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)
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"
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 "hedgehogfield" (compounded from igel = hedgehog and feld = field)
Sabre duel of German students, around 1900, painting by Georg Mühlberg (1863–1925)
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
