To earth falls the skeleton shattered.
It needed but small penetration to guess that Goethe had neither seen nor heard of the Provençal song. It seemed, therefore, certain that a version of the Shroud-theft must exist in Germany, or near it—an inference I found to be correct on consulting that excellent work, Goethe's Gedichte erläutert von Heinrich Viehoff (Stuttgart, 1870). So far as the title and the incident of the dancing are concerned, Goethe apparently had recourse to a popular story given in Appel's Book of Spectres, where it is related how, when the guards of the tower looked out at midnight, they saw Master Willibert rise from his grave in the moonshine, seat himself on a high tombstone, and begin to perform on his pocket pipe. Then several other tombs opened, and the dead came forth and danced cheerily over the mounds of the graves. The white shrouds fluttered round their dried-up limbs, and their bones clattered and shook till the clock struck one, when each returned into his narrow house, and the piper put his pipe under his arm and followed their example. The part of the ballad which has to do directly with the Shroud-theft is based upon oral traditions collected by the poet during his sojourn at Teplitz, in Bohemia, in the summer of 1813. Viehoff has ascertained that there are also traces of the legend in Silesia, Moravia, and Tyrol. In these countries the story would seem to be oftenest told in prose; but Viehoff prints a rhymed rendering of the variant localised in Tyrol, where the events are supposed to have occurred at the village of Burgeis:
The twelve night strokes have ceased to sound,
The watchman of Burgeis looks around,
The country all in moonlight sleeps;
Standing the belfry tower beneath
The tombstones, with their wreaths of death,
The wan moon's ghastly pallor steeps.
"Does the young mother in child-birth dead
Rise in her shroud from her lonely bed,