Umbrarium

In German-speaking lands an alp is a night being whose name is the same Germanic word that becomes English elf. Old High German glosses already treat alp as an eerie nature-being, later as the thing that troubles women in sleep. Jacob Grimm, in Teutonic Mythology, set the alp among wights and elves. The attack is Alpdruck or Alpdrücke, elf-pressure: the being sits astride the sleeper, grows heavier, and leaves the person awake, breathless, and unable to cry out. German Alptraum, nightmare, is literally alp-dream. D. L. Ashliman's folklore collection reprints Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Deutsche Sagen tale of the alp and later regional beliefs about how such visitors enter through keyholes and how they are caught or turned away.

The alp is typically spoken of as male. The mara, mahr, or mart — the being whose name sits inside English nightmare — is more often feminine in High and Low German tellings, a rider rather than only a sitter, sometimes a neighbouring girl out of her body. The two overlap in practice and were sometimes used as synonyms, yet they are not one vocabulary. An alp in many stories wears a Tarnkappe, a cap or cloak of concealment from which its power comes; steal the cap and you have the alp. Sexual assault is rarer in the German alp tales than in Latin incubus literature, though milk-theft from nursing mothers appears. Shape-changing into cats, pigs, or mist is recorded. The victim's isolation is the point: a houseful of family, and no voice.

Remedies are household and precise. Shoes turned at the bedside, a mirror, plugged keyholes, an inherited glove, calling the sleeper by baptismal name, iron, and the approach of dawn all appear in collections. Some tales trap the visitor until it bargains. The tradition belongs with other European chest-sitters — Hungarian lidércnyomás, Slavic zmora — as a way of naming sleep paralysis and night terror without reducing the stories to a medical footnote. People told them as encounters, complete with neighbours who were suspected of going out as maren.

Later art, from Fuseli's nightmare onward, mixed alp, mara, and demon into one image of a brute on a woman's chest. The German folk alp is smaller, stranger, and closer to elf-belief than to a Christian devil. It is a visitor through the ordinary openings of a room. Read with care, the stories preserve a language for nights when the body will not obey and the mind cannot call for help — and they distinguish the German elf-presser from the mare that rides, even when both leave the same sweat on the sheet.