Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld

Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld is the main character in a series of short, humorous novels by Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith.

In the books, Von Igelfeld is:

• a "Professor Dr";
• 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;
• the 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 in 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;

Sabre duel of German students, around 1900, painting by Georg Mühlberg (1863-1925)

• 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 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 Professor Walter Schöffler-Henschell at the University of Wiesbaden.