William Tell

According to the legend, Tell was an expert mountain climber and marksman with a crossbow who assassinated Albrecht Gessler, a tyrannical reeve of the Austrian dukes of the House of Habsburg positioned in Altdorf, in the canton of Uri.

Tell's defiance and tyrannicide encouraged the population to open rebellion and to make a pact against the foreign rulers with neighbouring Schwyz and Unterwalden, marking the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy.

[2] An equally early account of Tell is found in the Tellenlied, a song composed in the 1470s, with its oldest extant manuscript copy dating to 1501.

[3] The text then enumerates the cantons of the Confederacy, and says was expanded with "current events" during the course of the Burgundy Wars, ending with the death of Charles the Bold in 1477.

[6] There are a number of sources for the Tell legend later than the earliest account in the White Book of Sarnen but earlier than Tschudi's version of ca.

[7] Another early account is in Petermann Etterlin's Chronicle of the Swiss Confederation (German: Kronika von der loblichen Eydtgenossenschaft) of 1507, the earliest printed version of the Tell story.

It is Tschudi's account of the legend, however, which became the major model for later writers, even prior to its edition in print in the 1730s,[9] A widespread veneration of Tell, including sight-seeing excursions to the scenes of his deeds, can be ascertained for the early 16th century.

Peter Hagendorf, a soldier in the Thirty Years' War, mentions a visit to 'the chapel where William Tell escaped' in his diary.

They appeared at a number of important peasant conferences during the war, symbolizing the continuity of the present rebellion with the resistance movement against the Habsburg overlords at the origin of the Swiss Confederacy.

Unternährer and Dahinden fled to the Entlebuch alps before the arrival of the troops of general Sebastian Peregrin Zwyers; Zemp escaped to the Alsace.

After the suppression of the rebellion, the peasants voted for a tyrannicide, directly inspired by the Tell legend, attempting to kill the Lucerne Schultheiss Ulrich Dulliker.

The assassination attempt — an exceptional act in the culture of the Old Swiss Confederacy — was widely recognized and welcomed among the peasant population, but its impact was not sufficient to rekindle the rebellion.

[13] Even though it did not have any direct political effect, its symbolic value was considerable, placing the Lucerne authorities in the role of the tyrant (Habsburg and Gessler) and the peasant population in that of the freedom fighters (Tell).

Throughout the long nineteenth century, and into the World War II period, Tell was perceived as a symbol of rebellion against tyranny both in Switzerland and in Europe.

[16] Tschudi's Chronicon Helveticum continued to be taken at face value as a historiographical source well into the 19th century, so that Tschudi's version of the legend is not only used as a model in Friedrich Schiller's play William Tell (1804) but is also reported in historiographical works of the time, including Johannes von Müller's History of the Swiss Confederation (German: Geschichte Schweizerischer Eidgenossenschaft, 1780).

Characters from the play portrayed on the Obers and Unters include: Hermann Geszler, Walter Fürst, Rudolf Harras and William Tell.

Each August since 1958, Tell City's centennial year, the town has held "Schweizer Fest," a community festival of entertainment, stage productions, historical presentations, carnival rides, beer garden, sporting events and class reunions, to honor its Swiss-German heritage.

The depiction is in marked contrast with that used by the Helvetic Republic, where Tell is shown as a landsknecht rather than a peasant, with a sword at his belt and a feathered hat, bending down to pick up his son who is still holding the apple.

Hodler's depiction of Tell was often described as sacral, and compared to classical depictionons of God Father, Moses, John the Baptist, Jesus, or the Archangel Michael.

The reason for the ban is not known, but may have been related to the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1938 by young Swiss Maurice Bavaud[21] (executed on 14 May 1941, and later dubbed "a new William Tell" by Rolf Hochhuth), or the subversive nature of the play.

[citation needed] In Switzerland, the importance of Tell had declined somewhat by the end of the 19th century, outside of Altdorf and Interlaken which established their tradition of performing Schiller's play in regular intervals in 1899 and 1912, respectively.

[27] The Japanese historical fantasy manga series Wolfsmund, written and illustrated by Mitsuhisa Kuji and published by Enterbrain, is a retelling of the rebellion started by William Tell.

François Guillimann, a statesman of Fribourg and later historian and advisor of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II, wrote to Melchior Goldast in 1607: "I followed popular belief by reporting certain details in my Swiss antiquities [published in 1598], but when I examine them closely the whole story seems to me to be pure fable."

In 1760, Simeon Uriel Freudenberger from Luzern anonymously published a tract arguing that the legend of Tell in all likelihood was based on the Danish saga of Palnatoke.

In the 1840s, Joseph Eutych Kopp (1793–1866) published skeptical reviews of the folkloristic aspects of the foundational legends of the Old Confederacy, causing "polemical debates" both within and outside of academia.

The decision, taken in 1891, to make 1 August the Swiss National Day is to be seen in this context, an ostentative move away from the traditional Befreiungstradition and the celebration of the deed of Tell to the purely documentary evidence of the Federal Charter of 1291.

[32] The canton of Uri, in defiant reaction to this decision taken at the federal level, erected the Tell Monument in Altdorf in 1895, with the date 1307 inscribed prominently on the base of the statue.

From pre-Christian Norse mythology, Rochholz compares Ullr, who bears the epithet of Boga-As ("bow-god"), Heimdall and also Odin himself, who according to the Gesta Danorum (Book 1, chapter 8.16) assisted Haddingus by shooting ten bolts from a crossbow in one shot, killing as many foes.

35–41) that the legend of the master marksman shooting an apple (or similar small target) was known outside the Germanic sphere (Germany, Scandinavia, England) and the adjacent regions (Finland and the Baltic) in India, Arabia, Persia and the Balkans (Serbia).

As with William Tell, Palnatoke is forced by the ruler (in this case King Harald Bluetooth) to shoot an apple off his son's head as proof of his marksmanship.