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 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)

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

• 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