icebox.” (1492 msec.)
(metaphorical assertion)
Mary’s final statement conveys a declarative assertion that compares her marriage
to an icebox, from which a listener presumably draws a variety of inferences, such
as that Mary’s marriage is unemotional, confining, and perhaps lacking in sex.
Now compare the meaning of this expression when it is used in a slightly different
context:
Mary said to John,
“We exchanged marriage vows ten years ago.”
“We have been married a long time.”
John then asked,
“Are you happy in your marriage?”
Mary then said,
“My marriage is an icebox.” (1403 msec.)
(metaphorical assertion + implicature)
In this situation, Mary’s utterance about her marriage not only conveys certain
things about her marriage, but also provides an indirect answer to John’s question
about whether she is happy in her marriage. Thus, Mary’s final utterance conveys

both a metaphorical assertion and a conversational implicature. On the surface, it
appears that the meaning of “My marriage is an icebox” conveys more meanings
in the second context than in the first, by virtue of the added conversational im-
plicatures in the second case, which was set up by John’s question. One reasonable
expectation is that people should take more effort, and more time, to comprehend
the metaphorical utterance in the second context than in the first. But in fact,
the results of one study showed that this was not the case. Readers actually took
slightly and significantly less time to read “My marriage is an icebox”, and many
similar metaphors, in contexts like the second context (1403 milliseconds) than
in the first type of context (1492 milliseconds).
What explains this seemingly contradictory result that metaphors conveying
conversational implicatures can take less time to comprehend than metaphors
with no implicatures? The answer to this question, of course, lies in closer exami-
nation of the discourse contexts in which metaphors are understood. In the case
above, where Mary’s metaphor also conveys an implicature, providing a “yes”
or “no” response to John’s question, it seems likely that the implicature comes
across so strongly as to make that interpretation immediately relevant, thereby
short-circuiting processing of the various possible meanings of the metaphorical
assertion “My marriage is an icebox”. Under this view, once listeners infer suf-
ficient cognitive effects from the metaphor to promptly answer John’s question,
processing will cease, as that interpretation will satisfy the principle of optimal
relevance. In Relevance Theory terms, the ostensive stimulus is relevant enough
for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it, and the ostensive stimulus is
the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and prefer-
ences (Sperber Wilson, 1995:270). Understanding “My marriage is an icebox”
in the first context, where no question is asked, allows listeners to derive more
metaphorical meanings, in order to derive an optimally relevant interpretation
in that situation.
The important point here is that listeners appear to be drawing different num-
bers of metaphorical meanings or inferences when interpreting “My marriage is
an icebox” in the two contexts considered here. We often have the intuitive sense
that some metaphors express more complex meanings than others, especially
in varying discourse situations. One difficulty, however, is that scholars do not
have a good way of assessing this complexity, or more specifically, of being able
to individuate and count metaphorical meanings This is true for both the use
of metaphorical words in context (e.g. “I can’t stand working for my boss”) and
metaphorical expressions (e.g. “My marriage is an icebox”). I personally think
trying to address this complex problem is a major challenge for future metaphor
studies, although the issue of individuating and quantifying any sort of meaning
is relevant to all aspects of language, not just metaphor.

In general, the issue of how to individuate and count metaphor meanings
is critical for any attempt to characterize metaphor understanding as being con-
strained by the trade-off between maximizing cognitive effects while minimizing
cognitive effort.
5.4 How are metaphors used?
My discussion about trying to understand which meanings of a metaphor are
actually understood in real-world contexts suggests that the pragmatic role that
metaphors serve in discourse influences the kinds of meanings people derive
from these statements. Much real-world metaphor research over the years has
examined the various conceptual, ideological, and rhetorical roles that metaphors
may play in context. Let me now briefly describe some ongoing psycholinguistic
research that shows that people can indeed recognize the pragmatic roles that
metaphors can play in context, which also appear to affect the processing time
needed to interpret these expressions (Gibbs Tendahl, 2006). There have been
no published studies that specifically investigated how different contexts give rise
to different cognitive effects when reading or listening to linguistic metaphors.
Relevance Theory, however, provides several suggestions on this. According to
Relevance Theory, cognitive effects are achieved by one of the following three
types: (1) new information provided by a contextual implication, (2) strengthen-
ing of an existing assumption, and (3) a contradiction and possible elimination of
an existing assumption. How might these different cognitive effects be manifested
with metaphor? Consider the following three contexts, each of which ends with
the metaphorical statement “Lawyers are sharks”.
Strengthening context
Tom said to Peter:
“Lawyers support malicious people.”
“They don’t care about the victims.”
“They just care about the money”
“Do you have anything to add, Peter?”
Peter replied:
“Lawyers are also sharks.”
New information context – contextual implication
Tom said to Peter:
“Lawyers work in a court.”
“They went to a law school.”
“They specialize in different fields.”

Peter replied:
Contradiction context
Tom said to Peter:
“Lawyers support people in need.”
“They care about their client’s troubles.”
“They are not concerned with money.”
Peter replied:
These different contexts evoke different readings of “Lawyers are sharks”. Each of
these different meanings is related to the basic metaphorical understanding of the
comparison between “lawyers” and “sharks”. But the cognitive effects one draws
from reading this metaphorical utterance in the three contexts nevertheless dif-
fer quite a bit. We have just confirmed these impressions in a study in which US
college students read one of the three contexts and final utterance above (there
were 24 contexts and metaphorical expressions presented overall). One half of the
metaphors evoked positive associations for the target concept (e.g. “Operas are
feasts”), and one half of the metaphors evoked negative associations for the target
(e.g. “Lawyers are sharks”). After reading each story and metaphorical ending,
participants rated their agreement with the following statements:
a. Peter thinks negatively about lawyers.
b. Peter thinks that Tom thinks negatively about lawyers.
c. Peter is trying to convince Tom of something about lawyers that Tom does not
already believe.
d. Peter’s remark expresses complex meanings.
The findings from this study indicated that college students are quite capable
of understanding the general metaphorical meanings of the speakers’ final ex-
pressions, as well as recognizing that these metaphors convey additional cog-
nitive effects that differ across the three types of contexts. First, participants
correctly rated the positive metaphors as expressing positive views about the
metaphor topic, and negative views about the topics of the negative metaphors.
This shows that people were sensitive to the general positive or negative mean-
ings of the metaphorical statements. Second, participants saw the metaphors in
the strengthening contexts as agreeing more with the addressees’ beliefs than
when new contextual implications were communicated. This was especially the
case for positive metaphors. Third, participants recognized, in the contradictory
contexts, that speakers were trying to convince addressees of something they did

not already believe about the metaphor topic, but they did not make the same
assumption when reading the contextual implication or strengthening contexts.
Finally, there was a linear increase in participants’ complex meaning ratings
across the strengthening, contextual implication, and contradictory contexts for
both the positive and negative metaphors.
A second study in this series examined the speed with which people read
these metaphors in the three types of context. Participants read these stories one
line at a time on a computer screen, pushing a button once they had read and un-
derstood each statement. The results showed that people took significantly longer
to read the metaphors in the contradictory contexts (1939 milliseconds) than they
did either the strengthening (1717 milliseconds) or contextual implication (1709
millisecond) contexts.
These new experimental results are both interesting and important. They
provide empirical support for Relevance Theory’s assertion that context criti-
cally determines cognitive effort and effects. Of course, the rating task does not
cover an exhaustive test of the different cognitive effects that participants may
receive in response to the different metaphors and different contexts. However,
the results clearly indicate that the cognitive effects of metaphors vary widely ac-
cording to the context, and specifically show an increase in the cognitive benefit
of metaphors from strengthening, via contextual implication to contradiction
contexts. At least in this case, there is a strong association between understand-
ing more complex cognitive effects for a metaphor and the time needed to un-
derstand those meanings.
As natural as these results may seem, they point out something important
about metaphors that is mostly ignored in theories of metaphor. For instance,
psycholinguistic studies, again, traditionally explain understanding of metaphori-
cal versus literal meaning, but do not examine the complex pragmatic effects that
arise when metaphors are comprehended. If metaphors are more or less complex
according to their context, it will be difficult to say that metaphor, as a specific
type of language, is more or less complex than literal paraphrases. Moreover, psy-
cholinguists often suggest that metaphors should be compared with literal para-
phrases in default contexts. But what is a default context? Is it the context in which
a metaphor can be understood most easily, which would be a strengthening con-
text, or the context in which a metaphor has the highest communicational value,
which would be a contradictory context according to the results of our study? We
can only conclude that metaphors do not have meanings per se and they do not
have an invariant degree of complexity. Instead, metaphors exist in contexts and
are more or less complex accordingly, express more or fewer meanings, express
stronger or weaker explicatures and implicatures depending on the complex spe-
cifics of the real-world situation.

5.5 Mixed and multiple metaphors
Language educators often warn against the production and use of mixed met-
aphors, especially when these seem to be contradictory or come from different
source domains. But real speech and writing is full of such examples, and people
seem able to deal with them without terrible difficulty. Consider the following
newspaper headline and first two paragraphs from a March 2006 story in the San
Francisco Chronicle:
GOP is in ‘deep funk’ over Bush spending
The Republican rebellion that President Bush smacked into with the Dubai ports
deal was the tip of the iceberg of Republican discontent that is much deeper and
more dangerous to the White House than a talk radio tempest over Arabs run-
ning U.S. ports.
A Republican pushback on Capitol Hill and smoldering conservative dis-
satisfaction have already killed not just the ports deal but key elements of Bush’s
domestic agenda, and threatens GOP control of Congress if unhappy conserva-
tives sit out the November midterm election.
These two long sentences are full of metaphors (e.g. “smacked into”, “tip of the ice-
berg”, “much deeper”, “tempest”, “running”, “pushback”, “smoldering”, “killed”, and
“sit out”) and metonymies (e.g. “The Republican”, “The White House”, “Capitol
Hill”) that most people can easily interpret. Psycholinguists face the challenge of
describing how readers comprehend phrases like “smacked into”, “tip of the ice-
berg”, “pushback” and “The White House” as conveying different figurative mean-
ings that differ from talk about physical actions like smacking into something, or
pushing back something, and entities like icebergs in the ocean or large buildings in
Washington, D.C. We now know a good deal about how people comprehend some
of these words/phrases, and more generally recognize that the frequency of these
figurative forms reveals important insights into the ways people ordinarily con-
ceptualize of the concepts to which this language refers. It is fair to say that meta-
phor research has not yet addressed how people combine their understandings
of various figurative phrases to achieve more global interpretations of speakers’
complex utterances or discourse, such as seen in the above newspaper excerpts.
But this type of metaphor phenomena, and its interaction with metonymy, repre-
sents a rich, although complex, topic for future interdisciplinary research.

6. Metaphorical aesthetics
My final speculation on a future trend in metaphor research is the study of meta-
phorical aesthetics. How do people emotionally and aesthetically respond to dif-
ferent aspects of metaphorical language, as well as non-linguistic metaphor, such
as gesture and pictorial metaphor? One of the greatest complaints from tradi-
tional metaphor scholars in philosophy, literature and art is that the move toward
conceptual metaphor ignores some of the transcendental, aesthetic functions of
metaphor. Reducing metaphorical aesthetics to patterns of conventional thought
and embodiment appears, in some people’s view, to rob metaphor of its special
qualities to emotionally move us, and see old topics in a new light. Although advo-
cates of cognitive perspectives on metaphor sometimes resist this characterization
(Lakoff Turner, 1989), there remains a gap in metaphor studies between those
interested in metaphorical thought and those studying metaphorical aesthetics.
It is now time to close this divide, and my suggestion is that scholars turn their
attention to ways of linking linguistic and psychological studies of metaphor use
with both theoretical and applied studies of aesthetics.
7. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have tried to take a step back and systematically assess the most
important research findings and analytic advances seen in recent years, with re-
spect to exploring how metaphor is used in the ‘real world’, or has applications
to real-world issues. In doing so, I have especially emphasized the attention that
many real-world metaphor scholars have given to methodological issues, stressing
clarity, transparency and reliability. In the second part of the chapter, I outlined
a set of potential but key topics for future research that should, in my view, at-
tract the attention, both empirically and theoretically, of metaphor scholars from
a broad range of academic fields.
References
Cameron, Lynne (2003). Metaphor and educational discourse. London: Continuum.
Deignan, Alice (2005). Metaphor and corpus linguistics. Amsterdam Philadelphia: John

Benjamins.
Fauconnier, Gilles Mark Turner (2002). The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s
hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Gibbs, Raymond W. (1994). The poetics of mind: Figurative thought, language, and understand-
ing. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W. Marcus Tendahl (2006). Cognitive effort and effects in metaphor com-
prehension: Relevance theory and psycholinguistics. Mind Language, 21, 379–403.
Lakoff, George Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Lakoff, George Mark Turner (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lonergan, Julia Raymond W. Gibbs (2010). How many meanings can a metaphor express?
Manuscript in preparation.
Pragglejaz Group (2007). MIP: A method for identifying metaphorically used words in dis-
course. Metaphor and Symbol, 22, 1–40.
Sperber, Dan Deidre Wilson (1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford:
Blackwell.

section 1
Metaphor and language learning

chapter 2
Can people be cold and warm?
Developing understanding of figurative meanings
of temperature terms in early EFL
Ana M. Piquer-Píriz
University of Extremadura
The understanding and production of figurative language in childhood has been
the subject of a great deal of research. Most of the research literature on this
topic has concentrated on the L1 but the insights gained can also be relevant to
the process of learning a foreign language. This chapter reports on a study car-
ried out with young learners of EFL in order to test their understanding of the
semantic extensions of the lexemes cold and warm when referring to personality
at ages 6, 8 and 10. This area of metaphorical language seems to be particularly
problematic for children, and yet the figurative uses of adjectives such as ‘warm’,
‘cool’ and ‘cold’ are conventional in English. As such, these uses will need to
be grasped by EFL learners. The results of this study are discussed in relation
to the role played by the children’s understanding of the two domains involved
(temperatures and personality) and some of the possible implications for the
teaching of these lexemes and their semantic extensions in the EFL classroom.
Keywords: figurative meanings, young learners, EFL, temperature terms
1. Introduction
Children’s ability to understand and produce figurative meanings in their native
language has been the subject of a great deal of research. From the perspective of
developmental linguistics and psychology, the interest has mainly concentrated
on idioms (Cacciari Levorato, 1989; Levorato Cacciari, 1992; Abkarian, Jones
West, 1992) and metaphor (Gardner et al., 1975; Vosniadou Ortony, 1983;
Nippold Sullivan, 1987; Winner, 1988; Zurer Pearson, 1990; Glicksohn Yafe,
1998). These studies start from the premise that in order for a metaphor to exist,
there must be some pre-existing similarity between the two elements involved. In
fact, they tend to focus their analysis on a very specific type of figurative utterance

22 Ana M. Piquer-Píriz
that often takes the linguistic form of a simile expressed as ‘A is like B’ or ‘A is
B’, for instance, ‘a cloud is a marshmallow’ or ‘a camera is like a tape-recorder’
(Gentner Stuart, 1983). The children’s answers and, consequently, their capacity
to deal with figurative language are analysed in terms of their ability to perceive
this similarity.
In recent years, cognitive semanticists have developed a new framework in
which figurative meanings can be fitted. According to this account, the differ-
ent senses of a polysemous word are motivated by the mental mechanisms of
metaphor and metonymy and grounded in our bodily experience and the interac-
tion with the environment that surrounds us. This view has given rise to models
for lexical networks (Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1990) based on the notion that the
different meanings of a given lexeme form radially structured categories which
consist of a central member connected to the others via metonymy, metaphor or
image schemata. Thus, cognitive linguists do not conceive metaphor as being mo-
tivated by pre-existing similarity.1 Rather, in their view, metaphor and metonymy
themselves organize concepts with respect to one another. In order to understand
an abstract concept, we use another concept which is more concrete and our ex-
periences with the physical world serve as a natural and logical foundation for the
comprehension of more abstract notions (for further details on the importance
of the theoretical distinction between ‘resemblance’ and ‘correlational’ metaphors
and its implications for empirical studies, see Gibbs in his introduction to this
volume). This idea has had important implications for (a) applied linguistics, in
particular, for the teaching of vocabulary in an L2 (for a detailed overview see
Boers Lindstromberg, 2008) and (b) it has also begun to serve as a theoretical
basis for research into children’s language acquisition and development (Johnson,
1999 and Nerlich, Todd, Herman Clarke, 2003). This chapter attempts to ben-
efit from the research into these two fields and it aims to explore young learners’
understanding of the figurative meanings of the English words warm and cold
when referring to personality. It could, thus, be situated in the context of the last
two situations (both social and psychological) established by professor Gibbs in
his introduction to this volume: the development of metaphor understanding and
use in children and developing control over metaphor in second/foreign language
acquisition. And, following some of the contrasts he establishes, this chapter is a
synchronic analysis of the understanding of figurative language (language use) by
young learners in a real-world context (an EFL classroom).

Chapter 2. Understanding cold and warm in early EFL 23
2. Warm and cold and domain knowledge
The interest in children’s understanding of the meaning of warm and cold when
referring to personality can be traced back to the seminal article by Asch Ner-
love (1960). In this paper, they explored children’s understanding of what they call
“double-function terms”, that is, adjectives that refer both to physical properties of
things and psychological properties of people, for instance, hard, deep, bright
or cold and warm. Their interest in these particular lexemes had partly arisen
from the observation that such terms exist in languages belonging to different
families and the figurative meanings assigned to them are very similar. They car-
ried out a study with five groups of children, ranging in age from three to twelve
in order to explore whether the children mastered these terms in both senses
and how they understood the nexus between the physical and the psychological
meaning. Their main results can be summarised as follows: (a) the physical sense
of the term is acquired first, (b) the psychological meaning comes later and, ap-
parently, as an independent one and (c) the dual property of the lexeme is realised
at last and not spontaneously as a rule.
In the eighties, Winner (1988) also dealt with dual-property adjectives which
she classed as psychological-physical metaphors. She established a classification
of metaphors in which she distinguished between sensory and non-sensory meta-
phors depending on whether they are based on similarity that is apprehended by
our senses or not. Non-sensory metaphors can be sub-divided into relational and
physical-psychological metaphors. The former are based on similarities between
objects, situations or events that are physically dissimilar, but, owing to parallel
internal structures, function in a similar way (e.g. clouds and sponges which func-
tion to hold and then release water). Psychological-physical metaphors are based
on a resemblance between the sensory attributes of a physical object, perceived
through any sensory modality, and psychological, non-sensory attributes of a per-
son (e.g. cheerful people are described as sunny and cranky people as sour). Ac-
cording to Winner, children have problems to interpret non-sensory metaphors
because they try to find a sensory similarity between topic and vehicle when a
non-sensory similarity is at issue.
The evidence offered by these studies and others in the same line (e.g.
Gentner Stuart, 1983; Vosniadou Ortony, 1983 and Evans Gamble, 1988)
suggests that children’s perception of the properties that relate topic and vehicle
in a metaphorical comparison changes with development, with perceptual or
sensory links coming to action first, followed by relational or functional links
and then physical-psychological links. There are two possible accounts for these
findings. On the one hand, children may not be able to perceive the kinds of
similarities on which non-sensory metaphors are based. On the other hand,

failure may be due simply to insufficient knowledge of the vehicle and/or topic
domain, thus limiting the kind of connections between topic and vehicle that
children perceive. Support for the first hypothesis would lead to the conclusion
that metaphorical ability is not fully developed until a certain age. Children could
only grasp metaphors based on sensory similarities. In contrast, support for the
second hypothesis would suggest that when the child has sufficiently developed
knowledge of the elements being linked, they are able to interpret the metaphor
even if the ground is non-sensory (Keil, 1989).
This latter issue has been recurrently examined in the literature on children’s
understanding of figurative language. Several scholars (Carey, 1985; Winner, 1988;
Keil, 1989; Vosniadou, 1989; Cameron, 1996) have argued that children’s ‘misun-
derstanding’ of metaphors would not be due to their lack of metaphorical capacity
but to their developing ‘knowledge of the world’, particularly, the lack of ‘domain
knowledge’. These two notions refer to how children’s knowledge of concepts and
events and the relations among them become enriched in response to different
inputs and experiences (their own social experiences with other people and the
world that surrounds them, including all sort of inputs they are exposed to: the
explanations provided by their parents, teachers, siblings or friends but also sto-
ries, cartoons, TV programmes, computer games or the Internet). For example,
the knowledge of ‘dog’ may include the following notions: four-legged animal, it
barks, it can be a pet, it may also be aggressive, there are very different breeds, etc.
There is some share-knowledge (cultural within a community) about a concept
but also each individual may have a particular view of ‘dogs’ due to a specific
experience with them. Children are in the process of developing this knowledge
and, therefore, although even very young children may have the competence to
perceive all the kinds of similarities that adults perceive, they may lack articulated
knowledge of the domain from which either the topic or vehicle is drawn, and
thus fail to see the similarity between them.
Studies on children’s development of conceptual domains will therefore clarify
the domain differentiations which children are able to establish at different stages.
This point is particularly relevant if we attempt to apply the cognitive linguis-
tic view of polysemy to foreign language instruction. If we accept the cognitive
premise that our abstract reasoning is based on our understanding of concrete
concepts via metonymical or metaphorical projections from source/concrete to
target/abstract domains, then any methodology that aims to enhance this pro-
jection needs to take into account what kind of domain differentation a child is
capable of at various ages.
So far, the scant studies that have explored children’s acquisition of polysemy
from this perspective have focused on monolingual children. In the case of ap-
plied cognitive linguistics studies, although they are far more numerous, they

have mainly concentrated on adolescent or adult learners of EFL. However, EFL
is expanding and is introduced at ever younger ages in the educational systems
of many countries and these notions may be also applied to young learners. Re-
search carried out with young (5-, 7-, 9- and 11-year-old) Spanish learners of EFL
has shown that they were able to understand some semantic extensions of body
part terms in English. In general, these children were able to grasp the figura-
tive meaning and they often explained the links among the polysemous senses of
these lexical items by resorting to metonymy and metaphor (Piquer-Píriz, 2005a,
2008a, 2008b), as predicted by cognitive linguistics. Nevertheless, the children’s
preference for certain reasoning strategies varied at different ages, and this had an
impact on their successful understanding of the figurative meanings (MacArthur
Piquer-Píriz, 2007). Furthermore, it was also shown that children’s reasoning
was heavily influenced by their developing knowledge of the world. For example,
when presented with some semantic extensions of head (the head of a bed, ham-
mer, stairs and a line of cars), the younger learners mostly based their reasoning
on the knowledge about the human body. In contrast, older children showed a
better differentiated and more developed knowledge of domains and were more
flexible in the use of other schemas, for example, animal schemas which led them
to a more successful identification of extensions such as the head of a line of cars
(Piquer-Píriz, 2005b).
Thus, although the application of the cognitive linguistics view of polysemy
to the learning of vocabulary in an L2 may offer an appealing alternative to tra-
ditional approaches to the foreign language lexicon from very early ages, issues
such as the kind of domain differentiation a child is capable of at various ages
or the use and deployment of certain reasoning strategies need to be taken into
account at least at this early period of life. By means of exploring the field of
temperature terms, the study presented below aims to shed some further light
on these issues.
3. Method
Two research questions were addressed in this study:
1. Are 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old Spanish learners of EFL able to identify the se-
mantic extensions of the core lexical items warm and cold, the prototypical
meaning of which they know from their English lessons, when they refer to
personality?
2. What kind of reasoning is involved in the children’s (non) recognition of these
figurative senses?

3.1 Participants
A hundred and forty children (75 girls and 65 boys) in their first (mean age: 6;1),
third (mean age: 8;5) and fifth year (mean age: 10;5) of primary school took part
in this study. Apart from a girl from Uruguay and a boy from Ecuador, the rest
came from Spain and they all were native speakers of Spanish. They attended two
state schools in Extremadura (western Spain) and they came from a variety of
social and economic backgrounds.
3.2 Stimuli and procedure
A short story in English in which friendly and unfriendly types of behaviour were
illustrated was devised (see Appendix 1).2 Dolls representing the characters in the
story were used to facilitate children’s understanding of the contents.
The sessions took place in a quiet area of the school with groups of five chil-
dren. The same procedure was followed in each session. First of all, the children’s
knowledge of the core meaning of the lexemes warm and cold was checked and
reinforced. In general, they did not have any problems to recognise and produce
these words that they often use to refer to weather conditions in their EFL class-
room. Secondly, the children were told the short story in English twice and they
were asked to retell it in Spanish to check comprehension. Finally, they had to
decide which character in the story was cold and which was warm and to justify
their decisions. Their explanations were tape-recorded and transcripts were made
of all the recordings to be analysed later from a quantitative and a qualitative
perspective.
3.3 Results and discussion
A quantitative analysis of the children’s identification of the friendly (warm)
and unfriendly (cold) characters in the three age groups offers the results shown
in Table 1.
As can be seen in the graph, in the 6-year-old group, 46% of the children
made the right choice, that is, they identified the unfriendly character in the story
as cold and the friendly one as warm. The percentage of right identifications in the
8-year-old group is very close to 70% whereas in the case of the 10-year-olds, this
percentage stays just below 60%. At first sight, it seems surprising that older chil-
dren (10-year-olds) had more problems with the task than their younger counter-
parts (8-year-olds). A qualitative analysis of the results was also carried out due

UNDERSTANDING COLD AND WARM IN EARLY EFL 1
Table 1. Quantitative results of the study
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Quantitative results
right 46% 68% 59%
wrong 43% 32% 41%
don't know 11% 0% 0%
6-year-olds 8-year-olds 10-year-olds
Table 1. Quantitative results of the study
UNDERSTANDING COLD AND WARM IN EARLY EFL 2
Table 2. Types of answers
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Types of answers
6-year-olds 6% 66% 17% 11%
8-year-olds 18% 69% 12% 2%
10-year-olds 76% 10% 14% 0%
Personality
Bodily
sensation –
clothes
Weight
Bodily
sensation +
weight
Table 2. Types of answers

to the nature of the study with the children freely explaining their responses. This
analysis complemented and rectified some of the quantitative data, explaining the
surprising success of the 8-year-olds. The individual examination of the children’s
answers shows that there are three main justifications used by the children to de-
cide why the two characters in the story are cold or warm and they are related to
(1) bodily sensations, (2) weight and (3) personality (for details, see Table 2).
The preferred justification in the case of the 6- and the 8-year-olds is that
related to bodily sensations, that is, these children concentrated mainly on the
prototypical meaning of warm and cold as temperature terms and particularly
in the bodily sensation of being cold or warm. In the context of the short story,
this was explained in terms of the clothes worn by the dolls used to illustrate
the story:
(1) C:
“porque tiene más frío – porque lleva menos ropa [se refiere a ‘the fat
lady’] ‘warm’ (R: ésta [thin lady] es ‘warm’ ¿por qué crees?) tiene más
calor porque lleva más cosas”
C:
Because she feels colder – because she’s got less pieces of clothing on [she
refers to the fat lady] warm (R: this one [thin lady] is warm why do you
think so?) she feels warmer because she’s got more things on.3
Thus, the 8-year-olds’ quantitative success on the task was only apparent. Most of
them do not relate coldness and warmth with unfriendliness and friendliness but
with their prototypical temperature senses.
This justification based on bodily sensations is also used by some of the 10-
year-olds but its presence in only marginal in this age group (10% of the answers
as opposed to over 60% in the other two groups). In contrast, most of the 10-year-
olds’explanationsarebasedonthecorrelationswarm-friendlyandcold-unfriendly,
that is, the figurative meanings of warm and cold referring to personality:
(2) C:
‘the fat lady’ es la ‘cold’ porque es fría y severa y que no quiere ayudar
a nadie y ‘a thin lady’ pues es más buena y creo que es ‘warm’ porque le
ayuda – no sé – que es más acogedora o como se diga.”
C:
the fat lady is the cold one because she’s cold and severe and she doesn’t
want to help anybody and ‘a thin lady’ is better-natured and I think she’s
warm because she helps him – I don’t know – she’s more welcoming or
whatever the word is.
The numbers of responses based on this justification in the three age groups seem
to show a developmental pattern: 6%, 18% and 76% in the 6-, 8- and 10-year-old
groups, respectively. Interestingly, not all the 10-year-olds that used this moti-
vation qualified the unfriendly character as cold and the friendly one as warm

(what explains why only 59% of their responses are correct). Some of the children
showed a richer knowledge of people’s personalities and of temperature terms and
focused on other aspects that can be related to warm and cold:
(3) C1:
“la ‘fat lady’ warm porque, repre, creo que representa la – el calor a la
maldad porque se ponen a hacer así ‘uuuuu’ y le sale humo y la ‘thin lady’
es ‘cold’ porque – porque representa al frío
C2: porque el calor es así como más fuerte
C1: como el demonio, el fuego del infierno es más malo
R: y el frío ¿por qué?
C1:
porque el cielo es azul – porque el frío se representa en un color azul y el cielo
es azul pero bueno – y se representa también el caliente rojo por el infierno
que es rojo”
C1:
the fat lady warm because – she repre – I think she represents the – heat
represents evil because they do like this ‘uuuu’ and smoke comes out and
the thin lady is cold because – because she represents coldness
C2: because heat is stronger
C1: like the devil, the fire in hell is worse
R: and coldness why?
C1:
because heaven is blue – because coldness is represented as blue and the
heaven is blue but it is good – and heat is represented as red because hell
is red.
For this particular child, warm has not positive connotations but it is rather re-
lated to fire and hell whereas heaven is blue which is related to coldness. This
interpretation of good and evil with strong religious connotations shows how
children can be heavily influenced by the cultural values of their communities.
It is quite frequent that Spanish children of that age have just taken or are about
to take their First Communion and are developing and being inculcated in these
religious notions.
Finally, a marginal justification in all age groups is based on the idea that fat
people are more ‘calurosas’, that is, they tend to feel warmer than thin people (a
clearly embodied explanation):
(4) C:
“Eh – ‘warm’ y ‘cold’ (R: ‘warm’ ‘the cold’ – ‘the fat lady’ ‘warm’ – ‘warm’ –
y ‘the thin lady’ ‘cold’ ¿por qué?) porque al ser tan gorda tiene muchas
calorías y al ser tan flaca tiene mucho frío”
C:
mmm – warm and cold (R: warm the cold – the fat lady warm – warm –
and the thin lady cold why?) because she’s so fat that she’s got lots of
calories and she’s so skinny that she feels very cold

4. Conclusions
The results of this study seem to indicate that there is a development in these
young EFL learners’ understanding of the lexemes warm and cold and their fig-
urative senses in relation to personality. Further research is obviously needed. It
would be interesting, for example, to have data for older children and adults to see
how these patterns evolve. But, there seems to be a sequence from the concrete,
prototypical meaning which is more salient to the youngest learners (6-year-olds)
and that they clearly relate to bodily sensations to the abstract, figurative sense
related to personality which is accessible to most of the 10-year-olds.
The numbers of responses based on this justification in the three age groups
seem to show a developmental pattern: 6%, 18% and 76% in the 6-, 8- and 10-year-
old groups, respectively. These results are in line with those obtained by Asch and
Nerlove (1960) and Winner (1988). This sequential pattern (from prototypical to
figurative) also coincides with the acquisition order of some meanings of get in
monolingual children (Nerlich, Todd Clarke, 2003).
It seems, then, that in the process of grasping the figurative sense of poly-
semous words children go from concrete to abstract via analogical reasoning in
their L1 and also when learning an L2. However, there are other factors which
also seem to be involved in this process. Children’s analogical reasoning is in-
fluenced by their growing knowledge of concepts, as illustrated in the different
conceptions of cold and warm people reflected in the answers of the youngest and
oldest children that participated in this study. The youngest children (6-year-old)
mainly stay in the concrete realm and relate cold and warm with their own bodily
sensations. This does not mean that they lack figurative capacity (see Piquer-Píriz,
2008b) but it seems that they have not made the links between temperature terms
and personality yet. The 8-year-olds seem to be on their way to do so but the
process does not seem to be completed yet. In contrast, most of the 10-year-olds
relate both domains but in the process of developing their world knowledge, some
notions are not clearly conventionalised yet and they make their own interpreta-
tions, as shown in Example (3).
When designing pedagogical materials aiming to foster the use and compre-
hension of the multiple senses of polysemous items in the EFL classroom, it seems
clear that which and when different semantic extensions should be introduced are
important issues. Analysing the domain differentiation which children make at
different ages can help to provide some answers.

Notes
1. Some cognitive linguistic approaches recognise the existence of some metaphors in which
the two elements are cognitively linked due to their actual similarities or to the human capac-
ity to impose resemblance between them. In this sense, Grady (1999) distinguishes between
this type of metaphor, which he calls ‘resemblance’ metaphor, and ‘correlation’ metaphors. The
latter are experientially motivated, that is, directly grounded in aspects of our experience and,
therefore, more primary and universal, according to Grady.
2. I would like to thank Fiona MacArthur for making up this story.
3. The explanations provided by the children illustrated in this chapter have been translated
into English as literally as possible to maintain the original sense. It should be born in mind that
they are spoken utterances produced by children and they have not been edited for grammar
or style neither in Spanish or English in order to preserve the children’s original words which
convey their ideas.
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Appendix
Short story
I’m going to tell you about a little boy. His name was Sam. He was very nice, he was (6, 8, 10)
years old, just like you. Sam’s mummy was always getting cross with Sam. Do you know why?
Well, it was because Sam was always losing things. If he had a ball, he lost it, and he said to his
mum(my): “Mum, where’s my ball?.” “I don’t know, Sam” said his mum(my). “Look for it”. And
Sam looked for it. If he had a book, he lost it, and he said to his mum(my): “Mum, where’s my
book?.” “I don’t know, Sam”; said his mum(my). “Look for it”. And Sam looked for it. And Sam
lost his shoes, and he said to his mum(my): “Mum, where are my shoes?” And Sam’s mum(my)
said: “I don’t know. Look for them.” Sometimes he found his ball or his books and sometimes he
didn’t. Sometimes his mother helped Sam find his ball or his books, and sometimes she didn’t.
Sometimes she was nice and sometimes she wasn’t nice. One day, Sam lost something VERY
important. Do you know what he lost? Well, he lost his nose. Yes, his NOSE. No, don’t ask me
how he lost his nose – but he did. One moment he had a nose on his face, and the next moment
it was gone. He put his hand on his face and he said “Oh no! My nose! Where is it? I’ve lost my
nose!” Well, Sam’s mum(my) wasn’t there. Sam was in the park. He couldn’t say: “Mum, where’s
my nose?” She wasn’t in the park. But Sam saw a fat lady, and he said: “Excuse me, I’ve lost my
nose. Where is it? Can you help me find my nose?. ” But the fat lady said: Stupid boy. You’ve
lost your nose. Well, that’s your problem. YOU look for it. I won’t help you.” Poor Sam began to
cry. What a horrible lady! No nose and no help! Then he saw a thin lady, and he said: “Excuse
me, I’ve lost my nose. Where is it? Can you help me find my nose?” And the thin lady said: “Oh
poor boy. You’ve lost your nose. I’ll help you.”. So Sam and the thin lady looked everywhere for
his nose. They looked on the ground, they looked under the benches, they looked behind the
trees (expand as necessary). And in the end they found the nose! Do you know where Sam’s
nose was? No? Well, it was in his pocket! Yes, Sam had used his hankie and he put his hankie
AND his nose in his pocket. Silly boy! But wasn’t he lucky the thin lady helped him? Because
she helped him, Sam now has a nose on his face! What a nice lady!

chapter 3
Grasping the point
A study of 15-year-old students’ comprehension
of metaphorical expressions in schoolbooks
Anne Golden
University of Oslo
Metaphorical expressions as defined by Conceptual Metaphor Theory are
frequently used in all sorts of texts, including real-world school books. This
study investigates the comprehension of different types of metaphorical expres-
sions by different groups of 15-year-old students in Norway. 50 metaphorical
expressions were selected from nine textbooks in lower secondary school
and presented to 400 students in a multiple choice task. About 40% of these
students had Norwegian as their second language. A questionnaire relating to
language practice and school experience provided the basis for categorizing the
students into several groups. A comparison of the results from different groups
of students showed that the linguistic minority students as a group under-
stood substantially fewer expressions than their peers with Norwegian as their
mother tongue, and that some of the language minority groups understood
fewer than others. The metaphorical expressions were categorized into differ-
ent sets according to several variables, relating to the expressions themselves
and to the contexts in which they appeared in the introductory phrases of the
multiple choice items. Some sets of expressions turned out to be more difficult
than others. The minority students’ choice of wrong alternatives seemed to be
influenced by the resemblance in form between single words in the introduc-
tory phrase and in the distracter. This study shows the need a) to take the di-
versity of the metaphorical expressions into account in studies of metaphorical
comprehension as urged by Gibbs (this volume) and b) to focus on vocabulary
of all sorts in education.
Keywords: comprehension, metaphors, second language vocabulary, reading,
school text book

36 Anne Golden
1. Introduction
Understanding written texts is essential for young people in school. In order to glean
knowledge, students need to understand the written texts presented to them. Some
students are poor readers, in the sense that they do not fully grasp what they have
read.Thisisafrequentexperiencewithlanguageminoritychildreninschoolbecause
theyarereadingintheirsecondlanguage.Theremaybeanumberofreasonsfortheir
reading difficulties. Kulbrandstad (2003) claims that students’ problems in reading
in their second language are mainly due to three factors: (1) incomplete knowl-
edge of the language (the grammar, the vocabulary), (2) inadequate background
knowledge (use of inappropriate schema) and (3) poorly developed metacognitive
skills (lack of control of their own comprehension). Challenges presented by vo-
cabulary have indeed been pointed out by several researchers (Oakhill Garnham,
1988; several articles in Huckin, Haynes Coady (Eds.), 1993; Urquhart Weir,
1998), and hence, the need to teach vocabulary in class has been strongly advocated
(see e.g. Sökmen, 1997; Beck, McKeown Kucan, 2002). But the relation between
reading comprehension and vocabulary is complex (Anderson Freebody, 1985)
and in need of further investigation (Pearson, Hiebert Kamil, 2007). In recent
years, there has been an increase in the awareness of the extent of metaphoricity
in language in general, and consequently also in the language used in textbooks.
Vocabulary studies should therefore include the comprehension of vocabulary in
its figurative sense. Studies of figurative language in textbooks as well as of students’
mastery of this type of language are therefore needed.
2. Background
2.1 Research on vocabulary in Scandinavia
Research on vocabulary has been an important part of second language research
in Scandinavia, mainly due to Åke Viberg’s extensive work in Sweden (see e.g.
Viberg, 1993, 1999, 2002, 2005). Part of his research has been on lexical typol-
ogy and contrastive studies, especially focusing on verbs. By categorizing and
comparing the 20 most frequent verbs into semantic fields in eleven European
languages he found a regular pattern: in each field one or two verbs were by far
more frequent. These verbs were named nuclear verbs and these verbs in Swedish
had an equivalent in all or almost all of the eleven different languages he studied.
Examples of nuclear verbs from the motion field are come and go, from the field
of verbal communication say, and from the field of possession take and give, e.g.
they are all among the most polysemous verbs in the language.

Chapter 3. Grasping the point 37
2.2 Research on vocabulary in schoolbooks in Scandinavia
Vocabulary in textbooks in physics, geography and history in upper primary
school and lower secondary school in Norway was carried out by Golden and
Hvenekilde in the 1980s. The vocabulary in these books was categorized as high-
ly common school words, subject-specific words and non-subject-specific words
(Golden, 1984). The highly common school words were frequently used function
words and everyday school words (like those introduced in beginners’ textbooks
when studying Norwegian as a foreign language). The subject-specific words were
selected by subject teachers and included words like breddegrad [Eng: latitude],
samfunn [Eng: society], fordampe [Eng: evaporate]. The remainder were classified
as non-subject-specific words. A comparison of the vocabulary1 in these three sub-
jects’ textbooks showed – as expected – that the highly common school words were
found in all disciplines, whereas the subject-specific words were unique to their
particular academic disciplines in about 93% of the cases. The unexpected re-
sult was that about 55% of the non-subject-specific words turned out to be subject
specific as well; they were found only in one of three subjects.2 Examples of this
category are gni [Eng: rub] that only appeared in physics, kvist [Eng: twig] that
only appeared in geography and frykt [Eng: fear] that only appeared in history.
This shows that vocabulary as a general rule is more diverse and topic-centred
than one would think.
2.3 Research on learners’ vocabulary in Scandinavia
Viberg has also studied second language speakers’ lexical production on several
occasions (Arnberg Viberg, 1991; Viberg, 1993; Viberg, 1998) using different
methods, including free conversation mixed with the retelling of short video clips
and informal play with flannel boards. Different age groups were studied. One
pattern emerged again and again: Certain verbs were overused while others were
underused by second language users, as compared to Swedish native speakers
of the same age. The overused verbs were the nuclear verbs (e.g. go, take). Verbs
which are typologically marked verbs in Swedish and Scandinavian languages
(e.g. set, lay) were avoided.
Golden studied the vocabulary of five students with different mother tongues
(Spanish, Turkish, Polish and Farsi) when retelling a fairy tale which had been
previously read in Norwegian (unpublished study, but reported in Golden, 2009).
Their verb vocabulary was compared with the verb vocabulary of five Norwegian
students. The foreign students used a higher proportion of nuclear verbs and text-
specific verbs (the latter normally being low-frequency verbs, but having a rather

38 Anne Golden
high frequency in the text, like grave [Eng: dig] and hugge [Eng: chop]. However,
the semantic range of the nuclear verbs used by the foreign students was narrower
compared to the range of the native speakers, very few verbs were used in a figu-
rative sense, and the collocations of the text-specific verbs were also less varied.
The foreign students did not use the typologically-marked Scandinavian durative
construction with verbs like stå, sitte and ligge [Eng: stand, sit and lie] that is typi-
cal in this text genre as well as in most oral narratives in Norwegian. These were
frequently used in the Norwegian students’ retellings.
2.4 Vocabulary comprehension research in Scandinavia
In Denmark, Golden and Hvenekilde’s vocabulary study was duplicated by Gimbel
(1995) using school books from history, biology and geography. This research was
followed up by a comprehension study of the non-subject-specific words (or the
‘pre-subject vocabulary’ as they were called in Gimbel, 1998). Turkish and Dan-
ish fifth graders were asked to explain the meanings of 50 words. The difference
between the two groups was substantial, as the Danish students attained an aver-
age of 42 words correct and the Turkish students 15.6. The answers offered by the
two groups of students when they misunderstood an item in question were also
dissimilar. The Danish students’ wrong answers displayed a semantic similarity to
the correct ones, as when the Danish noun frost [Eng: frost, cold] was explained
as something like slippery ice. The Turkish students’ answers had usually a phono-
logical similarity, as when the Danish noun grænse [Eng: border] was explained as
Danish græs [Eng: grass].
The same strategy of focusing on the form of the unknown word was found
in Haastrup’s (1991) study of Danish learners of English in the ninth grade in a
think-aloud task. But Haastrup saw a difference between the students’ guessing
strategies which related to their proficiency levels. The bottom-up strategy relat-
ing only to the orthographic /phonological aspect of the word was primarily used
by the low-proficiency learners whereas the high-proficiency learners tended to
use a top-down strategy and their guesses were guided by the theme in question.
Metaphorical comprehension research in Scandinavia
Research on metaphorical comprehension has been scarce in Scandinavia. In
Lise Iversen Kulbrandstad’s study of minority students’ reading comprehension
in Norway, a metaphorical expression medaljens bakside [lit: the back side of the
medal] appeared in the title of one of the texts read (Kulbrandstad, 1998). None
of the minority students (as opposed to their Norwegian peers) had any reason-
able idea as to what a text with a title like this would be about. However, they all

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abdication—Maximilian; builds the Burg; magnificence of his reign; legends of him;
his decline—Charles Quint; cedes Tirol to Ferdinand I.; his wise administration;
quiets popular agitation; Charles Quint’s visits to Innsbruck; attacked by Maurice,
Elector of Saxony; carried into Carinthia in a litter; death of Maurice—Ferdinand I.,
the Hof-Kirche; Maximilian’s cenotaph; its bas-relief; statues; Mirakel-Bild des H.
Anton; Fürstenchor; abjuration of Queen Christina—Introduction of Jesuits; results
—The ‘Fromme Siechin’—Ferdinand II.; his peaceful tastes; romantic attachment;
Philippine Welser; ménage at Schloss Ambras; collections; curiosities; portraits;
Philippine’s end 225
CHAPTER IX.
NORTH TIROL—THE INNTHAL.
INNSBRUCK (continued).
Wallenstein’s vow—Theophrastus Paracelsus; his mysterious dealings—The
Tummelplatz—The Silberne Kapelle—Earthquake and dearth; their lessons—
Ferdinand’s devotion to the Blessed Sacrament; analogous legend of Rudolf of
Hapsburg—Ferdinand’s second marriage—The Capuchin Church—Maximilian the
Deutschmeister; introduces the Servites—Paul Lederer—Maximilian’s hermitage—
S. Lorenzo of Brindisi—Dreiheiligkeitskirche—Provisions against ravages of the
Thirty Years’ War—The Siechenhaus—Leopold V.; dispensed from his episcopal
jurisdiction and vows; Marries Claudia de’ Medici—Friedrich v. Tiefenbach—
Festivities at Innsbruck—The Hofgarten—Kranach’s Madonna, Mariähülfskirche
built to receive it; translation to the Pfarr-kirche under Ferdinand Karl—Ferdinand
Karl—Regency of Claudia de’ Medici; administrative ability; Italian influences—
Sigismund Franz—Claudia Felicita—Charles of Lotharingia—War of succession;
Bavarian inroad of 1703; the Pontlatzerbrücke; Baierische-Rumpel—St. Annensäule
—Joseph I.—Karl Philipp; builds the Land-haus and gymnasium, restores the
Pfarrkirche; stucco and marble decorations; frescoes; preservation of Damian Asam
—Strafarbeitshaus—Church of S. John Nepomuk; his popularity; canonisation—
Maria Theresa; her partiality for Innsbruck; example; Prussian prisoners; marriage of
Leopold; death of Francis I.; the Triumphpforte, the Damenstift—Joseph II.—
Archduchess Maria Elizabeth—Pius VI. passes through Innsbruck—Leopold II.—
Repeal of Josephinischen measures—Francis II.—Outbreak of the French revolution
—-Das Mädchen v. Spinges—The Auferstehungsfeier—Archduchess Maria
Elizabeth—Gottesacker—Treaty of Pressburg—‘The Year Nine’—Andreas Hofer—
Peace of Schönbrunn—Speckbacher; successes at Berg Isel; Hofer as Schützen-
Kommandant; his moderation, simplicity, subordination; his betrayal; last hours;
firmness; execution—Restoration of Austrian rule—Hofer’s monument—Tirolese
loyalty in 1848—The Ferdinandeum; its curiosities—Early editions of German
authors—Paintings on cobweb—The Schiess-stand—Policy of the Viennese
Government, constitutional opposition of Tirol—Population of Innsbruck 265
CHAPTER X.

NORTH TIROL—OBERINNTHAL.
INNSBRUCK TO ZIRL AND SCHARNITZ—INNSBRUCK TO THE LISENS-
FERNER.
Excursions from Innsbruck—Mühlau; new church; Baronin Sternbach—Judgment of
Frau Hütt—Büchsenhausen—Weierburg—Mariä-Brunn—Hottingen; monuments in
the Friedhof—Schloss Lichtenthurm—The Höttingerbild; the student’s Madonna;
stalactites—Excursion to Zirl—Grossen Herr-Gott Strasse—Kranebitten—The
Schwefelloch—The Hundskapelle—The Zirlerchristen—Gross Solstein—The
Martinswand; danger of the Emperor Maximilian; Collin’s ballad; who led the Kaiser
astray?—His importance in Europe; efforts to rescue him; the Blessed Sacrament
visits him; unknown deliverer—Martinsbühl—Traditions of Kaiser Max—Zirl—
Fragenstein; its hidden treasure—Leiten—Reit—Seefeld—The Heilige Blutskapelle
—The Seekapelle—Scharnitz—Isarthal—Porta Klaudia—Dirstenöhl—The beggar-
woman’s prayer; vision of the peasant of Dorf 310
Unter-Perfuss—Selrainthal—The Melach—Rothenbrunn—Fatscherthal—The Hohe
Villerspitz—Sonnenberg—Magdalenen-Bründl—Character of the Selrainthalers—
Ober-Perfuss; Peter Anich—Kematen—Völs; the Blasienberg; S. Jodok—The
Galwiese—The Schwarze-Kreuzkapelle; Hölzl’s vow—Ferneck—Berg Isel—Noise
of the rifle practice—Count v. Stachel—Natters and Mutters—Waidburg—The
Nockspitze—Götzens—Schloss Völlenberg; Oswald v. Wolkenstein—Birgitz—
Axams—The Sendersthal 329
CHAPTER XI.
WÄLSCH-TIROL.
THE WÄLSCHEROLISCHE-ETSCHTHAL AND ITS TRIBUTARY VALLEYS.
Val di Lagarina—Borghetto—Ala—Roveredo—Surrounding castles—Dante at
Lizzana—The Slavini di S. Marco—La Busa del Barbaz; its myths—Serravalle—
Schloss Junk—The Madonna del Monte—Industries—Chapel of S. Columban—
Trent, Festa of St. Vigilius; comparison between Trent and Rome; the Domkirche; its
notabilia; Sta. Maria Maggiore; seat of the council; assenting crucifix; centenary
celebration; legend of the organ-builder—Church of St. Peter; Chapel of S. Simonin;
club; museum; Palazzi; Palazzo Zambelli, Teufelspalast; its legend; General Gallas—
The Madonna alle Laste; view of Trent—Dos Trento—St. Ingenuin’s garden; St.
Albuin’s apples—Lavis—French spoliation—Restitution—Wälsch Michel 340
Tributary valleys—Val di Non; Annaunia—Rochetta Pass Wälschmetz—Visiaun—
Spaur Maggiore—Denno—Schloss Belasis—The Seidenbaum—Tobel Wild-see—
Cles; Tavola Clesiana; Roman remains; the Schwarzen Felder—SS. Sisinus,
Martyrius and Alexander—Val di Sole—Livo—Magras; Val di Rabbi; San Bernardo

—Malè—Charles Quint’s visit—Pellizano—Val di Pejo—Cogolo—Corno de’ tre
Signori—Val Vermiglio—Tonale; the witches’ sabbath there—Tregiovo—Cloz—U-
Liebe Frau auf dem Gampen—Fondo—Sanzeno—Legend of the three brothers:
mithraic bas-relief—The Tirolean Petrarch—St. Romediusthal; legend of St.
Romedius; angelic consecration; conversion of the false penitents; extraordinary
construction and arrangement of the building; romantic situation; fifteen centuries of
uninterrupted veneration—Castel Thun; attachment of the people to the family; a
Nonesade; aqueduct—Dombel; its Etruscan key; its import 358
The Avisiothal—Val di Cembra; its inaccessibility—Altrei; presentation of colours—
Fleimserthal; Cavalese; its church a museum of Tirolese Art; local parliament; legend
of its site; handsome new church—Fassathal—Moena—Analogous English and
French traditions—Marriage customs of the valley—The Feuriger Verräther—Vigo
—The Marmolata; its legends—St. Ulrich 374
CHAPTER XII.
WÄLSCH-TIROL.
VAL SUGANA—GIUDICARIA—FOLKLORE.
Val Sugana—Baselga—The Madonna di Pinè; legend of the Madonna di Caravaggio
—Pergine; miners; the Canoppa—The Schloss—Marriage customs of the valley—
Lake Caldonazzo—St. Hermes at Calzeranica—Bosentino—Nossa signora del Feles
—The sleeper of Valle del Orco—Caldonazzo—Lafraun; legend of the disunited
brothers—Borgo, the Italian Meran—Franciscan convent; Castel Telvana; dangers of
a carneval procession; Count Welsburg’s vow—Gallant border defences—Stalactite
caves of Costalta—Sette Comuni—Castelalto—Strigno—Castelrotto—Cima d’Asta
—Quarazza garnet quarry—Ivano—Grigno; Legend of St. Udalric—Castel Tesino—
Canal San Bovo to Primiero—Tale of Virginia Loss; humble heroism—Le Tezze;
modern heroes 382
Judicarien; its divisions—Castel Madruzz; Cardinal Karl Madruzz; his dispensation;
its conditions—Abraham’s Garden—Sta. Massenza; Bishop’s Summer Palace—
Loreto-kapelle—The Rendenathal; St. Vigilius; his zeal; early admission to the
episcopate; missionary labours; builds churches; overthrows idols; his stoning; his
burial; the rock cloven for his body to pass; the Acqua della Vela; the bread of
Mortaso—S. Zulian; his legend; his penitence—Caresolo; its frescoes; another
memorial of Charles Quint; his estimation of Jews—New churches—Legends of
Condino and Campiglio—Riva on the Garda-see; its churches; its olive branches—
The Altissimo di Nago; view from S. Giacomo; optical illusion—Brentonico—The
Ponte delle Streghe—Mori; tobacco cultivation 400
Character of Wälsch-Tirol folklore—Orco-Sagen; his transformations in many lands;
transliterations of his name in Tirol—The Salvan and Gannes; perhaps Etruscan genii
—Salvanel; Bedelmon; Salvadegh—The Beatrik, identified with Dietrich von Bern

—The Angane—What came of marrying an Angana—The focarelli of Lunigiana—
The Filò—Froberte—Donna Berta dal nas longh—The discriminating Salvan—The
Angana’s ring; tales of the Three Wishes and the Faithful Beasts; legend of the Drei
Feyen of Thal Vent—Legend of St. Kümmerniss; her effigy in Cadore; the prevailing
minstrel—Turlulù—Remnants of Etruscan language—‘Storielle da rider’—The bear-
hunters—The horrible snail—How to make a church tower grow—Social customs
perhaps derived from Etruscan; similar to those of Lombardy and Lunigians—All
Souls’ Day; feast of Sta. Lucia; Christmas; St. Anthony’s Day; Carneval; Giovedi de’
Gnocchi; St. Urban—Popular sayings about thunder, crickets, brambles, cockchafers,
swallows, scorpions—Astronomical riddles 408

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Kufstein Frontispiece.
MAPS.
The Valleys of Tirol to face p. 12
Unterinnthal and Neighbourhood of Innsbruck 53
Wälsch-Tirol 341

THE
VALLEYS OF TIROL
THEIR TRADITIONS AND CUSTOMS.

VORARLBERG.
. . . . . Everywhere
Fable and Truth have shed, in rivalry,
Each her peculiar influence. Fable came,
And laughed and sang, arraying Truth in flowers,
Like a young child her grandam. Fable came,
Earth, sea, and sky reflecting, as she flew,
A thousand, thousand colours not their own.—Rogers.
‘Traditions, myths, legends! what is the use of recording and propagating the follies and
superstitions of a bygone period, which it is the boast of our modern enlightenment to
have cast to the winds?’
Such is the hasty exclamation which allusion to these fantastic matters very frequently
elicits. With many they find no favour because they seem to yield no profit; nay, rather
to set up a hindrance in the way of progress and culture.
Yet, on the other hand, in spite of their seeming foolishness, they have worked
themselves into favour with very various classes of readers and students. There is an
audacity in their imagery which no mere sensation-writer could attempt without falling
Phaeton-like from his height; and they plunge us so hardily into a world of their own, so
preposterous and so unlike ours, while all the time describing it in a language we can
understand without effort, that no one who seeks occasional relief from modern
monotony but must experience refreshment in the weird excursions their jaunty will-
o’the-wisp dance leads him. But more than this; their sportive fancy has not only
charmed the dilettante; they have revealed that they hold inherent in them mysteries
which have extorted the study of deep and able thinkers, one of whom1 insisted, now
some years ago, that ‘by this time the study of popular tales has become a recognized
branch of the studies of mankind;’ while important and erudite treatises from his own
pen and that of others2 have elevated it further from a study to a science.
All who love poetry and art, as well as all who are interested in the study of languages or
races, all who have any care concerning the stirrings of the human mind in its search
after the supernatural and the infinite, must confess to standing largely in debt, in the
absence of more positive records of the earliest phases of thought, to these various
mythologies.
Karl Blind, in a recent paper on ‘German Mythology,’3 draws attention to some
interesting considerations why the Germanic traditions, which we chiefly meet with in
Tirol, should have a fascination for us in this country, in the points of contact they

present with our language and customs. Not content with reckoning that ‘in the words of
the Rev. Isaac Taylor we have obtruded on our notice the names of the deities who were
worshipped by the Germanic races’ on every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
of our lives, as we all know, he would even find the origin of ‘Saturday’ in the name of a
god “Sætere” hidden, (a malicious deity whose name is but an alias for Loki,) of whom,
it is recorded, that once at a great banquet he so insulted all the heavenly rulers that they
chained him, Prometheus-like, to a rock, and made a serpent trickle down its venom
upon his face. His faithful wife Sigyn held a cup over him to prevent the venom reaching
his face, but whenever she turned away to empty the cup his convulsive pains were such
that the earth shook and trembled.... Few people now-a-days, when pronouncing the
simple word “Saturday,” think or know of this weird and pathetic myth.4... When we go
to Athens we easily think of the Greek goddess Athene, when we go to Rome we are
reminded of Romulus its mythic founder. But when we go to Dewerstone in Devonshire,
to Dewsbury in Yorkshire, to Tewesley in Surrey, to Great Tew in Oxfordshire, to Tewen
in Herefordshire—have a great many of us even an inkling that these are places once
sacred to Tiu, the Saxon Mars? When we got to Wednesbury, to Wanborough, to
Woodnesborough, to Wembury, to Wanstrow, to Wanslike, to Woden Hill, we visit
localities where the Great Spirit Wodan was once worshipped. So also we meet with the
name of the God of Thunder in Thudersfield, Thundersleigh, Thursleigh, Thurscross,
Thursby, and Thurso. The German Venus Freia is traceable in Fridaythorpe and
Frathorpe, in Fraisthorpe and Freasley. Her son was Baldur, also called Phol or Pol, the
sweet god of peace and light; his name comes out at Balderby, Balderton, Polbrook,
Polstead and Polsden. Sætere is probably hidden in Satterleigh and Satterthwaite; Ostara
or Eostre, the Easter goddess of Spring, appears in two Essex parishes, Good Easter and
High Easter, in Easterford, Easterlake and Eastermear. Again Hel, the gloomy mistress of
the underworld, has given her name to Hellifield, Hellathyrne, Helwith, Healeys and
Helagh—all places in Yorkshire, where people seem to have had a particular fancy for
that dark and grimy deity. Then we have Asgardby and Aysgarth, places reminding us of
Asgard, the celestial garden or castle of the Æsir—the Germanic Olympus. And these
instances might be multiplied by the hundred, so full is England to this day of the
vestiges of Germanic mythology. Far more important is the fact that in this country, just
as in Germany, we find current folk-lore; and quaint customs and superstitious beliefs
affecting the daily life, which are remnants of the ancient creed. A rime apparently so
bereft of sense as
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home!
Thy house is on fire!
Thy children at home!
can be proved to refer to a belief of our forefathers in the coming downfall of the
universe by a great conflagration. The ladybird has its name from having been sacred to
our Lady Freia. The words addressed to the insect were once an incantation—an appeal

to the goddess for the protection of the soul of the unborn, over whom in her heavenly
abode she was supposed to keep watch and ward, and whom she is asked to shield from
the fire that consumes the world.... If we ever wean men from the crude notions that
haunt them, and yet promote the enjoyment of fancies which serve as embellishing
garlands for the rude realities of life, we cannot do better than promote a fuller scientific
knowledge of that circle of ideas in which those moved who moulded our very speech.
We feel delight in the conceptions of the Greek Olympus. Painters and poets still go
back to that old fountain of fancy. Why should we not seek for similar delight in
studying the figures of the Germanic Pantheon, and the rich folk-lore connected with
them? Why should that powerful Bible of the Norse religion, which contains such a
wealth of striking ideas and descriptions in language the most picturesque, not be as
much perused as the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Æneid? Is it too much to say that many
even of those who know of the Koran, of the precepts of Kou-fu-tsi and of Buddha, of
the Zendavesta and the Vedas, have but the dimmest notion of that grand Germanic
Scripture?...
‘Can it be said that there is a lack of poetical conception in the figure of Wodan or Odin,
the hoary ruler of the winds and the clouds, who, clad in a flowing mantle, careers
through the sky on a milk-white horse, from whose nostrils fire issues, and who is
followed at night by a retinue of heroic warriors whom he leads into the golden shield-
adorned Walhalla? Is there a want of artistic delineation in Freia—an Aphrodite and
Venus combined, who changes darkness into light wherever she appears—the goddess
with the streaming golden locks and siren voice, who hovers in her sun-white robe
between heaven and earth, making flowers sprout along her path and planting irresistible
longings in the hearts of men? Do we not see in bold and well-marked outline the figure
of the red-bearded, steel-handed Thor, who rolls along the sky in his goat-drawn car, and
who smites the mountain giants with his magic hammer? Are these mere spectres
without distinct contour?... are they not, even in their uncouth passions, the
representatives of a primitive race, in which the pulse throbs with youthful freshness? Or
need I allude to that fantastic theory of minor deities, of fairies and wood-women, and
elfin and pixies and cobolds, that have been evolved out of all the forces of Nature by
the Teutonic mind, and before whose bustling crowd even Hellenic imagination pales?
‘Then what a dramatic power has the Germanic mythology! The gods of classic antiquity
have been compared to so many statues ranged along a stately edifice ... in the Germanic
view all is active struggle, dramatic contest, with a deep dark background of inevitable
fate that controls alike gods and men.’
Such are the Beings whom we meet wandering all over Tirol; transformed often into new
personalities, invested with new attributes and supplemented with many a mysterious
companion, the offspring of an imagination informed by another order of thought, but all

of them more living, and more readily to be met with, than in any part of wonder-loving
Germany itself.
Apart from their mythological value, how large is the debt we owe to legends and
traditions in building up our very civilization. Their influence on art is apparent, from
the earliest sculptured stones unearthed in India or Etruria to the latest breathing of
symbolism in the very reproductions of our own day. In poetry, no less a master than
Dante lamented that their influence was waning at the very period ascribed a few years
ago as the date of their taking rise. Extolling the simpler pursuits and pleasures of his
people at a more primitive date than his own, ‘One by the crib kept watch,’ he says,
‘studious to still the infant plaint with words which erst the parents’ minds diverted;
another, the flaxen maze upon the distaff twirling, recounted to her household, tales of
Troy, Fiesole, and Rome.’5 Their work is patent in his own undying pages, and in those
of all true poets before and since.
Besides all this, have they not preserved to us, as in a registering mirror, the manners and
habits of thought of the ages preceding ours? Have they not served to record as well as to
mould the noblest aspirations of those who have gone before? ‘What are they,’ asks an
elegant Italian writer of the present day,6 treating, however, only of the traditions of the
earliest epoch of Christianity, ‘but narratives woven beside the chimney, under the tent,
during the halt of the caravan, embodying as in a lively picture the popular customs of
the apostolic ages, the interior life of the rising (nascente) Christian society? In them we
have a delightful opportunity of seeing stereotyped the great transformation and the rich
source of ideas and sentiments which the new belief opened up, to illuminate the
common people in their huts no less than the patricians in their palaces. Those even who
do not please to believe the facts they expose are afforded a genuine view of the habits
of life, the manner of speaking and behaving—all that expresses and paints the erudition
of those men and of those times. Thus, it may be affirmed, they comment beautifully on
the Gospels, and in the midst of fables is grafted a great abundance of truth.
‘If we would investigate the cause of their multiplication, and of the favour with which
they were received from the earliest times, we shall find it to consist chiefly in the need
and love of the marvellous which governed the new society, notwithstanding the severity
of its dogmas. Neophytes snatched from the superstitions of paganism would not have
been able all at once to suppress every inclination for poetical fables. They needed
another food according to their fancy. And indeed were they not great marvels (though of
another order from those to which they were accustomed) which were narrated to them?
The aggregate mass was, however, increased by the way in which they lived and the
scarcity of communication; every uncertain rumour was thus readily dressed up in the
form of a wonderful fact.

‘Again, dogmatic and historical teaching continued long to be oral; so that when an
apostle, or the apostle of an apostle, arrived in any city and chained the interest of the
faithful with a narration of the acts of Jesus he had himself witnessed or received from
the personal narrative of witnesses, his words ran along from mouth to mouth, and each
repeater added something, suggested by his faith or by his heart. In this way his teaching
constituted itself into a legend, which in the end was no longer the narrative of one, but
the expression of the faith of all.
‘Thus whoever looks at legends only as isolated productions of a period most worthy of
study, without attending to the influence they exercised on later epochs, must even so
hold them in account as literary monuments of great moment.’
Nor is this the case only with the earliest legends. The popular mind in all ages has
evinced a necessity for filling up all blanks in the histories of its heroes. The probable,
and even the merely possible, is idealized; what might have been is reckoned to have
happened; the logical deductions as to what a favourite saint or cobbold ought to have
done, according to certain fixed principles of action previously ascribed to his nature, are
taken to be the very acts he did perform; and thus, even those traditions which are the
most transparently human in their origin, have served to show reflected in action the
virtues and perfections which it is the boast of religion to inculcate.
A Flemish writer on Spanish traditions similarly remarks, ‘Peoples who are cut off from
the rest of the world by such boundaries as seas, mountains, or wastes, by reason of the
difficulty of communication thus occasioned, are driven to concentrate their attention to
local events; and in their many idle hours they work up their myths and tales into poems,
which stand them in stead of books, and, in fact, constitute a literature.’7

The Valleys of Tirol.
Europe possesses in Tirol one little country at least in whose mountain fastnesses a store
of these treasures not only lies enshrined, but where we may yet see it in request.
Primitive and unsophisticated tillers of the soil, accustomed to watch as a yearly miracle
the welling up of its fruits, and to depend for their hopes of subsistence on the sun and
rain in the hand of their Creator, its children have not yet acquired the independence of
thought and the habit of referring all events to natural causes, which is generated by
those industries of production to which the human agent appears to be all in all. Among
them we have the opportunity of seeing these expositions of the supernatural, at home as
it were in their contemporary life, supplying a representation of what has gone before,
only to be compared to the revelations of deep-cut strata to the geologist, and the
unearthing of buried cities to the student of history. It is further satisfactory to find that,
in spite of our repugnance to superstition, this unreasoning realization of the supernatural
has in no way deteriorated the people. Their public virtues, seen in their indomitable
devotion to their country, have been conspicuous in all ages, no less than their heroic
labours in grappling with the obstacles of soil and climate; while all who have visited
them concur in bearing testimony to their possession of sterling homely qualities,

frugality, morality, hospitality; and, for that which is of most importance to the tourist,
all who have been among them will bear witness to the justice of the remark in the latest
Guide-book, that, except just in the more cultivated centres of Innsbruck, Brixen, and
Botzen, you need take no thought among the Tiroleans concerning the calls on your
purse.
My first acquaintance with Tirol was made at Feldkirch, where I had to pay somewhat
dearly for my love of the legendary and the primitive. Our plan for the autumn was to
join a party of friends from Italy at Innsbruck, spend some months of long-promised
enjoyment in exploring Tirol, and return together to winter in Rome. The arrangements
of the journey had been left to me; and as I delight in getting beyond railways and
travelling in a conveyance whose pace and hours are more under one’s own control, I
traced our road through France to Bâle, and then by way of Zurich and Rorschach and
Oberriet to Feldkirch (which I knew to be a post-station) as a base of operations, for
leisurely threading our mountain way through Bludenz and Landeck and the intervening
valleys to Innsbruck.
How our plan was thwarted8 I will relate presently. I still recommend this line of route to
others less encumbered with luggage, as leading through out-of-the-way and
unfrequented places. The projected railway between Feldkirch and Innsbruck is now
completed as far as Bludenz; and Feldkirch is reached direct by the new junction with
the Rorschach-Chur railway at Buchsstation.9
Feldkirch affords excursions, accessible for all, to the Margarethenkapf and the St.
Veitskapf, from either of which a glorious view is to be enjoyed. The latter commands
the stern gorges through which the Ill makes its final struggles before losing its identity
in the Rhine—struggles which are often terrific and devastating, for every few years it
carries down a whole torrent of pebbles for many days together. The former overlooks
the more smiling tracts we traversed in our forced march, locally called the Ardetzen,
hemmed in by noble mountain peaks. Then its fortifications, intended at one time to
make it a strong border town against Switzerland, have left some few picturesque
remains, and in particular the so-called Katzenthurm, named from certain clumsy
weapons styled ‘cat’s head guns,’ which once defended it, and which were ultimately
melted down to make a chime of peaceful bells. And then it has two or three churches to
which peculiar legends attach. Not the least curious of these is that of St. Fidelis, a local
saint, whose cultus sprang up as late as the year 1622, when he was laid in wait for and
assassinated by certain fanatical reprobates, whose consciences his earnest preaching had
disturbed. He was declared a martyr, and canonized at Rome in 1746. The sword with
which he was put to death, the bier on which his body was carried back into the town,
and other things belonging to him, are venerated as relics. About eight miles outside the
town another saint is venerated with a precisely similar history, but dating from the year

844. This is St. Eusebius, one of a band of Scotch missionaries, who founded a
monastery there called Victorsberg, the oldest foundation in all Vorarlberg. St. Eusebius,
returning from a pilgrimage one day, lay down to sleep in this neighbourhood, being
overtaken by the darkness of night. Heathen peasants, who had resisted his attempts at
converting them, going out early in the morning to mow, found him lying on the ground,
and one of them cut off his head with his scythe. To their astonishment the decapitated
body rose to its feet, and, taking up the head in its hands, walked straight to the door of
the monastery, where the brethren took it in and laid it to rest in the churchyard. A little
further (reached most conveniently by a by-path off the road near Altenstadt, mentioned
below,) is Rankweil. In the church on Our Lady’s Mount (Frauenberg) is a little chapel
on the north side, where a reddish stone is preserved (Der rothe Stein in der
Fridolinskapelle), of which the following story is told. St. Fridolin was a Scotch
missionary in the seventh century, and among other religious houses had founded one at
Müsigen. Two noblemen of this neighbourhood (brothers) held him in great respect, and
before dying, one of them, Ursus by name, endowed the convent with all his worldly
goods. Sandolf, the other, who did not carry his admiration of the saint to so great a
length as to renounce his brother’s rich inheritance, disputed the possession, and it was
decided that Fridolin must give it up unless he could produce the testimony of the donor.
Fridolin went in faith to Glarus, where Ursus had been buried two years before. At his
call the dead man rose to his feet, and pushing the grave-stone aside, walked, hand-in-
hand, with his friend back to Rankweil, where he not only substantiated Fridolin’s
statements, but so effectually frightened his brother that he immediately added to the gift
all his own possessions also. But the story says that when the judgment requiring him to
produce the testimony of the dead was first given, Fridolin went to pray in the chapel of
Rankweil, and there a shining being appeared to him, and told him to go to Glarus and
call Ursus; and as he spoke Fridolin’s knees sank into the ‘red stone,’ making the marks
now seen.10
The reason given why this hill is called Our Lady’s Mound is, that on it once stood a
fortress called Schönberg. Schönberg having been burnt down, its owner, the knight of
Hörnlingen, set about rebuilding it; but whatever work his workmen did in the day-time,
was destroyed by invisible hands during the night. A pious old workman, too, used to
hear a mysterious voice saying that instead of a fortress they should build a sanctuary in
honour of the mother of God. The knight yielded to the commands of the voice, and the
church was built out of the ruins of his castle. In this church, too, is preserved a singular
antique cross, studded with coloured glass gems, which the people venerate because it
was brought down to them by the mountain stream. It is obviously of very ancient
workmanship, and an inscription records that it was repaired in 1347.
Winding round the mountain path which from Rankweil runs behind Feldkirch to
Satteins, the convent of Valduna is reached; and the origin of this sanctuary is ascribed to
a legend, of which counterparts crop up in various places, of a hermit who passed half a

life within a hollow tree,11 and acquired the lasting veneration of the neighbouring
people.
Another mountain sanctuary which received its veneration from the memory of a tree-
hermit, is S. Gerold, situated on a little elevation below the Hoch Gerach, about seven
miles on the east side of Feldkirch. It dates from the tenth century. Count Otho, Lord of
Sax in the Rhinethal, was out hunting, when the bear to which he was giving chase
sought refuge at the foot of an old oak tree, whither his dogs durst not follow it. Living
as a hermit within this oak tree Count Otho found his long lost father, S. Gerold, who
years before had forsaken his throne and found there a life of contemplation in the
wild.12 The tomb of the saint and his two sons is to be seen in the church, and some
curious frescoes with the story of his adventures.
Another way to be recommended for entering Vorarlberg is by crossing Lake Constance
from Rorschach to Lindau, a very pleasant trajet of about two hours in the tolerably
well-appointed, but not very swift lake-steamers. Lindau itself is a charming old place,
formed out of three islands on the edge of the lake; but as it is outside the border of
Tirol, I will only note in favour of the honesty of its inhabitants, that I saw a tree laden
with remarkably fine ripe pears overhanging a wall in the principal street, and no street-
boy raised a hand to them.
The first town in Tirol by this route is Bregenz, which reckons as the capital of
Vorarlberg. It may be reached by boat in less than half an hour. It is well situated at the
foot of the Gebhartsberg, which affords a most delightful, and in Tirol widely celebrated,
view over Lake Constance and the Appenzel mountains and the rapid Rhine between;
and here, at either the Post Hotel or the Black Eagle, there is no lack of carriages for
reaching Feldkirch. Bregenz deserves to be remembered as the birth-place of one of the
best modern painters of the Munich-Roman school, Flatz, who I believe, spends much of
his time there.
Among the objects of interest in Bregenz are the Capuchin Convent, situated on a
wooded peak of the Gebhardsberg, founded in 1636; on another peak, S. Gebhard auf
dem Pfannenberge, called after a bishop of Constance, who preached the Christian faith
in the neighbourhood, and was martyred. Bregenz has an ancient history and high
lineage. Its lords, who were powerful throughout the Middle Ages, were of sufficiently
high estate at the time of Charlemagne that he should take Hildegard, the daughter of
one of them, to be his wife, and there is a highly poetical popular tale about her. Taland
(a favourite name in Vorarlberg) was a suitor who had, with jealous eye, seen her given
to the powerful Emperor, and in the bitterness of his rejected affection, so calumniated
her to Charlemagne, that he repudiated her and married Desiderata, the Lombard
princess.13 Hildegard accepted her trial with angelic resignation, and devoted her life to
tending pilgrims at Rome. Meantime Taland, stricken with blindness, came to Rome in

penitential pilgrimage, where he fell under the charitable care of Hildegard. Hildegard’s
saintly handling restored his sight—not only that of his bodily eyes, but also his moral
perception of truth and falsehood. In reparation for the evil he had done, he now led her
back to Charlemagne, confessed all, and she was once more restored to favour and
honour. Bregenz has also another analogous and equally beautiful legend. One of its later
counts, Ulrich V., was supposed by his people to have died in war in Hungary, about the
year 916. Wendelgard, his wife, devoted her widowhood to the cloistral life, but took the
veil under the condition that she should every year hold a popular festival and
distribution of alms in memory of her husband. On the fourth anniversary, as she was
distributing her bounty, a pilgrim came forward who allowed himself the liberty of
kissing the hand which bestowed the dole. Wendelgard’s indignation was changed into
delight when she recognized that the audaciously gallant pilgrim was no other than her
own lord, who, having succeeded in delivering himself from captivity, had elected to
make himself thus known to her. Salomo, Bishop of Constance, dispensed her from her
vow, and Ulrich passed the remainder of his life at Bregenz by her side. Another
celebrated worthy of Bregenz, whose name must not be passed over, is ‘Ehreguota’ or
‘Ehre Guta,’ a name still dear to every peasant of Vorarlberg, and which has perpetuated
itself in the appellation of Hergotha, a favourite Christian name there to the present day.
She was a poor beggar-woman really named Guta, whose sagacity and courage delivered
her country people from an attack of the Appenzell folk, to which they had nearly
succumbed in the year 1408; it was the ‘honour’ paid her by her patriotic friends that
added the byname of ‘Ehre,’ and made them erect a monument to her. One of the
variants of the story makes her, instead of a beggar-woman, the beautiful young bride of
Count Wilhelm of Montfort-Bregenz; some have further sought to identify her with the
goddess Epona.
Pursuing the journey southwards towards Feldkirch, every step is full of natural beauty
and legendary interest. At first leaving Bregenz you have to part company with Lake
Constance, and leave in the right hand distance the ruins of Castle Fussach. On the left is
Riedenberg, which, if not great architecturally, is interesting as a highly useful
institution, under the fostering care of the present Empress of Austria, for the education
of girls belonging to families of a superior class with restricted means. From Fussach the
road runs parallel to the Rhine; there is a shorter road by Dornbirn, but less interesting,
which joins it again at Götzis, near Hohenembs. The two roads separate before Fussach
at Wolfurth, where there is an interesting chapel, the bourne of a pilgrimage worth
making if only for the view over the lake. The country between S. John Höchst and
Lustenau is much frequented in autumn for the sake of the shooting afforded by the wild
birds which haunt its secluded recesses on the banks of the Rhine at that season. At
Lustenau there is a ferry over the Rhine.
The favourite saints of this part of the country are Merboth, Diedo, and Ilga—two
brothers and a sister of a noble family, hermit-apostles and martyrs of the eleventh

century. Ilga established her hermit-cell in the Schwarzenberg, just over Dornbirn, where
not only all dainty food, but even water, was wanting. The people of Dornbirn also
wanted water; and though she had not asked the boon for herself, she asked it for her
people, and obtained from the hard rock, a miraculous spring of sparkling water which
even the winter cold could not freeze. Ilga used to fetch this water for her own use, and
carry it up the mountain paths in her apron. One day she spilt some of it on the rock near
her cell on her arrival, and see! as it touched the rock, the rock responded to the appeal,
and from out there flowed a corresponding stream, which has never ceased to flow to
this day.
The most important and interesting spot between Bregenz and Feldkirch, is Embs or
Hohenembs, with its grand situation, its picturesque buildings and its two ruined castles,
which though distinguished as Alt and Neu Hohenembs, do not display at first sight any
very great disparity of age; both repay a visit, but the view from Alt Hohenembs is the
finer. The virtues and bravery of the lords of Hohenembs have been duly chronicled.
James Von Embs served by the side of the chevalier Bayard in the battle of Ravenna, and
having at the first onset received his death wound, raised himself up again to pour out
his last breath in crying to his men, ‘The King of France has been our fair ally, let us
serve him bravely this day!’ His grandson, who was curiously enough christened James
Hannibal, was the first Count of Embs, and his descendants often figure in records of the
wars of the Austrian Empire, particularly in those connected with the famous
Schmalkaldischer Krieg, and are now merged in the family of Count Harrach.
The ‘Swiss embroidery’ industry here crosses the Rhine, and, in the female gatherings
which it occasions, as in the ‘Filo’ of the south, many local chronicles and legends are,
or at least have been, perpetuated.
In the parish church, I have been told by a traveller, that the cardinal’s hat of S. Charles
Borromeo is preserved, though why it should be so I cannot tell; and I think I have
myself had it shown me both at Milan and, if I mistake not, also at the church in Rome
whence he had his ‘title.’
The ascent to Neu Hohenembs has sufficient difficulty and danger for the unpractised
pedestrian to give it special interest, which the roaring of the waterfall tends to excite. A
little way beyond it the water was formerly turned to the purpose of an Italian pescheria
(or fish-preserve for the use of the castle), which is not now very well preserved. Further
up still are the ruins of Alt Hohenembs. There are also prettily situated sulphur baths a
little way out of the town, much frequented from June to September by the country
people. It is curious that the Jews, who have never hitherto settled in large numbers in
any part of Tirol, have here a synagogue; and I am told that it serves for nearly a hundred
families scattered over the surrounding country, though there are not a dozen even at
Innsbruck.

All I have met with of interest between this and Feldkirch, I have mentioned under the
head of excursions from Feldkirch.
Stretching along the bank of the Rhine to the south of Feldkirch, is the little principality
of Lichtenstein or Liechtenstein, a territory of some three square miles and a half in
extent, which yet gives its possessor—lately by marriage made a member of English
society—certain seignorial rights. The chief industry of the people is the Swiss
embroidery. Vaduz, its chief town, is situated in its centre, and above it, in the midst of a
thick wood, is the somewhat imposing and well kept up castle of Lichtenstein. Further
south, overhanging the Rhine, is Schloss Gutenberg, and beyond, a remarkable warm
sulphur spring, which runs only in summer, at a temperature of 98° to 100° Fahrenheit; it
is crowded by Swiss and Tiroleans from June to September, though unknown to the rest
of the world.14 It was discovered in the year 1240 by a chamois-hunter, and was soon
after taken in charge by a colony of Benedictine monks, established close by at Pfäffers,
who continued to entertain those who visited it until it was taken possession of by the
Communal Council of Chur, and the monastery turned into a poor-house. The country
round it is exceedingly wild and romantic, and there is a celebrated ravine called the
Tamina-Schlund, of so-called immeasurable depth, where at certain hours of a sunny day
a wonderful play of light is to be observed. Pfäffers is just outside the boundary of Tirol;
the actual boundary line is formed by the Rhætian Alps, which are traversed by a pass
called Luziensteig, after St. Lucius, ‘first Christian king of Britain,’ who, tradition says,
preached the gospel to Lichtenstein.15 The road from Feldkirch to Innsbruck first runs
along the Illthal, which between Feldkirch and Bludenz is also called the Wallgau, and
merges at Bludenz into the Walserthal on the left or north side. On the right or south side
are the Montafonthal, Klosterthal, and Silberthal.
Soon after leaving Feldkirch the mountains narrow upon the road, which crosses the Ill
at Felsenau, forming what is called the gorge of the Ill, near Frastanz. Round this terrible
pass linger memories of one of the direst struggles for independence the Tiroleans ever
waged. In 1499 the Swiss hosts were shown the inlet, through the mountains that so well
protect Tirol, by a treacherous peasant whom their gold had bought.16 A little shepherd
lad seeing them advance, in his burning desire to save his country, blew such a call to
arms upon his horn that he never desisted till he had blown all the breath out of his little
body. The subsequent battle was fierce and determined; and when it slackened from loss
of men, the women rushed in and fought with the bravest. So earnestly was the cause of
those who fell felt to be the cause of all, that even to the present time the souls of those
who were slain that day are remembered in the prayers said as the procession nears the
spot when blessing the fields on Rogation-Wednesday. On the heights above Valduna are
the striking ruins of a convent of Poor Clares, one of those abandoned at the fiat of
Joseph II. It was founded on occasion of a hermit declaring he had often seen a beautiful
angel sitting and singing enchantingly on the peak. Below is a tiny lake, which lends an
additional charm to the tranquil beauty of the spot. The patron saint of the Walserthal is

St. Joder or Theodul (local renderings of Theodoric), and his legend is most fantastic. St.
Joder went to Rome to see the Pope; the Pope, in commendation of his zeal, gave him a
fine bell for his church. Homewards went St. Joder with his bell, but when he came to
the mountains it was more than he could manage, to drag the bell after him. What did he
then do? He bethought him that he had, by his prayers and exorcisms, conjured the devil
out of the valley where he had preached the faith, so why should not prayer and
exorcism conjure him to carry the bell for the service of his faithful flock? If St. Joder’s
faith did not remove mountains it removed the obstacles they presented, and many a bit
of rude carving in mountain chapels throughout the Walserthal shows a youthful saint, in
rich episcopal vestments, leading by a chain, like a showman his bear, the arch enemy of
souls, crouched and sweating under the weight of the bell whose holy tones are to sound
his own ban.17
Bludenz retains some picturesque remnants of its old buildings. It belonged to the
Counts of Sonnenberg, and hence it is said that it is often called by that name; but it is
perhaps more probable that the height above Bludenz was called Sonnenberg, in contrast
with Schattenberg, above Feldkirch, and that its lords derived their name from it. The
story of the fidelity of Bludenz to Friedrich mit der leeren Tasche, I have narrated in
another place.18
The valley of Montafon has for its arms the cross keys of St. Peter, in memory of a
traditionary but anachronistic journey of Pope John XXIII. to the Council of Constance,
in 1414.19 In memory of the same journey a joy-peal is rung on every Wednesday
throughout the year.
A little way south of Bludenz, down the Montafon valley, is a chapel on a little height
called S. Anton, covering the spot where tradition says was once a mighty city called
Prazalanz, destroyed by an avalanche. Near here is a tiny stream, of which the peasants
tell the following story:—They say up the mountain lives a beautiful maiden, set to
guard a treasure, and she can only be released when some one will thrice kiss a
loathsome toad,20 which has its place on the cover of the treasury, and the maiden feels
assured no one will ever make the venture. She weeps evermore, and they call this
streamlet the ‘Trächnabächle’—the Tear-rill.
The valley of Montafon is further celebrated for its production of kirschwasser.
Opposite Dalaas is a striking peak, attaining an elevation of some 5,000 feet, called the
Christberg. On the opposite side to Dalaas is a chapel of St. Agatha; in the days of the
silver mining of Tirol, in the fifteenth century, silver was found in this neighbourhood.
On one occasion a landslip imprisoned a number of miners in their workings. In terror at
their threatened death, they vowed that if help reached them in time, they would build a
chapel on the spot to commemorate their deliverance. Help did reach them, and they

kept their vow. The chapel is built into the living rock where this occurred, and a grey
mark on the rock is pointed out as a supernatural token which cannot be effaced, to
remind the people of the deliverance that took place there. It is reached from Dalaas by a
terribly steep and rugged path, running over the Christberg, near the summit of which
may be found, by those whom its hardships do not deter, another chapel, or wayside
shrine, consisting of an image of the Blessed Virgin under a canopy, with an alcoved seat
beneath it for the votary to rest in, called ‘Das Bruederhüsle,’ and this is the reason of its
name:—The wife of a Count Tanberg gave birth to a dead child; in the fulness of their
faith, the parents mourned that to the soul of their little one Christian baptism had been
denied, more than the loss of their offspring. In pursuance of a custom then in vogue in
parts of Tirol, if not elsewhere, the Count sent the body of the infant to be laid on the
altar of St. Joseph, in the parish church, in the hope that at the intercession of the
fosterfather of the Saviour it might revive for a sufficient interval to receive the
sacrament of admission into the Christian family. The servant, however, instead of
carrying his burden to the church at Schruns (in Montafonthal), finding himself weary by
the time he had climbed up the Christberg, dug a grave, and buried it instead. The next
year there was another infant, also born dead; this time the Count determined to carry it
himself to the church, and by the time he had toiled to the same spot he too was weary,
and sat down to rest. As he sat he heard a little voice crying from under the ground, ‘ätti,
nüm mi’ô met!’21 The Count turned up the soil, and found the body of his last year’s
infant. Full of joy he carried both brothers to the altar of St. Joseph, at Schruns; here,
continues the legend, his prayer went up before the divine throne; both infants gave signs
of life before devout witnesses; baptism could be validly administered, and they, laid to
rest in holy ground.22
After Dalaas the road assumes a character of real grandeur, both as an engineering work
and as a study of nature. The size of the telegraph poles alone (something like fourteen
inches in diameter) gives an idea of the sort of storms the road is built to resist; so do the
veritable fortifications, erected here and there, to protect it from avalanches.
The summit (6,218 ft.) of the Arlberg, whence the province has its name—and which in
turn is named from Schloss Arlen, the ruins of which are to be observed from the road—
is marked by a gigantic crucifix, overhanging the road. An inscription cut in the rock
records that it was opened for traffic (after three hard years of labour) on St. James’s day,
1787; but a considerable stretch of the road now used was made along a safer and more
sheltered pass in 1822–4, when a remarkable viaduct called the Franzensbrücke was
built. Two posts, striped with the local colours, near the crucifix above-named, mark the
boundary of Vorarlberg and Oberinnthal. As we pass them we should take leave of
Vorarlberg; but it may be convenient to mention in this place some few of the more
salient of the many points of interest on the onward road to Innsbruck.

The opening of the Stanzerthal, indeed, on which the road is carried, seems to belong of
right to Vorarlberg, for its first post-halt of S. Christof came into existence through the
agency of a poor foundling boy of that province, who was so moved by the sufferings of
travellers at his date (1386), that he devoted his life to their service, and by begging
collected money to found the nucleus of the hospice and brotherhood of S. Christof,
which lasted till the time of Joseph II. The pass at its highest part is free from snow only
from the beginning of July to September, and in the depth of winter it accumulates to a
height of twenty feet. The church contains considerable remains of the date of its
founder, Heinrich das Findelkind; of this date, or not much later, must be the gigantic
statue of S. Christopher, patron of wayfarers.
The Stanzerthal, without being less grand, presents a much more smiling prospect than
that traversed during the later part of the journey through Vorarlberg. The waters of the
Rosanna and the Trisanna flow by the way; the mountains stretch away in the distance,
in every hue of brilliant colouring; the whole landscape is studded with villages
clustering round their church steeples, while Indian-corn-fields, fruit-gardens in which
the barberry holds no insignificant place, and vast patches of a deep-tinted wild flora, fill
up the picture.
At Schloss Wiesburg is the opening into the Patznaunthal, the chief village of which is
Ischgl, where the custom I have heard of in other parts of Tirol, and also in Brittany,
prevails, of preserving the skulls of the dead in an open vault in the churchyard, with
their names painted on them. Nearly opposite it, off the left side of the road lies Grüns or
Grins, so called because it affords a bright green patch amid the grey of the rocks. It was
a more important place in mediæval times, for the road then ran beside it; the bridge with
its pointed arches dates from the year 1639. Margareta Maultasch, with whose place in
Tirolese history we must make acquaintance further on, had a house here which still
contains some curious mural paintings.
Landeck23 is an important thriving little town, with the Inn flowing through its midst. It
has two fine remains of ancient castles: Schloss Landeck, now used partly as a hospice;
and Schloss Schrofenstein, of difficult access, haunted by a knight, who gave too ready
ear to the calumnies of a rejected suitor of his wife, and must wander round its precincts
wringing his fettered hands and crying ‘Woe!’ On the slope of the hill crowned by
Schloss Landeck stands the parish church. Its first foundation dates from the fifteenth
century, when a Landecker named Henry and his wife Eva, having lost their two children
in a forest, on vowing a church in honour of the Blessed Virgin, met a bear and a wolf
each carrying one of the children tenderly on its back. It has a double-bulbed tower of
much later date, and it was restored with considerable care a few years back; but many
important parts remain in their original condition, including some early sculpture. In the
churchyard are two important monuments, one dating from the fifteenth century, of
Oswald Y. Schrofenstein; the other, a little gothic chapel, consecrated on August 22,

1870, in memory of the Landeck contingent of the Tirolean sharpshooters, who assisted
in defending the borders of Wälsch-Tirol in 1866.24 About two or three miles from
Landeck there is a celebrated waterfall, at a spot called Letz.
Imst was formerly celebrated for its breed of canary-birds, which its townsmen used to
carry all over Europe. The church contains a votive tablet, put up by some of them on
occasion of being saved from shipwreck in the Mediterranean. It has a good old inn,
once a knightly palace. From Imst the Pitzthal branches southwards; but concerning it I
have not space to enlarge, as the more interesting excursion to Füssen, on the Bavarian
frontier, must not be passed over. The pleasantest way of making this excursion is to
engage a carriage for the whole distance at Imst, but a diligence or ‘Eilwagen,’ running
daily between Innsbruck and Füssen, may be met at Nassereit, some three miles along
the Gunglthal. At Nassereit I will pause a moment to mention a circumstance, bearing on
the question of the formation of legends, which seemed to take considerable hold on the
people, and was narrated to me with a manifest impression of belief in the supernatural.
There was a pilgrimage from a place called Biberwier to a shrine of the Virgin, at
Dormiz, on August 10, 1869. It was to gain the indulgence of the Vatican Council, and
the priest of Biberwier in exhorting his people to treat it entirely as a matter of penance,
and not as a party of pleasure, had made use of a figure of speech bidding them not to
trust themselves to the bark of worldly pleasure, for, he assured them, it had many holes
in it, and would swamp them instead of bearing them on to the joys of heaven. Four of
the men, however, persisted in disregarding his warning, and in combining a trip to the
Fernsee, one of two romantically situated mountain lakes overlooked by the ancient
castle of Sigmundsburg, on a promontory running into it and with its Wirthshaus ‘auf
dem Fern’ forming a favourite though difficult pleasure-excursion. The weather was
treacherous; the boat was swamped in the squall which ensued, and all four men were
drowned. From Nassereit also is generally made the ascent of the Tschirgants, the peak
which has constantly formed a remarkable feature in the landscape all the way from
Arlberg.
The road to Füssen passes by Sigmundsburg, Fernsee and Biberwier mentioned in the
preceding narrative also the beautiful Blendsee and Mittersee (accessible only to the
pedestrian) or rather the by-paths leading to them. Leermoos is the next place passed,—a
straggling, inconsiderable hamlet, but affording a pleasing incident in the landscape,
when, after passing it, the steep road winds back upon it and reveals it again far far
below you. It is, however, quite possible to put up for a night with the accommodation
afforded by the Post inn, and by this means one of the most justly celebrated natural
beauties may be enjoyed, in the sunset effects produced by the lighting up of the
Zugspitzwand.
Next is Lähn, whose situation disposes one to believe the tradition that it has its name
from the avalanches (Lawinen, locally contracted into Lähne) by which the valley is

frequently visited, and chiefly from a terrible one, in the fifteenth century, which
destroyed the village, till then called Mitterwald. A carrier who had been wont to pass
that way, struck with compassion at the desolation of the place, aided in providing the
surviving inhabitants to rebuild their chapel, and tradition fables of him that they were
aided by an angel. The road opens out once more as we approach Heiterwang; there is
also a post-road hence to Ammergau; here, a small party may put up at the Rossl, for the
sake of visiting the Plansee, the second largest lake of Tirol, on the right (east) of the
road; on the left is the opening of the Lechthal, a difficult excursion even to the most
practised pedestrian. For those who study convenience the Plansee may be better visited
from Reutte.
After Heiterwang the rocks close in again on the road as we pass through the
Ehrenberger Klause, celebrated again and again through the pages of Tirolese history,
from the very earliest times, for heroic defences; its castle is an important and beautiful
ruin; and so the road proceeds to Reutte, Füssen, and the much visited Lustschloss of
Schwangau; but as these are in Bavaria I must not occupy my Tirolese pages with them,
but mention only the Mangtritt, the boundary pass, where a cross stands out boldly
against the sky, in memory of S. Magnus, the apostle of these valleys. The devil, furious
at the success of the saint with his conversion of the heathen inhabitants, sent a tribe of
wild and evil men, says one version of the legend, a formidable dragon according to
another, to exterminate him; he was thus driven to the narrow glen where the fine post-
road now runs between the rocks beside the roaring Lech. Nothing daunted, the saint
sprang across to the opposite rock whither his adversaries, who had no guardian angels’
wings to ‘bear them up’, durst not pursue him; it is a curious fact for the comparative
mythologist that the same pass bears also the name of Jusulte (Saltus Julii) and the
tradition that Julius Cæsar performed a similar feat here on horseback. Near it is a poor
little inn, called ‘the White House,’ where local vintages may be tasted.
Reutte has two inns; the Post and Krone, and from it more excursions may be made than
I have space to chronicle. That to Breitenwang is an easy one; a house here is pointed
out as having been built on the spot where stood a poor hut which gave shelter in his last
moments to Lothair II. ‘the Saxon’ overtaken by death on his return journey from the
war in Italy, 1137; what remained of the old materials having been conscientiously
worked into the building, down to the most insignificant spar; a tablet records the event.
The church, a Benedictine foundation of the twelfth century, was rebuilt in the
seventeenth, and contains many specimens of what Tirolese artists can do in sculpture,
wood-carving, and painting. A quaint chapel in the churchyard has a representation in
stucco of the ‘Dance of Death.’
The country between this and the Plansee is called the Achenthal, fortunately
distinguished by local mispronounciation as the Archenthal from the better known
(though not deservingly so) Achenthal, which we shall visit later. The Ache or Arche

affords several water-falls, the most important of them, the Stuibfall, is nearly a hundred
feet in height, and on a bright evening a beautiful ‘iris’ may be seen enthroned in its
foam.
At the easternmost extremity of the Plansee, to be reached either by pleasure boat or
mountain path, near the little border custom-house, the Kaiser-brunnen flows into the
lake, so called because its cool waters once afforded a refreshing drink to Ludwig of
Brandenberg, when out hunting: a crucifix marks the spot. There is also a chapel erected
at the end of the 17th century, in consequence of some local vow, containing a picture of
the ‘Vierzehn Nothhelfer;’ and as the so-called ‘Fourteen Helpers in Need’ are a
favourite devotion all over North-Tirol I may as well mention their legend here at our
first time of meeting them. The story is that on the feast of the Invention of the Cross,
1445, a shepherd-boy named Hermann, serving the Cistercian monks of Langheim
(some thirty miles south of Mayence) was keeping sheep on a farm belonging to them in
Frankenthal not far from Würtzburg, when he heard a child’s voice crying to him out of
the long grass; he turned round and saw a beautiful infant with two tapers burning before
it, who disappeared as he approached. On the vigil of S. Peter in the following year
Hermann saw the same vision repeated, only this time the beautiful infant was
surrounded by a court of fourteen other children, who told him they were the ‘Vierzehn
Nothelfer,’ and that he was to build a chapel to them. The monks refused to believe
Hermann’s story, but the popular mind connected it with a devotion which was already
widespread, and by the year 1448 the mysteriously ordered chapel was raised, and
speedily became a place of pilgrimage. This chapel has been constantly maintained and
enlarged and has now grown into a considerable church; and the devotion to the
‘Fourteen Helpers in Need’ spread over the surrounding country with the usual rapid
spread of a popular devotion.25 The chief remaining points of interest in the further
journey to Innsbruck, taking it up where we diverged from it at Nassereit, are mentioned
later in my excursions for Innsbruck.
Before closing my chapter on Vorarlberg I must put on record, as a warning to those who
may choose to thread its pleasant valleys, a laughable incident which cut short my first
attempt to penetrate into Tirol by its means. Our line of route I have already named.26
Our start was in the most genial of August weather; our party not only harmonious, but
humorously inclined; all our stages were full of interest and pleasure, and their memory
glances at me reproachfully as I pass them over in rigid obedience to the duty of
adhering to my programme. But no, I must devote a word of gratitude to the friendly
Swiss people, and their kindly hospitable manners on all occasions. The pretty bathing
establishments on the lakes, where the little girls go in on their way to school, and swim
about as elegantly as if the water were their natural element; the wonderful roofs of
Aarau; its late-flowering pomegranates; and the clear delicious water, tumbling along its
narrow bed down the centre of all the streets, where we stop to taste of the crystal brook,

using the hollow of our hands, pilgrim fashion, and the kind people more than once
come out of their houses to offer us glasses and chairs!
I must bestow, too, another line of record on the charming village of Rorschach, the little
colony of Catholics in the midst of a Protestant canton. Its delicious situation on the
Boden-see; our row over the lake by moonlight, where we are nearly run down by one of
the steamers perpetually crossing it in all directions, while our old boatman pours out
and loses himself in the mazes of his legendary lore; the strange effect of interlacing
moonbeams, interspersed by golden rays from the sanct lamps with Turner-like effect,
seen through the open grated door of the church; the grotesque draped skeletons
supporting the roof of one of the chapels, Caryatid fashion and the rustic procession on
the early morning of the Assumption.
So far all had gone passing well; my first misgiving arose when I saw the factotum of
the Oberriet station eye our luggage, the provision of four English winterers in Rome,
and a look of embarrassed astonishment dilate his stolid German countenance. It was
evident that when he engaged himself as ticket-clerk, porter, ‘and everyting,’ he never
contemplated such a pile of boxes being ever deposited at his station. We left him wrapt
in his earnest gaze, and walked on to see what help we could get in the village. It was a
collection of a half-dozen cottages, picturesque in their utter uncivilization, clustered
round an inn of some pretensions. The host had apparently heard of the depth of English
purses, and was delighted to make his premières armes in testing their capacity. Of
course there was ‘no arguing with the master of’ the only horses to whose assistance we
had to look for carrying us beyond the mountains, which now somehow struck us as
much more plainly marked on the map than we had noticed before. His price had to be
ours, and his statement of the distance, about double the reality, had to be accepted also.
His stud was soon displayed before us. Three rather tired greys were brought in from the
field, and made fast (or rather loose) with ropes to a waggon, on which our formidable
Gepäck was piled, and took their start with funeral solemnity. An hour later a parcel of
boys had succeeded in capturing a wild colt destined to assist his venerable parent in
transporting ourselves in a ‘shay,’ of the Gilpin type, and to which we managed to hang
on with some difficulty, the wild-looking driver good-naturedly volunteering to run by
the side.
Off we started with the inevitable thunder of German whip-cracking and German
imprecations on the cattle, sufficient for the first twenty paces to astonish the colt into
propriety. No sooner had we reached the village boundary, however, than he seemed to
guess for the first time that he had been entrapped into bondage. With refreshing juvenile
buoyancy he instantly determined to show us his indomitable spirit. Resisting all efforts
of his companion in harness to proceed, he suddenly made such desperate assault and
battery with his hind legs, that one or two of the ropes were quickly snapped, the Jehu
sent sprawling in the ditch on one side, and the travelling bags on the other; so that, but

for the staid demeanour of the old mare, we should probably in two minutes more have
been ‘nowhere.’ Hans was on his feet again in an instant, like the balanced mannikins of
a bull-fight, and to knot the ropes and make a fresh start required only a minute more;
but another and another exhibition of the colt’s pranks decided us to trust to our own
powers of locomotion.
A bare-footed, short-petticoated wench, who astonished us by proving that her rough
hands could earn her livelihood at delicate ‘Swiss’ embroidery, and still more by details
of the small remuneration that contented her, volunteered to pilot us through the woods
where we had quite lost our way; and finding our luggage van waiting on the banks of
the Rhine for the return of the ferry, we crossed with it and walked by its side for the rest
of the distance.
Our road lay right across the Ardetzen, a basin of pasture enclosed by a magnificent
circuit of mountains,—behind us the distant eminences of Appenzell, before us the great
Rhætian Alps, and at their base a number of smiling villages each with its green spire
scarcely detaching from the verdant slopes behind. The undertaking, pleasant and bright
at first, grew weary and anxious as the sun descended, and the mountains of Appenzell
began to throw their long shadow over the lowland we were traversing, and yet the end
was not reached. At last the strains of an organ burst upon our ears, lights from latticed
windows diapered our path, and a train of worshippers poured past us to join in the
melodies of the Church, sufficiently large to argue that our stopping-place was attained.
We cast about to find the Gasthof zur Post to which we were bound, but all in vain, there
was no rest for us.
Here indeed, Feldkirch fuit, but here it was no more. In the year 909, the Counts of
Montfort built themselves a castle on the neighbouring height of Schattenburg, (so called
because the higher eminences around shade it from the sun till late in the morning,) and
lured away the people from this pristine Feldkirch to settle themselves round the foot of
their fortress. Some of the original inhabitants still clung to the old place, and its old
Church of St. Peter, that very church whose earlier foundations, some say, were laid by
monks from Britain, S. Columban and St. Gall, who, when the people were oppressed by
their Frankish masters, came and lived among them, and by their preaching and their
prayers rekindled the light of religion, working out at the same time their political relief;
the former subsequently made his way, shedding blessings as he went, on to Italy, where
he died at the age of ninety, in 615; the latter founded, and ended his days at the age of
ninety-five, in the famous monastery which has given his name to the neighbouring
Swiss Canton.
The descendants of this remnant have kept up the original settlement to this day with the
name of Altenstadt, while the first built street of the present thriving town of Feldkirch
still retains its appellation of the Neustadt.

It seemed a long stretch ere we again came upon an inhabited spot, but this time there
was no mistake. All around were the signs of a prosperous centre, the causeways
correctly laid out, new buildings rising on every side, and—I am fain to add—the church
dark and closed; in place of the train of worshippers of unsophisticated Altenstadt, one
solitary figure in mourning weeds was kneeling in the moonlight at a desk such as we
often see placed under a cross against the outer wall of churches in Germany.
Before five next morning I was awakened by the pealing organ and hearty voices of the
Feldkirch peasants at Mass in the church just opposite my window. I dressed hastily, and
descended to take my place among them. It was a village festival and Mass succeeded
Mass at each of the gaily decorated altars, and before them assembled groups in quaint
costumes from far and near.27 As each half hour struck, a bell sounded, and a relic was
brought round to the high altar rails, all the women in the church going up first, and then
all the men, to venerate it.
Our first care of the day was to engage our carriage for Innsbruck. We were at the Post
hotel, and had the best chance there; for besides its own conveyances, there were those
of the post-office, which generally in Germany afford great convenience. Not one was
there, however, that would undertake our luggage over the mountain roads. The post-
master and his men all declared that at every winding of the passes there would be too
great risk of overturning the vehicle. It was in vain we argued that the same amount had
often accompanied us over higher mountains in Italy; it was clear they were not prepared
for it. There was a service for heavy goods by which it could be sent; there was no other
way, and they did not advise that. They could not ensure any due care being taken of it,
or that it should reach within three or four weeks. Four or five hours spent in weighing,
measuring, arranging, and arguing, advanced our cause not a whit; there was no plan to
be adopted but to return by Oberriet to Rorschach, cross lake Constance to Lindau, and
make our way round by Augsburg, Munich, and Rosenheim!
It was with great reluctance we relinquished the cherished project. Our now hated
luggage deposited in a waggon, as the day before, we mounted our rather more
presentable, and certainly better horsed vehicle, in no cheerful mood, for, besides the
disappointment, there was the mortification which always attaches to a failed project and
retraced steps.
‘The Herrschaften are not in such bright spirits as the sun to-day!’ exclaimed our driver,
when, finally tired of cracking his whip and shouting to his horses, he found we still sat
silent and crest-fallen. He wore the jauntiest costume to be found in Europe, after that of
his Hungarian confrère, a short postilion jacket, bound and trimmed with yellow lace, a
horn slung across his breast by a bright yellow cord, and a hat shining like looking-glass
cocked on one side of his head, while his face expressed everything that is pleasant and
jovial.

‘How can one be anything but out of spirits when one is crossed by such a stupid set as
the people of your town? Why, there is no part of Europe in which they will even believe
it possible!’
‘Well, you see they don’t understand much, about here,’ he replied, with an air of
superiority, for he was a travelled postilion, as he took care to let us know. ‘In Italy they
manage better; they tie the luggage on behind, or underneath, where it is safe enough.
Here they have only one idea—to stick it on the top, and in that way a carriage may be
easily upset at a sharp turn. You cannot drive any new idea into these fellows; it is like
an echo between their own mountains, whatever is once there, goes on and on and on.’ I
showed him the map, and traced before him the difference in the length of the route we
should have taken and that we had now to pursue. I don’t think he had ever understood a
map before, for he seemed vastly pleased at the compliment paid to his intelligence.
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, ‘if we could always go as the crow flies, how quickly we should get
to our journey’s end; or if we had the Stase-Sattel, as they used to have—wasn’t that
fine!’
‘The Stase-Sattel,’ I replied, ‘what is that?’
‘What! don’t you know about the Stase-Sattel—at that place, Bludenz, there,’ and he
pointed to it on the map, ‘where you were telling me you wanted to have gone, there
used to live an old woman named Stase, and folk said she was a witch. She had a
wonderful saddle, on to which she used to set herself when she wanted anything, and it
used to fly with her ever so high, and quicker than a bird. One day the reapers were in a
field cooking their mess, and they had forgotten to bring any salt—and hupf! quick!
before the pot had begun to boil she had flown off on her saddle to the salt-mines at Hall,
beyond Innsbruck, and back with salt enough to pickle an ox. Another time there was a
farmer who had been kind to her, whose crops were failing for the drought. She no
sooner heard of his distress than up she flew in her saddle and swept all the clouds
together with her broom till there was enough to make a good rainfall. Another time, a
boy who had been sent with a message by his master to the next village had wasted all
the day in playing and drinking with her; towards dusk he bethought himself that the
gates would be shut and the dogs let loose, so that it was a chance if he reached the
house alive. But she told him not to mind, and taking him up on her saddle, she carried
him up through the air and set him down at home before the sun was an inch lower.’
‘And what became of her?’ I inquired.
‘Became of her! why, she went the way of all such folk. They go on for a time, but God’s
hand overtakes them at the last. One day she was on one of her wild errands, and it was a
Fest-tag to boot. Her course took her exactly over a church spire, and just as she passed,
the Wandlung bell28 tolled. The sacred sound tormented her so that she lost her seat and

fell headlong to the ground. When they came out of church they found her lying a
shapeless mass upon the stone step of the churchyard cross. Her enchanted saddle was
long kept in the Castle of Landeck—maybe it is there yet; and even now when we want
to tell one to go quickly on an errand, we say, “Fly on the saddle of Dame Stase.”’
‘You have had many such folk about here,’ I observed seriously, with the view of
drawing him out.
‘Well, yes, they tell many such tales,’ he answered; ‘and if they’re not true, they at least
serve to keep alive the faith that God is over us all, and that the evil one has no more
power than just what He allows. There’s another story they tell, just showing that,’ he
continued. ‘Many years ago there was a peasant (and he lived near Bludenz too) who
had a great desire to have a fine large farm-house. He worked hard, and put his savings
by prudently; but it wouldn’t do, he never could get enough. One day, in an evil hour, he
let his great desire get the better of him, and he called the devil in dreiteufelsnamen29 to
his assistance. It was not, you see, a deliberate wickedness—it was all in a moment, like.
But the devil came, and didn’t give him time to reflect. “I know what you want,” he said;
“you shall have your house and your barns and your hen-house, and all complete, this
very night, without costing you a penny; but when you have enjoyed it long enough,
your old worn-out carcass shall belong to me.” The good peasant hesitated; and the
devil, finding it necessary to add another bait, ran on: “And what is more, I’ll go so far
as to say that if every stone is not complete by the first cock-crow, I’ll strike out even
this condition, and you shall have it out and out.” The peasant was dazzled with the
prospect, and could not bring himself all at once to refuse the accomplishment of his
darling hope. The devil shook him by the hand as a way of clenching the bargain, and
disappeared.
‘The peasant went home more alarmed than rejoiced, and full of fear above all that his
wife should inquire the meaning of all the hammering and blustering and running hither
and thither which was to be heard going on in the homestead, for she was a pious God-
fearing woman.
‘He remained dumb to all her inquiries, hour after hour through the night; but at last,
towards morning, his courage failed him, and he told her all. She, like a good wife, gave
back no word of reproach, but cast about to find a remedy. First she considered that he
had done the thing thoughtlessly and rashly, and then she ascertained that at last he had
given no actual consent. Finally, deciding matters were not as bad as might be, she got
up, and bid him leave the issue to her.
‘First she knelt down and commended herself and her undertaking to God and His holy
saints; then in the small hours, when the devil’s work was nearly finished, she took her
lamp and spread out the wick so that it should give its greatest glare, and poured fresh oil

upon it, and went out with a basket of grain to feed the hens. The cock, seeing the bright
light and the good wife with her basket of food, never doubted but that it was morning,
and springing up, he flapped his wings, and crowed with all his might. At that very
moment the devil himself was coming by with the last roof-stone.30 At the sound of the
premature cock-crow he was so much astonished that he didn’t know which way to turn,
and sank into the ground bearing the stone still in his hand.
‘The house belonged to the peasant by every right, but no stone could ever be made to
stay on the vacant space. This inconvenience was the penance he had to endure for the
desperate game he had played, and he took it cheerfully, and when the rain came in he
used to kiss his good wife in gratitude for the more terrible chastisement from which she
had saved him.’
The jaunty postilion whipped the horses on as he thus brought his story to a close, or
rather cracked his whip in the air till the mountains resounded with it, for he had
slackened speed while telling his tale, and the day was wearing on.
‘We must take care and not be late for the train,’ he observed. ‘The Herrschaften have
had enough of the inn of Oberriet, and don’t want to have to spend a night there, and we
have no Vorarlberger-geist to speed us now-a-days.’
‘Who was he?’ I inquired eagerly.
‘I suppose you know that all this country round about here is called the Vorarlberg, and
in olden time there was a spirit that used to wander about helping travellers all along its
roads. When they were benighted, it used to go before them with a light; when they were
in difficulties, it used to procure them aid; if one lost his way, it used to direct him
aright; till one day a poor priest came by who had been to administer a distant
parishioner. His way had lain now over bog, now over torrent-beds. In the roughness of
the way the priest’s horse had cast a shoe. A long stretch of road lay yet before him, but
no forge was near. Suddenly the Vorarlberger-geist came out of a cleft in the rock,
silently set to work and shod the horse, and passed on its way as usual with a sigh.
‘“Vergeltsgott!”31 cried the priest after it.
‘“God be praised!” exclaimed the spirit. “Now am I at last set free. These hundred years
have I served mankind thus, and till now no man has performed this act of gratitude, the
condition of my release.” And since this time it has never been seen again.’
We had now once more reached the banks of the Rhine. The driver of the luggage van
held the ferry in expectation of us, and with its team it was already stowed on board. Our
horses were next embarked, and then ourselves, as we sat, perched on the carriage. A
couple of rough donkeys, a patriarchal goat, and half-a-dozen wild-looking half-clothed

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