Ongoing work re-telling old Alpine and European stories linked to winter, snow and ice. Frau Holle is the goddess of weaving and spinning, leader of the Wild Hunt who rides with her entourage of Perchten through the Wild Nights, she is an old hag or a maiden dressed in white, she rides in a white cloth-swathed cart, brings snow when she shakes her feather pillows, slits the stomachs of those who spin when they must not and has one, large swan foot or splay-foot from spinning. She goes by Frau Holle, The Bright One, Perchta, Quartemberca, Bertha with the Big Foot, Mother Goose, Diana and a thousand other names.
Stollenwurm is part serpent, part cat, and lives in the highest Alpine regions, feared by humans but needed by the dairy cows to relieve their swollen udders through the long hours away from their calves. Without Stollenwurm mastitis cases increase and the cows drip milk onto ground already saturated with glacier melt water.
Keywords: Ember Days, glacial melt, Alpine myths, de-colonising mythologies, snow stories, ritual objects, climate chaos