One of the most famous Germanic coins is known colloquially as the “Wildman taler.”

Multiple examples of this design type are offered in Fritz Rudolf Künker’s March 21 auction of coins and medals from Brunswick.

Typical Wildman coins show a gigantic beast, usually hairy and muscled, wearing a loincloth of leaves, with only its hands and feet free of fur. The creature is often seen grasping the trunk of a tree, sometimes with a city or forest in the background.

The image was influenced by pagan tradition in the Harz Mountain region of Germany, where the wildman appears in folklore and other forms of art, not exclusively on coinage.

Harz was a major silver-producing region and the imagery is a reference to the mining city Wildemann and the legend of its foundation. As the story goes, in 1529, miners who were sent out to find new ore deposits discovered a wild man who lived with a wild woman. They captured him, but he died as a result of his injuries. Large silver ore deposits were reportedly discovered where he had lived.

The Wildman, according to Germanic Coinages, Charlemagne through Wilhelm II by William D. Craig, was the medieval European equivalent of the American Bigfoot or Sasquatch. The legend of a demonic “Wildman” is found even in Sir Walter Scott’s Antiquary of 1816.

“Virtually all wildman coinage was struck at Zellerfeld in the Harz,” according to Craig, “hence the device doubles as a Mint mark.”

One of the marquee Wildman coins in the auction is the 1605 silver double reichstaler (57.48 grams) struck for Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. In Very Fine condition, the coin has an estimate of €2,000 ($2,216 U.S.).

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