Like the folktales of every people, the stories and anecdotes of the Czechs were the literature of the illiterate. Folktales functioned as cautionary fables, as repositories of folk wisdom and accepted morality. But what was this wisdom and morality? The Czechs made fun of their masters and tyrants by demonstrating that powers both earthly and hellish could be outsmarted and overcome; they celebrated folk heroes, those strong and simple people who overcome dragons, kings, and sorcerers. In these stories, goodness seldom wins out without a good dose of wiliness.
In one tale, the protagonist, who acquired various magical devices during his youth, is now old. He manages to fool the devil and thus evades hell. But perhaps more telling, he later pulls a fast one on Saint Peter and sneaks into heaven. Remember that this is a country where Protestantism was brutally suppressed at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War; where the Catholic Church was often the handmaiden of the Austrian ruling class.
During the almost three hundred years of Austrian occupation, vernacular literature preserved the Czech language at a time when most "serious" literature was written in German. In Bohemia, the nineteenth century saw a tremendous surge in interest in all aspects of the folk vocabulary. It was part of the nationalist sentiment that swept most of Europe. Since the large towns were dominated by the German-speaking official class, the native traditions were sought in the countryside and small villages, in the local usages, dialects, songs, and tales of the common people.
The best-loved folktale collection was compiled by Božena Nĕmcová. First published in 1845, it has gone through countless editions since. Born in 1820, Nĕmcová epitomized her generation. She grew up speaking German as well as Czech and married an official of the Austrian bureaucracy. She learned of the nationalist movement and met many of its leading lights, including Karel Erben, the other great contemporary collectors of folk literature. Nĕmcová grew up writing verses in German, but once she became a nationalist, she is said to have burned them. She not only collected folktales but also reported on all aspects of folklore: the traditions, habits, sayings and proverbs dances, costumes and idiomatic expressions of the countryside.
"The Night Watch," the story retold below, is grimmer than some of Nĕmcová's sunnier, morally uplifting tales and is usually excluded from more recent fairy tale anthologies intended for children. However, it captures the ethos of small Bohemian village better than some of her other narratives, which are more concerned with princes winning the hearts of princesses. In "The Night Watch" a poor school teacher fools hellhounds into giving him a fortune with a combination of courage, cunning, and not a little luck. Note that the holy water that the schoolteacher sprinkles around him to make an impenetrable shield functions more as a magic potion than as a sacramental element. Note also that the priest who gives him the holy water manages to get a good part of the loot for himself: a bit of realism in a time and place where the stature of the village priest was often in question.
Outsmarting the devil is a favorite theme of Czech folklore. The devil usually dresses it the green costume of a gamekeeper, one of the more despised representatives of authority. Gamekeepers' primary role was to keep poachers – invariably
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