#hinzelmann

Invisible, and typically some degree of mischievous, there are three types of kobold: the household spirits, the mine spirits, and shipboard spirits.

... So. If you have watched episode 9 you might have noticed that Hinzelmann kept in her house the knife that was used by settlers to kill the Native little girl on what would later become Lakeside. Right? 

It is because visibly this was a sacrifice given to what would become Hinzelmann. I thought originally that it was a kill to Odin, but I actually visibly misheard it because turns out it was a kill to Hodekin, which they call “the dark one”. (I haven’t rewatched the scene but I got that from several reviews - if anyone is kind enough to check). Another thing I didn’t caught was that the guy who prayed to Hodekin was actually German. A German trader. Why didn’t I get that? Because the other guy was French. You hear him distinctely speak French, and he speaks it first. Why, just why would you mix up two different nationalities? Just to blur the lines? That’s confusing and idiot. Why not make an all-German team, huh? 

For the prayer in question I was about to rant about how it is an Old Norse/Scandinavian prayer and not an Old German one, but then my rant fell a bit flat. They use the rune alphabet, true, but it was used by a lot of Germanic languages. They associate the hammer with the thunder, just like with Thor, and earlier Whiskey Jack said to Odin that his followers had slaughtered his people. It might lead one to believe this is an honor to the Old Norse gods, but then you have to rememberer that the Norse gods were also the Germanic gods, the same pantheon being worshipped on the two territories with a few differences (Odin became Wotan, Thor became Donar, but they stayed roughly the same). After that I do not have enough knowledge to identify the language spoken as Old Norse or Old Germanic, so I’ll leave it to experts. But I’ll still mention it stays overall confusing.

Especially since they threw a French in there. Why a French? Why confuse people like that?

But the treatment of Hodekin is the most confusing thing. Here Hodekin is called the “Dark One” and seemingly referred to as a god, due to the prayer and all that. Something quite serious. Except that Hodekin never was truly a god, and certainly never had a name such as the “Dark One”. Hodekin is an individual kobold (the same way Hinzelmann is the name of another individual kobold). And while Hödekin was reported as a folkloric kobold in the 19th century, Hinzelmann’s legend can be dated to the 16th century, well before this Coming to America scene (which is in 1690). 

All that being said, it is theorized that the scene actually referred to Hodr, a blind god of Norse mythology, usually associated with cold and darkness. But... to my knowledge Hodr did not actually had Germanic counterparts and stayed mostly a Norse entity? I’m not sure, but I think it is the case. And why would Hodr devolve into a Germanic kobold that specalizes himself in protecting houses, families and bring good fortune? For Mad Sweeney it made sense, because it was based on real facts (the Tuatha dé Danann, the Germanic pantheon, was later associated and fused with the Daoine Sidhe, the people of the Sidh, aka the otherworld where lived mixed together gods, fairies and the dead, and thus it was believed the “people of the mounds” and “fair folks” were descendants or a lesser form of the old Celtic gods). But here? 

Plus on top of that they entirely skipped the actual backstory of Hinzelmann in the novel. Aka the fact that while in Germanic folklore he indeed became a kobold/sprite/house spirit, his “career” as a god dated from pre-Roman times, as a “god” of a nomadic tribe that had settled in the Black Forest. 

The old man was locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. “Store ain’t open Christmas,” he told Shadow cheerfully. “But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure everything was okay. Couldn’t live with myself if some poor soul’d found ‘emselves stranded on Christmas Day.”

He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life’s vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.

(...)

“(...) Where are my manners? My name’s Hinzelmann. I’d say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. (...)”

~ Hinzelmann's description in “American Gods”, Neil Gaiman (2001)

Julia Sweeney as Ann-Marie Hinzelmann, American Gods, 2021, S03 Ep01, "A Winter's Tale"

Honest to God and God's Wrath.