“One Single Dance Form like the Sword Dance Can Open Up a Whole Lost World”: The Vienna Ritualists and the Study of Sword Dancing and Secret Men's Unions between the World Wars

Abstract

This article examines the study of the purported connection between sword dancing and secret men's unions, or Männerbünde. This notion was promoted by the “Vienna ritualists,” a group of Germanists and folklorists from the University of Vienna, which included Richard Wolfram, Otto Höfler, Elisabeth (Lily) Weiser, and their professor, Rudolf Much, in the interwar years until the end of World War II. Wolfram, author of Schwerttanz und Männerbund [“Sword Dancing and Men's Unions”] was the most important for this approach, but he applied the same “Germanic continuity” model as the others, and drew on evidence and models they provided. Their work was consistent with that of older German and Austrian scholars, including Karl Müllenhoff, Wilhelm Mannhardt, Heinrich Schurtz, and Leopold von Schroeder, who wrote on the same and related topics.