Wilhelm Mannhardt (Friedrichstadt 1831 – Danzig/Gdańsk 1880) was born as the son of Mennonite preacher who settled in Danzig in 1836. Suffering from asthma and a severe spinal deformity, Mannhardt’s attendance to the local gymnasium (1842-51) was frequently interrupted by periods of home-schooling. Reading Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (1835; extended edition published in 1844), was later recalled as a life-changing moment, inspiring his life-long passion for mythology and folklore. In 1851, he enrolled in the University of Berlin to study German philology under Hans Ferdinand Maßmann. Two years later, he moved on to Tübingen, where he received his doctorate in 1854 with a dissertation on the etymologies of Germanic kings’ names (published in 1857). Meanwhile, his mythological interest had brought him into contact with many of Grimm’s other disciples, such as Karl Joseph Simrock, Karl Victor Müllenhoff, and Johann Wilhelm Wolf, as well as with the old master himself. After Wolf’s death in 1855, Mannhardt took over the editorship of the Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde (discontinued in 1859).

Like many of his peers, Mannhardt also became increasingly aware of some of the methodological and conceptual weaknesses in Grimm’s approach. In the preface to his first major publication, Germanische Mythen (1858), he already declared that, despite Grimm’s pioneering efforts, mythology still had a long way to go before it could claim the “status of a true, method-based science”. Following Adalbert Kuhn and Wilhelm Schwartz, he called for adopting a broader (“Indo-Germanic”) comparative framework in order to verifiably reconstruct the historical development of the Germanic mythological tradition. To provide mythology with a solid empirical foundation, Mannhardt envisioned the creation of a “Monumenta Mythica Germaniae”, which, in parallel to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, would bring together all Germanic folk tales, legends, myths and customs in all their local and historical varieties. In 1865, he started to systematically collect information about agrarian traditions, rituals and superstitions surrounding harvest time by sending out some 150,000 questionnaires to clergymen, teachers, colleagues, and farmers’ associations. Here, Mannhardt not only targeted German-speaking communities; the survey was translated into several languages, sent out to France, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, and spread among the Slavic and Baltic communities in the region surrounding his hometown. Mannhardt received c. 2000 responses, which formed the basis for his small-scale studies Roggenwolf und Roggenhund (1865) and Die Korndämonen (1868), as well as for his magnum opus Wald- und Feldkulte (2 vols, 1876-77).

His later works show an increasing influence of the upcoming anthropological-evolutionist theories of Adolf Bastian, Theodor Waitz and Edward Burnett Tylor. Mannhardt, however, a transitional figure between two major paradigms, continued to see himself as a mythologist and remained committed to the philological-historicist aim of tracing back each folk tale and folkloric practice to an idealized, primordial essence (“Grundanschauung”). As it turned out, mythology never developed into an independent discipline, and Mannhardt never managed to obtain an academic position, much to his chagrin. From 1863 until his death in 1880, he was employed as a librarian at the municipal library of Danzig. Posthumously, his work was acknowledged by James Frazer as a major influence on The Golden Bough (1890), and the material he collected with the help of his survey campaign (the first of its kind) has since been treasured by generations of folklorists. Meanwhile, his notes towards a Letto-Preußische Götterlehre (written around 1870, posthumously published in Riga in 1936) became an important source for Latvian and Lithuanian mythologists.