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38. The Hero Who Never Was
Unfortunately, all the statues, monuments, and sites on the William Tell pilgrimage circuit commemorate heroic deeds of derring-do that never occurred, and a man who never was. Today, historians and scholars agree that neither Tell nor the Hapsburg agent, Albrecht Gessler, had ever existed.
Indeed, the whole story was cribbed from a tenth-century Viking legend about a man named Toko, who was forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head, and reserved a second arrow for the baddie who had made him do it. However, the Swiss were so attached to the Tell tale, that when an eighteenth-century historian wrote a book detailing the legend’s Viking origins, they burned his book in public. They would have burned him, too, if he had not apologized.