Friar Rush (Low German; Low Saxon; German, Low; Saxon, Low: Broder Rusche, German: Bruder Rausch, Broder Ruus) is the title of a medieval Low German legend, surviving in a 1488 edition in verse form. During the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous High German, Scandinavian (Danish and Swedish), Dutch and English translations and adaptations in Volksbuch or chap book form were printed. The first High German edition dates to 1515, printed in Strassburg.
The story along with those of Till Eulenspiegel, Faust and Marcolf was among the most successful popular literature in 16th-century Germany.The various adaptations vary in their style and focus, some intending to set a moral example or criticize excesses in monastic life, others simply intending to amuse the reader.
Bruder Rausch (Broder Ruus and variants, in the English version Frier Rush). Early Modern German Low German; Low Saxon; German, Low; Saxon, Low: Rusche, German: Rausch is the term for a loud swooshing noise.[1]
In the narrative, the devil infiltrates a monastery full of young monks, posing as one Bruder Rausch and getting hired as a kitchen servant. Acting as a prankster, Friar Rausch causes various episodes of commotion among the monks. Rausch is assigned the task of procuring women for the abbot and the other monks every night. On one occasion, he is about to be chastised by the cook for being delayed. Rush throws the cook into a boiling cauldron and takes his place, working to the satisfaction of the monks for seven years, but constantly causing strife among them. Rausch's demonic identity is finally discovered by the abbot, who expels him from the monastery by means of the sacred mass. In the High German version, Rush then travels to England and possesses the king's daughter. He is again exorcized after the abbot is called in from Saxony for the purpose, who banishes the demon inside a hill near the monastery.
An analysis by Shakespearean scholar George Lyman Kittredge (1900) discusses various possibilities, perhaps inconclusively. He concedes that the tale may well have originated in Low German,[2] But he has also seized on the possibility that the Icelandic Frá þvî er púkinn gjörðiz ábóti may represent an earlier simplistic version of Friar Rush that has survived, and this combined with elements of the German house-kobold tale about the "Hödeken" resulted in the familiar version.[3] The episode of Friar Rush boiling the cook is paralleled in the story of another kobold, the Chimmeke of Loitz in Pomerania.[4] And the service of Rush guarding a man's wife, which only occurs in the English version, is paralleled in the story of the Hödeken.[5]
Kittredge criticized the then-common notion the helpful-and-satanic Friar Rush wasn't the only one adapted into English, but it had also forked into a good "friar", akin to Robin Goodfellow. Both were apparently helpful household spirits that accepted offerings of cream, according to a misreading of Samuel Harsnett (1603) A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures by past commentators. In fact, Kittredge argues, Harsnett was not speaking of any folkloric supernatural "friar" lurking in the kitchen, but polemically blaming actual flesh-and-blood clergymen (led inside homes at appointed hours) and dairy-maids as being the real-life culprits who made the cream offerings to home-sprites disappear.
Kittredge however credited Reginald Scott's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) for recognizing a parallel between Rush and the kobold Hödeken (spelt Hudgin or Hutgin).[6]
Friar Rush appears in Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker's If This Be Not a Good Play the Devill is in It.
Nineteenth-century German writer Wilhelm Hertz published a novel Bruder Rausch in 1882 based on the story.