📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº0270 ACTIVE

William Tell and the Apple

William Tell and the Apple is a legend from Altdorf, Canton of Uri, CH — a folk story passed down over generations. This file collects its origins, its meaning and how it has been retold.

Where does the legend of William Tell and the Apple come from?

Location: Altdorf, Canton of Uri, CH
Kind of legend: Myth
Coordinates: 46.88, 8.644
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is the legend of William Tell and the Apple?

The story is dated 1307. The oldest text that tells it was written around 1470, in the chancery of a small alpine canton: the Weisses Buch von Sarnen, a copybook of charters compiled by the Obwalden land-scribe Hans Schriber. His Tell has no first name, no village, no date and no shooting distance. The bailiff Gessler is named there, but Swiss print called him Grissler for the next two centuries. Wilhelm, Bürglen, the son Walter and the date of Monday 19 November 1307 are all the work of one sixteenth-century chronicler, Aegidius Tschudi; Schiller took them almost whole in 1804. Even the spare arrow is older than Switzerland's claim on it: Saxo Grammaticus tells the same scene around 1200, with a Danish archer named Toko, an apple, a king called Harald and three arrows drawn instead of one. Uri had the man who first printed that comparison, in 1760, burned by the executioner in the market square of Altdorf. The record of the argument is better documented than the shot.

William Tell and the Apple, Altdorf, Canton of Uri, Switzerland — “The Arrest of Tell”, a mosaic by Hans Sandreuter, 1901 (244.5 × 474 cm, inv. LM 59002), on the outer façade of the armoury wing of the Landesmuseum in Zurich. Sandreuter won the competition in 1897 and died on 1 June 1901 without finishing the series. Note what is not in it: there is no apple. Neither is there one on Richard Kissling's monument at Altdorf. The scene shows the hat on the pole, three men-at-arms in Habsburg surcoats, and Tell with his crossbow beside his son. It illustrates well, but it should be read for what it is: almost the entire “Tell landscape” today's visitor sees was made in the nineteenth century — six hundred years after the events it depicts, and four hundred after the earliest text that tells them. Image: Hans Sandreuter; photograph: Roland zh · CC BY-SA 3.0

What is the history of William Tell and the Apple?

The apple shot is dated to 1307. The oldest text that tells it was written around 1470. That gap of some hundred and sixty years is the first fact about William Tell, and most of the others follow from it. What survives from the years around 1300 is a small pile of very unromantic parchment. The Federal Charter agreed by the men of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden at the beginning of August 1291 is a working document: it binds the three valleys to mutual defence, forbids the buying of judicial office, sets death for murderers and exile for arsonists, regulates the recovery of debts and orders everyone to obey the judges they have. It is specific, it is dull, and it says nothing at all about a marksman, a bailiff, a hat on a pole or an oath sworn at night in a meadow. Werner Stauffacher and Walter Fürst, two of the men the legend later placed at the Rütli, do appear in genuine documents of the period. Tell does not, and neither does any murdered Habsburg bailiff. The story surfaces in the chancery of a small alpine canton. Hans Schriber, land-scribe of Obwalden, compiled between about 1470 and 1474 the manuscript now catalogued as Staatsarchiv Obwalden A.02.CHR.0003 and known since the seventeenth century, from its white leather binding, as the Weisses Buch von Sarnen. It is a copybook: five hundred pages of treaties, charters and settlements. Inside it, on some twenty-five pages, Schriber set down the earliest known narrative of the founding of the Confederacy, and inside that narrative a man called Thäll. Schriber's Tell is thin. He is not given a first name, not given a birthplace, not given a date. His child is a Kind, not a son. The prose is flat and administrative: 'du der Tall kam untz an die ze Tellen blatten … du swang er den Nawen zu hinn und namm sin schieszüg und sprang üs dem Nawen üf die blatten und stiess den Nawen von jmm' — Tell reaches the slab, swings the boat in, takes his shooting gear, jumps, and shoves the boat back into the storm. Then he runs overland to the hollow way at Küssnacht, waits behind a bush, and shoots an arrow into 'dem lantvogt gesler'. Everything the modern story is made of arrives afterwards, and it can be watched arriving. The Tellenlied, a ballad first written down in 1501 inside Ludwig Sterner's chronicle of the Burgundian wars and printed at Zurich around 1540, supplies the child's sex, the shooting distance and the punchline: 'Zwentzig vnd hundert schritt, die must er stän' — a hundred and twenty paces — and one spare bolt kept in his göller, with which, he tells the bailiff, 'ich wölt' euch auch hin troffen'. The ballad also supplies the political claim that made the story worth telling: 'davon entsprung der erste Eydgnoss', from this sprang the first Confederate. Melchior Russ of Lucerne, writing between 1482 and 1488, leaves the bailiff without any name at all and has Tell shoot him from the slab itself, out on the lake, with no hollow way in sight. Petermann Etterlin put the tale into print at Basel in 1507 and turned Schriber's gesler into Grissler. Around 1512 Altdorf staged it as a play, the Urner Tellenspiel, which has a claim to be the earliest surviving political drama in German. The version everyone knows is the work of one man, Aegidius Tschudi of Glarus, who finished his Chronicon Helveticum around 1570 and had it printed only in 1734-36. Tschudi gave the hero the first name Wilhelm, the village of Bürglen, a son called Walter and a bailiff called Hermann Gessler, and he pinned the shot to a weekday and a date: Monday, 19 November 1307. Friedrich Schiller took Tschudi almost whole for the play he finished in 1804; Rossini's opera followed in 1829; and the hero of a fifteenth-century chancery note became the founding figure of a nation-state.

Timeline: the documented record of William Tell and the Apple

c. 1200 Saxo Grammaticus writes the Toko episode in Book X of the Gesta Danorum: the apple set on a stick, the son stood in the stick's place, three arrows drawn from the quiver, and the answer to King Harald that the others were meant for him. Two further chapters give Toko a second forced ordeal and the killing of the king by an arrow from ambush.
Beginning of August 1291 Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden seal the Federal Charter. It regulates mutual defence, the buying of judicial office, penalties for murder and arson, debt recovery and obedience to judges. It names no Tell, no bailiff and no oath at the Rütli.
c. 1470-1474 Hans Schriber, land-scribe of Obwalden, compiles the Weisses Buch von Sarnen. Inside a five-hundred-page copybook of charters, some twenty-five pages carry the earliest known narrative of the Confederacy's origin — and with it a man called Thäll, with no first name, no birthplace and no date.
1482-1488 Melchior Russ of Lucerne writes his chronicle. His bailiff has no name at all, and his Tell shoots the man from the slab itself, out on Lake Uri — not in the hollow way at Küssnacht.
1501 The Tellenlied is written down in Ludwig Sterner's chronicle of the Burgundian wars. Stanza nine gives the distance for the first time — 'Zwentzig vnd hundert schritt', a hundred and twenty paces — and stanza twelve the political point: from this sprang the first Confederate.
1507 Petermann Etterlin's Kronika is printed at Basel, the first printed telling. He copies the White Book but turns its 'gesler' into Grissler — the form Swiss print will use for the next two centuries.
c. 1570 Aegidius Tschudi completes the Chronicon Helveticum, printed only in 1734-36. He supplies the first name Wilhelm, the village of Bürglen, the son Walter, the bailiff Hermann Gessler and the date: Monday, 19 November 1307. He is also the first writer to mention a chapel on the Tellsplatte.
1607 François Guillimann, who had repeated the story in his Swiss antiquities of 1598, writes to Melchior Goldast that on examination 'tout ce récit me paraît une pure fable'. It is the earliest recorded doubt.
1675 Bartholomäus Anhorn the Younger devotes a passage of his Magiologia to the shot, still reckoning the distance at a hundred and twenty paces and arguing that Tell managed it by skill and not, like the magic marksmen of the witch trials, by forbidden arts.
1722 Josias Simler states the reason for the name change in print: of a family called Grisler nothing further can be found, but of the Gesslers plenty can — they held Brunegg castle and sold the lordship of Grüningen to Zurich in 1409.
30 May and 4 June 1759 After seven years, the Uri parish vicar Johannes Imhoff finally sends the documents demanded of him to prove Tell's existence. Rochholz, reading them in 1877, calls them adventurous and fruitless trifles.
1760 Uriel Freudenberger publishes anonymously Der Wilhelm Tell, ein dänisches Mährgen — Guillaume Tell, fable danoise — setting out the Toko parallel. The government of Uri has it burned publicly at Altdorf by the executioner and on 4 June writes to the other cantons urging condemnation. Felix von Balthasar's official rebuttal earns him a letter of thanks and two gold medals.
1804 Schiller's Wilhelm Tell is premiered at Weimar on 17 March. Working from Tschudi, Schiller shortens the shot to eighty paces and has Gessler add that Tell had boasted of hitting a man at a hundred.
28 August 1895 Richard Kissling's Tell Monument is unveiled on the Rathausplatz at Altdorf, its plinth cut with Tschudi's date of 1307 in protest at the federal decision to celebrate 1291 instead. Hans Sandreuter paints the background on the tower behind it.
1901 Hans Sandreuter completes the mosaic 'Tell's arrest' (244.5 by 474 cm, inv. LM 59002) for the armoury facade of the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, one of fourteen he had won the commission for in 1897. He dies on 1 June of that year with the series unfinished. It is the image that illustrates this entry: the hat on its pole held out by cowed villagers, three men-at-arms in Habsburg surcoats, and Tell with his crossbow beside his son. Like Kissling's monument, it contains no apple.

Is there a rational explanation for William Tell and the Apple?

The detail our own summary treated as the heart of the episode — the second arrow, and what it was for — is the detail that is oldest, and it is not Swiss. Saxo Grammaticus finished the Gesta Danorum around 1200, some two hundred and seventy years before Hans Schriber picked up his pen. In Book X, chapter 7, a warrior named Toko boasts in his cups that he could hit an apple set at a distance on a stick, 'pomum quantumcumque exiguum baculo e distantia superpositum prima spiculi directione feriret'. King Harald Bluetooth has the man's son stood 'baculi loco', in the place of the stick, with the apple on his head. Toko turns the boy's face away so the sight of the missile will not frighten him, then draws not one spare shaft but two: 'Tribus deinde sagittis pharetra expeditis', three arrows out of the quiver, and the first hits. Asked why he took three when he only had one attempt, he answers: 'Ut in te primi errorem reliquorum acumine vindicarem, ne mea forte innocentia poenam, tua impunitatem experiretur violentia' — so that with the points of the others I might avenge on you the failure of the first, lest my innocence suffer punishment and your violence go unpunished. Saxo then has Harald force Toko into a second ordeal, a headlong descent of the Kullen rock on boards strapped to his feet, which Toko survives; and in the following chapter Toko finally kills Harald with an arrow, from ambush, while the king has stepped into the bushes. Apple, spare arrows, defiant answer, a second forced ordeal survived, and a tyrant shot from cover: five elements, all in one Danish text, all more than two centuries before the Swiss one. How the parallel reaches an English reader matters, because the usual route serves it short. Oliver Elton's translation of 1894 is the freely available English Saxo, and it stops at Book IX; Toko survives in it only as the first item of an appendix of 'Passages from Later Books', printed with an editorial ellipsis where Saxo's praise of father and son stood. The Kullen descent is not there. Harald's death is not there. The English-language reader is therefore shown exactly one coincidence with the Tell story and none of the other four. The Swiss knew this early and reacted badly. François Guillimann, who had reported the Tell story in his Swiss antiquities of 1598, wrote to Melchior Goldast in 1607 that on closer examination 'tout ce récit me paraît une pure fable'. In 1752 the Bernese pastor Uriel Freudenberger, through intermediaries, had a sceptical essay placed in the hands of the Uri parish vicar Johannes Imhoff at Schattdorf, with the mock-courteous suggestion that Uri refute him from the Tell documents it surely possessed. It took Imhoff seven years to answer: his papers went off on 30 May and 4 June 1759, and Eduard Rochholz, who read them, called them adventurous trifles. On the strength of that emptiness Freudenberger published anonymously in 1760 the pamphlet known in German as Der Wilhelm Tell, ein dänisches Mährgen and in French as Guillaume Tell, fable danoise, which laid the Toko parallel out in print for the first time. The government of Uri had it burned publicly at Altdorf by the executioner and, on 4 June 1760, wrote to the other cantons pressing them to condemn it. Felix von Balthasar answered it officially with a Schutzschrift für Wilhelm Tell (Zurich, 1760), whose central argument was that nobody builds chapels over a fairy tale; Uri sent him a gracious letter and two gold medals. Rochholz's verdict in 1877 was that the counter-evidence hurriedly gathered in Uri to refute the pamphlet was 'nicht weniger Träume und Fälschungen' than the papers Imhoff had sent — no less dreams and forgeries. Two smaller things can be checked with arithmetic, and both fail. Tschudi dates the shot to Monday, 19 November 1307; in the Julian calendar then in use, 19 November 1307 was a Sunday. This is not a general incapacity of his: his other date, the Rütli oath on 'the Wednesday before Martinmas' 1307, converts exactly to 8 November 1307, which was indeed a Wednesday. And the fifty paces this entry used to quote appear in no source consulted. The Tellenlied says a hundred and twenty; Bartholomäus Anhorn, discussing the shot in his Magiologia of 1675, still says a hundred and twenty and worries whether it could be done without witchcraft; Schiller cut it to eighty. Fifty is ours. The name is the neatest case of all. Schriber's manuscript has 'gesler', but the printed tradition that Switzerland actually read had Grissler for two centuries: Etterlin in 1507, Sebastian Franck in 1538, Stettler in 1627, Cysat in 1659, Steiner in 1684, Fäsi as late as 1765, and the inscription put up in the Küssnacht chapel in 1768. The switch back to Gessler comes with the eighteenth-century demand for documents, and Josias Simler states the reason out loud in 1722: of a family called Grisler nothing further can be found, but of the Gesslers plenty can — they held Brunegg castle and sold the lordship of Grüningen to Zurich in 1409. Rochholz put it bluntly: the chroniclers made of that name an instrument of continued historical fraud. None of this proves that nothing happened in Uri around 1300. It dates the telling, which is a different and more answerable question.

Can you visit William Tell and the Apple?

Almost the entire Tell landscape is younger than the debate about whether Tell existed, and walking it in date order is the best way to see that. Altdorf, capital of Uri, is twenty minutes by train or bus from Flüelen at the head of Lake Lucerne. The Tell Monument stands in the open on the Rathausplatz and costs nothing to visit. Richard Kissling won the national competition in 1892 and the bronze was unveiled on 28 August 1895: a mountaineer with a crossbow over his shoulder and a hand on his son's shoulder, with no apple anywhere in the group. Read the plinth. It carries the year 1307, which is Tschudi's date for the Rütli oath, and Uri had it cut there in deliberate protest after the federal parliament decided around 1890 to make 1291 and the Federal Charter the country's founding moment instead. The painted background on the tower behind the statue is by Hans Sandreuter, the same Basel artist who made the mosaic used to illustrate this entry. A short walk away is the Tellspielhaus, home of the Tellspielgesellschaft. Altdorf first played Schiller's drama on 25 June 1899 in a temporary wooden house on the Schützenmatte; the present brick theatre was begun in 1924 and opened in 1925. Performances run in seasons rather than continuously — the last was in 2024 and the next is announced as TELL 2028 — so check before travelling. Bürglen, four kilometres up the Schächental and served by local bus, is where Tschudi put Tell's birth. The Tell-Museum occupies the medieval Wattigwiler tower at Klausenstrasse 139a and has been open since 1966, with more than five hundred objects tracing six centuries of the Tell image rather than six centuries of Tell. In 2026 the season runs 16 May to 18 October, Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays; roughly 10:00-11:30 and 13:30-17:00 in May, June, September and October, and 10:00-17:00 in July and August. Admission is CHF 9 for adults, CHF 7 for students, CHF 5 for children and CHF 16 for a family. Groups of ten or more can arrange winter visits. In the village, the Tell chapel was built in 1582 on the spot local tradition assigned to Tell's house; a fresco cycle of 1588, among the oldest Tell paintings anywhere, was found under the plaster during the 1949 restoration. The Tellsplatte, the slab Tell is said to have jumped onto, is on the Uri arm of the lake between Flüelen and Sisikon. It is reached by lake steamer to the Tellsplatte landing stage or on foot along the Weg der Schweiz, and about eighty stone steps drop from the path to the chapel and the pier; the stretch from the landing stage to the chapel is passable with a pushchair. The chapel you see was built in 1879 and its four large frescoes — the Rütli oath, the apple shot, Tell's leap and the killing of Gessler — were painted by Ernst Stückelberg in 1880-82, after he won a competition held by the Swiss Art Association in 1876. The site was already a pilgrimage destination in the sixteenth century, and a chapel here is often said to date from 1388, but the earliest documents cited locally are of 1516 or 1530, and none of the three oldest chroniclers of the legend — the White Book, Melchior Russ or Etterlin — knows of any chapel on the slab at all. The first writer to mention a 'Heilig-Hüsslin' there is Tschudi, in the sixteenth century.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-15 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas