The Buschgroßmutter: The Bush Grandmother and Her Moss Children
In the wooded hill country where Saxony, Bohemia and Silesia lean together — the Ore Mountains, the deep spruce belts of the old German-Czech borderlands — the forest had a grandmother. The woodcutters and berry-pickers of those hills spoke of her for centuries in the tone reserved for a formidable elderly neighbor: the Buschgroßmutter — the Bush Grandmother — an ancient female being, old as the timber itself, who walks the deep woods leaning on a staff, her hair a wild grey thicket hung with lichens (she is forever asking, in the old tales, to have it combed), her feet sometimes described as moss-shod, her gown of the woods' own weave. She is no hag of the devouring kind; she is something rarer and more unsettling: an authority . The Bush Grandmother rules the forest's small folk — for she is the mother, queen and matriarch of the Moosleute , the moss people: the little grey-green men and wives of the woods, knee-high to waist-high, clothed in moss, moss-bearded, their faces...