Wilhelm Tell: The Legend, and What Historians Actually Know

No record from his own time shows that Wilhelm Tell existed. The story first appears in the White Book of Sarnen, written around 1470, long after the events it describes, and its famous apple shot has a twin in a Danish chronicle written around 1200. Historians treat Tell as a legend that shaped Switzerland, not as a documented person.

Live here long enough and Tell finds you. He stands in bronze in Altdorf, he is the hero of a famous German play, and, you would think, he is on the five-franc coin in your pocket. The story is simple and very good. It is also, as far as anyone can prove, a story.

The story, as Switzerland tells it

A Habsburg bailiff called Gessler hangs his hat on a pole in Altdorf and orders everyone to bow to it. Tell refuses. As punishment Gessler makes him shoot an apple off his own son's head, and Tell hits the apple. He is arrested anyway, escapes from Gessler's boat by leaping onto a rock slab on the lake, and later waits for Gessler in the Hohle Gasse, a sunken lane near Küssnacht, and shoots him. Every one of those scenes, the hat, the apple, the leap and the lane, is already in the oldest written version (Swiss National Museum).

Where the story really comes from

That oldest version is in the White Book of Sarnen, a volume of documents and chronicle that Hans Schriber, the state secretary of Obwalden, put together around 1470. Unterwalden had been placed under an imperial ban in 1469 and needed to show that its rights were old and legitimate. A tale of cruel bailiffs justly resisted served that purpose well (Swiss National Museum). A song about Tell, the Tellenlied, follows around 1477, and in the 16th century the chronicler Aegidius Tschudi gave the story a firm date, 1307 (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, in German).

The apple is older than Tell

Between about 1185 and 1200, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote down the story of an archer, Toko, also known as Palnatoki, whom a Danish king forces to shoot an apple off his son's head (Swiss National Museum). The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says Schriber joined the Tell story to this northern apple-shot motif. A good scene travels.

So did Tell exist?

In 1760 an anonymous pamphlet, «Der Wilhelm Tell, ein dänisches Mährgen» (William Tell, a Danish fairy tale), argued that the whole story came from the north. The public found that unacceptable. But once historians in the 19th century, led by Joseph Eutych Kopp, built Swiss history on documents rather than tradition, there was no hiding it: no record from Tell's own time mentions him. Today the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland calls him a legendary hero of the liberation tradition (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland).

Tell may never have lived. Switzerland would look different without him all the same.

Why he still matters

Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell, from 1804, turned the legend into one of Europe's great freedom stories. Altdorf put up its first Tell monument in 1583, and the bronze of Tell and his son on the square today is by Richard Kissling, from 1895. Even the Swiss post bus plays him: in 1924 the postal service adopted its three-tone horn, a motif from Rossini's William Tell overture (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland). Next time a yellow bus honks at you on a mountain road, that is Tell saying hello.

And the man on the five-franc coin?

Not Tell. Swissmint, the federal mint, says it plainly: the figure on the Fünfliber is an alpine herdsman, and the first sketches of its designer, Paul Burkhard, show exactly that (Swissmint). He has been on the coin since the 1920s, and the federal government notes that many people still see Tell in him (admin.ch). You may now correct your Swiss colleagues. Gently.

More Swiss stories, checked: the whole history of Switzerland in 23 minutes and the cuckoo clock that is not Swiss.