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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 depicted as:
- a "Professor Dr"
- proud, stoic, and unable or unwilling to admit or face failure or imminent disaster in his professional or personal life (frequently the basis for the humour in these novels)
- a philologist
- the author of a fictional book Portuguese Irregular Verbs, described as "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" (compounded from igel = hedgehog and feld = field)
- tall
- born on May Day, 1 May
- initially a student in Heidelberg, Germany
- the second for his friend Prinzel's duel, which he had mistakenly arranged 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
Book series
The books in the series are:
- 2003 Portuguese Irregular Verbs
- 2003 The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
- 2003 At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances
- 2011 Unusual Uses for Olive Oil
- 2021 Your Inner Hedgehog
The illustrations in the books are by Iain McIntosh.