Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld (character)
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Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld is the main fictional character of a series of humorous novels, by Scottish author and academic, Alexander McCall Smith.
Von Igelfeld is, or was:
- proud, stoic, and unable or unwilling to admit or face failure or imminent disaster in his professional or personal life - which is the basis for the humour in these novels;
- a philologist;
- author of a fictional book Portuguese Irregular Verbs - "the seminal work on Romance philology" and "a lengthy book of some twelve hundred pages";
- proud of his aristocratic German heritage;
- an academic at the fictional Institute of Romance Philology at Regensburg, Germany;
- a colleague of the other major characters of the book series, Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) Florianus Prinzel and Professor Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer;
- a compound word name in the German language meaning "hedgehog field" - igel=hedgehog, feld=field;
- said to be quite tall;
- born on May Day, 1 May;
- initially a student in Heidelberg, Germany;
- second for a duel by his friend Prinzel, which he had arranged, mistakenly, in a drunken discussion;
- a doctoral student of (fictitious) Professor Dr Dr Dr Dieter Vogelsang, in Munich, Germany, studying Celtic philology and in particular Early Irish, and completed a field trip to Cork to gather data on its profanity;
- a doctoral student (second assistant) of (fictitious) Professor Walter Schoeffler-Henschell at the University of Wiesbaden.
[edit] Book Series
The books of a series are:
- 2003 Portuguese Irregular Verbs
- 2003 The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
- 2003 At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances
The books' illustrations are by Iain McIntosh.
