title: Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld
text: # 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.
  
  