At Offensen on the Aller in Lower Saxony, lived a great farmer, whose name was Hövermann
- Date of account
- Nineteenth-century comparative survey
- Source
- The Fairy Mythology Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries
- Reference
- The Fairy Mythology Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries · selected passage 238
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English with translated traditional material
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
At Offensen on the Aller in Lower Saxony, lived a great farmer, whose name was Hövermann
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyAt Offensen on the Aller in Lower Saxony, lived a great farmer, whose name was Hövermann. He had a boat on the river; and one day two little people came to him and asked him to put them over the water. They went twice over the Aller to a great tract of land that is called the Allerô,[270] which is an uncultivated plain extending so wide and far that one can hardly see over it. When the farmer had crossed the second time one of the Dwarfs said to him, "Will you have now a sum of money or so much a head?" "I'd rather have a sum of money," said the farmer. One of them took off his hat and put it on the farmer's head, and said, "You'd have done better to have taken so much a head." The farmer, who had as yet seen nothing and whose boat had gone as if there was nothing in it, now beheld the whole Allerô swarming (_krimmeln un wimmeln_) with little men. These were the Dwarfs that he had brought over. From that time forward the Hövermanns had the greatest plenty of money, but they are all now dead and gone, and the place is sold. But when was this? Oh!
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.