By Eben van Tonder, 30 April 25

Introduction

Saint Walpurga and her uncle, Saint Boniface, occupy a unique place in early medieval European religious history. As Anglo-Saxon missionaries to the Germanic peoples, their work contributed to the Christianisation of Bavaria, Thuringia, and Franconia. Centuries later, the feast that came to bear Walpurga’s name, Walpurgisnacht, absorbed a body of older Central European spring custom connected to the Maibaum, the May tree, and to the wider repertoire of agrarian protective magic practised across the German speaking lands. The same decade that saw Walpurga settle at Heidenheim also saw an Irish churchman take charge of the neighbouring see of Salzburg, in open conflict with Boniface himself, a reminder that the eighth century mission field running from England through Bavaria into Austria was never the work of one nation alone. This article sets out what is documented about Walpurga’s life and veneration, the Austrian Maibaum and wedding traditions described by the Styrian folklorist Christa Berger, a closely related body of spring ritual recorded in the great German folklore encyclopaedia, the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, and the case of Virgil of Salzburg as a window onto the Irish presence in Austria in Walpurga’s own generation.

Saint Walpurga: Life and Mission

Walpurga was born around 710, most likely in the kingdom of Wessex in what is now Devon, the daughter of Richard the Pilgrim, who died at Lucca, Italy, while on pilgrimage to Rome with his two sons, and was venerated locally there. She was educated at the Benedictine double monastery at Wimborne in Dorset, where she remained for some twenty six years before crossing to the Continent.

In 748 she answered the call of her uncle, Saint Boniface, who had asked the community at Wimborne to send Anglo-Saxon religious women to assist the mission to Germany. Walpurga joined Saint Lioba and others in this work. She first lived at Tauberbischofsheim under Lioba, and later moved to the double monastery of Heidenheim, founded by her brother Wunibald. On his death around 760 or 761, her surviving brother Willibald, by then bishop of Eichstätt, appointed her abbess over both the monks’ and the nuns’ communities there, an unusual position of authority for a woman in the eighth century church.

According to early hagiographical tradition, during her voyage to the Continent a violent storm threatened the ship, and her prayer was credited with calming the sea, an event read at the time as confirmation of her calling.

Death, Relics, and Patronage

The sources disagree on the exact year of Walpurga’s death, giving 777, 779, or 780, but agree on the date, 25 February, and the place, Heidenheim. Roughly a century later, in the 870s, her relics were translated to Eichstätt, and her feast was fixed on 1 May, the date of that translation, presumably confirmed through canonisation by Pope Hadrian II. A strong relic cult developed at Eichstätt, where a clear oil is said to flow from the rock around her tomb, the so called Walburga’s oil. A medical history review of the surviving pilgrimage testimonies records cures of dizziness and of pains in the eye, chest, foot, back, head, and hand attributed to the oil, drawn from across all social classes and both sexes, many supported by witness statements; the practice of collecting and distributing the oil continues at the abbey today.

Walpurga is conventionally shown holding a small flask of this oil. She is also shown holding stalks of grain, an attribute that appears as early as the eleventh century Hitda Codex. The grain has traditionally been explained through a legend of her saving children from famine, though some scholars have also read it as a case of a Christian saint’s iconography absorbing an older agricultural and fertility symbolism associated with the harvest, since peasant farmers in some regions fashioned a corn dolly in her likeness at harvest time. She is venerated as patroness of the sick, of women in childbirth, of farmers and of the harvest, and as a protector against plague, coughs, dog bites, and rabies. In Vienna she is depicted in the Stephansdom, the Peterskirche, and the Breitenseer Pfarrkirche.

Saint Boniface: The Apostle of the Germans

Boniface, born Wynfrith in Wessex around 675, was a Benedictine monk commissioned by Pope Gregory II in 719 to convert the Germanic tribes and reform the Frankish church. His programme included the destruction of pagan shrines, the founding of bishoprics, and the recruitment of monastic women for teaching work, of whom Walpurga was one. He was named Archbishop of Mainz and Primate of Germany around 747 or 748, and was martyred in Frisia in 754 while preparing converts for confirmation.

Virgil of Salzburg: An Irish Counterpoint in Boniface’s Own Lifetime

While Boniface was establishing Walpurga and her brothers in Bavaria, an Irish churchman was establishing himself in the neighbouring see of Salzburg, in direct and conflict with Boniface himself. Virgil, known in Irish as Feirgil or Fearghal, had been abbot of Aghaboe in what is now County Laois before leaving Ireland around 745, intending to reach the Holy Land but settling instead at the Frankish court. In 745 or 746 the Frankish ruler Pepin sent him to Bavaria, where Duke Odilo installed him as abbot of St Peter’s in Salzburg and effective head of the diocese, governing it according to Irish custom for two decades before his own episcopal consecration in 767.

Boniface clashed with Virgil twice. The first dispute concerned a priest who had baptised converts using a grammatically garbled formula, “in nomine patria et filia et spiritus sancti” rather than “patris et filii.” Boniface held the baptisms invalid and appealed to Rome for permission to have the converts rebaptised; Pope Zachary, persuaded by Virgil’s own account of the case, ruled the baptisms valid and sided against Boniface. The second and more famous dispute, raised by Boniface with the pope in 748, accused Virgil of teaching that there existed another world and other people beneath the earth, the antipodes, a view Boniface regarded as contrary to Scripture. The pope ordered an inquiry, with excommunication threatened if the charge proved true, but no condemnation followed, and Virgil continued in his post.

Virgil went on to be consecrated bishop of Salzburg in 767, led a successful mission converting the Carantanian Slavs of Carinthia and Styria from 772, and in 774 dedicated the first Salzburg cathedral. He died in 784 and was formally canonised in 1233 after his grave was rediscovered when fire destroyed the medieval cathedral in 1181. He is remembered today as the patron of Carinthia and, owing to his defence of the antipodes, as an early and somewhat unlikely patron of the idea of a spherical, inhabited earth.

The episode is a useful corrective to any picture of the eighth century mission field as a simple, one directional Anglo-Saxon project. Within the very years that Walpurga was settling into Heidenheim, an Irish abbot bishop was governing the cathedral diocese immediately to the south, answering to Rome on his own terms and prevailing over Boniface’s own complaints, which shows that Irish ecclesiastical authority was already deeply rooted in the Austrian church a full three centuries before the later, more institutionally formal Irish Schottenklöster were founded at Regensburg and Vienna.

Walpurgisnacht: Pagan Rites and Christian Memory

The eve of May 1 had older roots in Alpine and Central European seasonal custom, associated with the turn into summer, the warding off of evil, and fire rites. Bonfires lit on hilltops in the Alps and the Harz were believed to purify the land, and the Brocken in the Harz became fixed in folklore as a gathering place for witches. The Church’s later attachment of Walpurga’s feast to May 1 placed a healing, learned Christian woman over a date that already carried this seasonal and apotropaic weight, so that Walpurgisnacht became both an echo of older rites and the vigil of a saint’s day.

The Maibaum in Austria

Custom and geography

The erection of a Maibaum on the evening of April 30 or on May 1 is recorded across Bavaria, the Rhineland, the Saarland, the Emsland, East Frisia, North Rhine-Westphalia, Franconia, Baden, Swabia, the Palatinate, parts of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and the Lausitz, as well as Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, and parts of Romania. In some regions the tree is raised at Pentecost rather than May 1, and in Sweden the related custom is tied to midsummer.

Earliest Austrian evidence

The first record of a Maibaum in Austria comes from the Babenbergerhof in Vienna in 1230. The Babenberg dukes were responsible for erecting and decorating a tree and for hosting the May celebrations for the population. A complaint by the subjects of Duke Leopold IV after his death, preserved from this period, runs: “Wer singet uns nu vor, zu Wienn auf dem Chor […] Wer singet uns nu raien, wer zieret uns nu die maien?” Later the custom passed to groups of unmarried young men, among whom the right to steal a rival village’s tree, the Stehlrecht, was already established.

Oldest written reference and church opposition

The oldest written reference to a Maibaum anywhere comes from Caesarius of Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk near Bonn, who around 1222 condemned the erection of a Maibaum in Aachen as a pagan ritual, linking it to a fire that struck Aachen in 1224. Martin Luther, in his translation of Psalm 118, rendered a verse as “Schmücket das Fest mit Maien bis an die Hörner des Altars.”  “Adorn the feast with branches, even (Kottas) to the horns of the altar.”

The verse is interesting precisely because Luther’s wording is unusual. More literal renderings of the Hebrew, such as the Elberfelder translation, give something closer to “Bind the festival sacrifice with cords, bring it to the horns of the altar,” reading the line as an instruction to lead the sacrificial animal to the altar. (Kottas) Luther instead read the same Hebrew term as referring to festive green branches rather than binding cords, and rendered it as a command to decorate the feast with greenery. That translation choice is exactly why German folklorists, including in the discussion of the Maibaum custom, cite this verse as a biblical anchor point for the practice of bringing branches and greenery into festival and church settings each spring, since Luther’s own Bible appeared to instruct precisely that.

The tall trunk with a green crown and wreath, the form familiar today, is attested from the sixteenth century, and the first painted Maibaum is recorded around 1650. During the Thirty Years’ War soldiers began raising Ehrenbäume, honour trees, for officers and princes on May 1, a practice the authorities tried unsuccessfully to suppress.

The Hexenbaum

In the nineteenth century a Walpurgisnacht tree, the Hexenbaum, was raised specifically to drive away evil spirits, its trunk stripped completely smooth so that witches could not lodge themselves under the bark.

Tree, felling, and erection

The tree was traditionally a birch, the first species to break winter dormancy and a symbol of strength, grace, and the will to live, though today fir or spruce is more common. The tree is usually cut shortly before Walpurgisnacht, traditionally stolen from the forest, stripped, decorated with wreaths, ribbons, and flags, and carried in procession to the village square, where erecting it by hand with poles can take five to six hours, accompanied by music and dancing.

The Bandltanz

In some districts a ribbon dance, the Bandltanz, is still performed, in which ribbons fixed at the crown of the stripped trunk are woven into a pattern and then unwound by dancing pairs. Comparable dances are recorded in the Odenwald and Taunus regions of Germany, and in France, England, Spain, South America, and East India, although the precise date of origin of the ribbon dance itself is unknown, even though the tree dance is assumed to descend from pre-Christian practice.

Interpretation

The folklorist Elisabeth Schiffkorn describes the Maibaum since the Middle Ages as a strong symbol that winter has been survived, standing for growth and fertility, a Lebensrute, life rod: “Junge starke Männer errichten ein unübersehbares Symbol, um zu zeigen, wir haben den Winter überlebt.”

Fat, the Plough, and the Wider Family of Spring Protective Magic

A separate but closely related strand of Central European spring custom concerns the smearing of animal fat onto iron farm tools as a protective and fertility rite, recorded not for Walpurgisnacht itself but for a neighbouring spring observance, the erster Pfluggang, the first ploughing of the year. The entry is preserved in the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, the great encyclopaedia of German folk belief edited by Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli and Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, Band VII, Berlin and Leipzig, 1935 and 1936, under the heading Pfluggang, erster.

The entry states that, in order to protect the seed, the ploughshare was rubbed with Fastnachtsfett, fat rendered at Shrovetide, with Schmalz in which the Fastnachtskuchen, the Shrovetide pastries, had been fried, and with Speck, bacon fat, that had been blessed on Easter morning. The timing of the rite followed its own calendar, fixed variously at Lichtmess, at the feast of Saint Gertrude on 17 March, or most commonly at the feast of the Annunciation, a day so closely tied to this custom that it was popularly called Pflugmarien. The act of greasing the ploughshare belonged to a wider set of practices surrounding the first ploughing, which the encyclopaedia records as a heilige Handlung, a sacred act, going back to agrarian religious custom and paralleled, the editors note, by the ritual consecration of the plough by a priest in ancient India and by the libation poured with washed hands at the first ploughing in ancient Rome.

Alongside the fat itself, the entry records a layer of spoken ritual accompanying the rite, described as gesprochener Wortzauber, spoken word magic, taking the form of short Segenssprüche, blessing formulas, recited as the ploughing began. In some districts the household knelt together before the threshing floor and recited five Paternosters before setting out, and elsewhere the household prayed a full rosary while making the return journey from the third furrow of the field back to the farmhouse. Wax crosses fashioned from the Candlemas candle were sometimes fixed to the plough itself, and blessed wax tapers were lit before it left the barn. The text does not preserve the precise wording of the shorter Segenssprüche, only that they were brief and customary.

The crop itself was protected on the same logic as the iron tool, since the entry also records that the bread eaten communally by the household at the first ploughing, the Pflugbrot, was baked with blessed flour and salt, echoing the same idea that food substances, salted and blessed, carried protective force when brought into contact with the implements and the soil. The ploughshare custom belongs to a different point in the spring calendar from Walpurgisnacht itself, yet the underlying instinct it shares with the wider Alpine repertoire, fat from the pig rubbed onto iron, spoken blessing accompanying the act, and a fixed point in the agrarian and liturgical year, marks out a single, coherent current of belief running through Central European farming communities, surfacing under several different names and on several different days of the spring calendar.

The Brautstab and the Bidlmann

The Brautstab

A bridal staff, the Brautstab, was traditionally carved from Maibaum wood and carried as a sign of the dignity of marriage. Peter Rosegger, writing in 1875, already described the custom as falling out of use, noting it as a stick about four feet tall with a knob and tassel, traditionally read as a sign of the husband’s standing and authority in the household, carried by the head of the household on important family occasions, and sometimes buried with its owner.

The Bidlmann

Marriage proposals in rural Styria traditionally involved a go-between, the Bidlmann or Brautwerber, sent by the prospective groom’s family to sound out the bride’s parents, sometimes through the formal pretext of a cattle deal, a Kuhhandel, before the true purpose was raised. An account from the Mürztal, recorded by the parish priest Johann Tippl in Blätter für Heimatkunde, 1925, preserves a toast traditionally given by the Bidlmann at the wedding meal: “Gesundheit, Brautleut’, zur Lust und Freud für die Lebenszeit und für die Ewigkeit.” A literal rendering: “Health, wedding couple, for delight and joy, for the span of life and for eternity.” It is a toast, so the sense is closer to “To your health, bride and groom, in joy and gladness, for your life on earth and for eternity to come.”

A parallel is sometimes drawn with the wooing of Gerðr on behalf of the god Freyr by his servant Skírnir in the Skírnismál of the Edda, and a related custom is recorded on the North Frisian Hallig of Süderoog, where the Brautführer requests entry to the house using the bridal staff.

Folk Weather Sayings for Walpurgisnacht

A set of Bauernregeln, traditional weather sayings, attaches to the night itself:

“Regen in der Walpurgisnacht, hat stets ein gutes Jahr gebracht.” Rain on Walpurgis night has always brought a good year.

“In der Walpurgisnacht Regen, bringt uns reichen Erntesegen.” Rain on Walpurgis night brings us a rich blessing of harvest.

“Walpurgisfrost ist schlechte Kost.” Walpurgis frost is poor fare.

“Sturm und Wind in der Walpurgisnacht, hat Scheune und Keller vollgemacht.” Storm and wind on Walpurgis night have filled the barn and the cellar.

Conclusion

Walpurga and Boniface were missionaries whose work reshaped religious life in the Germanic lands, and Walpurga’s memory was layered, through her feast day, onto an older seasonal moment already associated with fire and the turn of the year. Her own generation, however, was not an Anglo-Saxon monopoly. Virgil of Salzburg shows that Irish ecclesiastical authority sat at the very heart of the Austrian church while Walpurga and Boniface were still alive, three centuries before the later and more visible Irish Schottenklöster were founded at Regensburg and Vienna. The Austrian Maibaum and its associated wedding customs, as Christa Berger documents them, form one further strand of regional folklore tied to this same date, while the ploughshare rite recorded in the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens shows that the same underlying instinct, to carry fat from the pig onto iron tools as protection at a sacred point in the farming year, surfaces elsewhere in the Central European calendar under its own name and its own date. Together these threads, the Anglo-Saxon mission, the Irish presence already established beside it, the Maibaum, and the ploughshare rite, suggest a single broad and mixed current of belief and authority running beneath several distinct named customs in the same corner of early medieval Europe.

References

1. Acta Sanctorum. (1680). Maii Tomus I.
2. Bächtold-Stäubli, H., and Hoffmann-Krayer, E. (Eds.). (1935/1936). Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, Band VII: Pflügen-Sackpfeife-Schatz. Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
3. Berger, C. (2024, updated 2025). “Walpurgisnacht und Maibaum.” Der Steirische Brauch. https://www.der-steirische-brauch.at/post/walpurgisnacht-und-maibaum
4. Dictionary of Irish Biography. “Virgil (Virgilius, Fergil).” https://www.dib.ie/biography/virgil-virgilius-fergil-a3043
5. Duffin, C. (2025). “The Healing Oil of Saint Walburga.” Hektoen International, Fall 2025. https://hekint.org/2025/10/23/the-healing-oil-of-saint-walburga/
6. Encyclopedia.com. “Virgilius (Fergal or Feirgil) of Salzburg, St.” New Catholic Encyclopedia.
7. Farmer, D. H. (1997). The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (5th ed.). Oxford University Press.
8. Lawrence, C. H. (2001). Medieval Monasticism (3rd ed.). Longman.
9. Lindow, J. (2002). Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press.
10. Talbot, C. H. (Ed.). (1954). The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany. Sheed and Ward.
11. Tippl, J. (1925). “Mürztaler Hochzeitsgebräuche.” Blätter für Heimatkunde, 3.
12. Wikipedia contributors. “Saint Walpurga.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
13. Wikipedia contributors. “Vergilius of Salzburg.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.