Showing posts with label Johann Ludwig Tieck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Johann Ludwig Tieck. Show all posts

Monday, February 1, 2010

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.

Not Tieck's Vampire

I was inspired to write this entry by Andrew's latest movie review.

"Wake Not the Dead" (c. 1800) is a short story commonly attributed to German Romanticist, Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773 - 1853). Its importance to the genre is enhanced by the fact that it preceded John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819) by nearly 20 years.

Or so we thought.

Recent studies have revealed that Tieck wasn't actually the author of the story. That credit is now going to Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach (1784-1852).

I'm not sure if Rob Brautigam, a Dutch vampirologist, was the first to uncover this point of attribution, but his comment on the matter was certainly the first reference I've seen (it was incorporated to this review).

The attribution is also elaborated in "Relato Gotico/Vampirismo: Deja a los Muertos en Paz - Avances Programa Nº 425 (21/11/09)" (English translation here) and Heide Crawford has composed a paper for the 2010 Kentucky Foreign Language Conference.

As she and the other articles reveal, not only was Tieck not the author of the story, but it was actually first published in 1823.

Here's what she has to say on the matter, also revealing a possible source of the error:
When Theodor Hildebrandt published the first German vampire novel Der Vampir oder die Todtenbraut in 1828, he was contributing to a long tradition of literary representations of the vampire in European poetry and prose that began with Heinrich August Ossenfelder's poem "Der Vampir" in 1748. Two years before Hildebrandt published his vampire novel, the popular dramatist Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach (1784-1852) had published the vampire story "Lasst die Todten ruhen" (1823), which has been erroneously attributed to Ludwig Tieck by American and British scholars of Gothic Horror literature since at least 1973 when Peter Haining published the English translation, "Wake Not the Dead" in his volume two of his Gothic Horror anthology Gothic Tales of Terror and named Tieck as the author.
I should note that "Relato" cites Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) as the source of the error.

But, Tieck does have a saving grace: Crawford attributes the "earliest known German prose work that features a female vampire" to him, in the shape of his 1812 story, "Liebeszauber".

And thus, Tieck's place in the vampire genre is still solid. Even if it's for a completely different story.

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