Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld
# 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)
* 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.

