How Saint Peter Lost His Hair

I don’t know why the humor bug has gotten a hold of me, but here is a legend I came across while doing some research totally unrelated to Saint Peter or baldness.

Everyone knows that Saint Peter is entirely bald, except for a single lock of hair in front that falls over his forehead, but most people do not know the following story that explains how this came to be.

While he and Christ were traveling together they came to a farmhouse where the farmwife was just cooking up some large yeast pancakes in grease. According to others it was noodles.

Saint Peter entered the house to beg for some pancakes, while the Lord waited outside. The farmwife was a good-hearted woman, and she gave Peter three pancakes, fresh from the pan. But Peter was selfish, and in order to gain an advantage when the pancakes were divided up, he quickly hid one of them in his cap, then put it on his head. He pretended that he had received only two pancakes, one of which he gave to the Lord.

The pancake under his cap was still hot, and it began to burn Peter terribly on the head, but he could not do anything about it; he just had to bear the pain.

Later, when he took off his cap, he discovered that the hot pancake had burned into his head a large bald spot, which remained with him as long as he lived. Only the lock of hair that had protruded from the front of his cap was spared. Thus Saint Peter’s bald head has one lock of hair in front.

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Source: Karl Reiser, Sagen, Gebräuche und Sprichwörter des Allgäus (Kempten, 1895), v. 1, p. 356.

Aarne-Thompson type 774J.

Comical folktales about Jesus and Peter are very common in Europe, with Jesus playing the “straight man,” and Peter providing the burlesque humor. The individual episodes in these stories are classified as type 774A through 774P in the Aarne-Thompson system.

~ from Bald Stories: Folktales about Hairless Men, translated and/or edited by D. L. Ashliman