Tieck Time Again

In the previous entry, I mentioned a volume called Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) as a source for a mis-attributed work called "Wake Not the Dead".

It's apparently to blame for mistaking Raupach's authorship for Tieck's.

Thanks to the wonders of Google Book Search, you can actually read the tome, yourself. The story appears on pp. 233-291.

Interestingly enough, Tieck is not directly cited as the source of the story in that volume. The only reference to him appears in the book's "Preface":

On the same principle are two volumes of PopularTales, published at Eisenach, without the author's name, but many of them are exceedingly entertaining. Lebrecht and Tieck are the authors of many beautiful legends, but they have generally trusted to their own fancy instead of building themselves on antient traditions. Backzo's legends are something in the manner of La Motte Fouqué, though neither so fanciful nor so original. But to detail all the volumes of German legend and romance would be to give a bookseller's catalogue ; for, not only has Moravia, Silesia, Thuringia, and Austria, each its distinct legends, but every quarter of the Harz Mountains, east, west, north, and south, has its own exclusive terrors; and when to these are added the fictions of later writers, the catalogue swells beyond all reasonable limit (xi-xii).

That's about as close as it gets.

However, I was somewhat doubtful of Crawford's suggestion that Haining is the source of the error. So, I decided to do some Googling.

Haining's Gothic Tales of Terror was published in 1973, but earlier attributions of Tieck to "Wake" exist. He had already done it in 1972 with Great Tales of Terror From Europe and America, but renamed the story "The Bride of the Grave".

But Charles M. Collins had already beaten him to the punch in A Feast of Blood (1967).

I'd be almost certain that other editors and writers have attributed it to Tieck, too. It's been doing the rounds for so long, it's hard to tell just where it started.