Till Eulenspiegel
Till Eulenspiegel is the protagonist of a German chapbook published in 1515 with a possible background in earlier Middle Low German folklore.
Eulenspiegel is a native of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg whose picaresque career takes him to many places throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
He plays practical jokes on his contemporaries, exposing vices at every turn. His life is set in the first half of the 14th century, and the final chapters of the chapbook describe his death from the plague of 1350.
His name translates to "owl mirror", and the frontispiece of the 1515 chapbook, as well as his alleged tombstone in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein, display the name in rebus writing by an owl and a hand mirror. There is a suggestion that the name is in fact a veiled pun on a Low German phrase translating to "wipe-arse".
Retellings of the Eulenspiegel tradition have been published in modern literature, since the later 19th century. Notably, The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak by Charles De Coster transfers the character to the context of the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt. The Ulenspiegel from this novel became a symbol of the Flemish Movement.
Origin and historicity
According to the chapbook, Eulenspiegel was born in Kneitlingen in Lower Saxony near Brunswick around 1300. As a vagrant, he travelled through the Holy Roman Empire, especially Northern Germany, but also the Low Countries, Bohemia, and Italy.He is said to have died in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein, near Lübeck and Hamburg, of the Black Death in 1350.
The first known chapbook on Eulenspiegel was printed in c. 1510–1512 in Strasbourg. It is reasonable to place the folkloristic origins of the tradition in the 15th century, although, in spite of often-repeated suggestions to the effect "that the name 'Eulenspiegel' was used in tales of rogues and liars in Lower Saxony as early as 1400", 15th-century references to a Till Eulenspiegel turn out to be surprisingly elusive.
The text of the first extant edition, printed by Johannes Grüninger, is in the High German language.
There has been a debate surrounding the possible existence of an older Low German edition, now lost.
This version has been attributed to Hans Dorn, the only known printer active in Brunswick at the beginning of the 16th century. Sodmann in support of this hypothesis adduced the woodcut of a fool on horseback holding a hand mirror used by Dorn in later prints, as the title illustration of his Liber vagatorum and Grobianus, which may originally have served as the title illustration of the lost Eulenspiegel edition.
There are several suggestions as to the author of the 1510 chapbook, none of which has gained mainstream acceptance.
Candidates include Thomas Murner, Hermann Bote, Hieronymus Brunschwig, or an author collective surrounding Johannes Grüninger, including Thomas Murner, Johannes Adelphus, Tilemann Conradi and Hermannus Buschius.
The author of the 1515 edition in a short preface identifies himself only as "N". He gives the year 1500 as the date when he originally began to collect the tales, stressing the difficulty of the project and how he wanted to abandon it several times, saying that he is now publishing it after all to "lighten the mood in hard times". The preface also announces the inclusion of material from Pfaff Amis and Pfaff vom Kahlenberg, but no such material is present in the 1515 edition.
The literal translation of the High German name "Eulenspiegel" is "owl mirror". It is both innocuous and indicative of his character and has been explained as a garbled form of an expression for "wipe-the-arse".
Many of Till's pranks are scatological in nature, and involve tricking people into touching, smelling, or even eating Till's excrement.
Scatological stories abound, beginning with Till's early childhood and persisting until his death bed.
In modern scholarship, there have been some attempts to find evidence for the historicity of Till Eulenspiegel's person.
Hucker mentions that according to a contemporary legal register of the city of Brunswick one Till van Cletlinge was incarcerated there in the year 1339, along with four of his accomplices, for highway robbery.
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In Mölln, the reported site of Eulenspiegel's death and burial in the plague year of 1350, a memorial stone was commissioned by the town council in 1544, now on display in an alcove on the outside wall of the tower of St. Nicolai church. The stone is inscribed in Low German, as follows:
The inscription was allegedly copied from an older tombstone, now lost. This older tombstone is referred to in the chapbook of 1515, and it is mentioned as still being extant in 1536.
The 1544 stone is mentioned by Fynes Moryson in his Itinerary of 1591.
Moryson also reports that in his time, the citizen of Mölln held a yearly festival in Eulenspiegel's honour, on which occasion they would present the clothes worn by Eulenspiegel when he died.
Chapbook tradition
The two earliest printed editions, in Early New High German, were printed by Johannes Grüninger in Strasbourg. The first edition was unknown before sixteen folia of printing proofswere discovered in 1971 in the binding of a Latin edition of Reynard.
Honegger dated these pages to 1510/11 based on the type used, but this date has since been called into question.
Only a single specimen of the first edition has been preserved, discovered in 1975. Thirty folia are missing, including the title page.
A previous owner has replaced the missing pages by pages torn from an Eulenspiegel edition of c. 1700.
It was most likely published in 1512. The sixteen folia discovered by Honegger are likely printing proofs for this edition.
It consists of 100 folia with 66 woodcuts of high quality.
The 1515 edition was also printed by Grüninger in Strasbourg. Its full title reads:
The text is divided into 95 chapters.
The 1515 edition is decidedly inferior, missing many of the illustrations of the older edition, and showing signs of careless copying of the text.
It is uncertain how many of these chapters were present in the earlier edition of 1510/12, although some of the chapters appear to be later additions. The initials of the final six chapters form the "acrostic" ERMANB, which has been taken as a hidden reference to the book's author.
The first chapters are dedicated to Till's childhood. In chapter nine, Till leaves his mother and begins his life as a vagrant. He takes up diverse occupations, but each chapter ends with his moving on to another place.
The final seven chapters are dedicated to his death and burial.
In the chapbooks, Eulenspiegel is presented as a trickster who plays practical jokes on his contemporaries, exposing vices at every turn, greed and folly, hypocrisy and foolishness. As Peter Carels notes, "The fulcrum of his wit in a large number of the tales is his literal interpretation of figurative language." Although craftsmen are featured as the principal victims of his pranks, neither the nobility nor the pope is exempt from being affected by him.
A third Strasbourg edition, of 1519, is better again and is usually used in modern editions to provide the sections that are missing in the surviving 1510/12 copy.
The 'Antwerp group' of Eulenspiegel editions comprises a number of Flemish, French and English publications. The dating of these publications is still an issue of contention. The Antwerp printer Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten is believed to have printed the first Dutch-language version of the Till Eulenspiegel story. In the past, the Hillen edition was dated to 1512 or 1519, but recent scholarship places it in the period between 1525 and 1546. Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten appears to have used for his translation a German text, in manuscript or printed, that is now lost, which antedated the Grüninger edition. Jan van Doesborch is believed to have printed the first English translation in Antwerp possibly as early as 1520. In this edition the name Ulenspiegel is rendered Howleglas. Later English editions, derived from the Antwerp group, were printed by William Copland in London, in 1547 and 1568.
Owleglasse is mentioned in Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington and again in Ben Jonson's comedic play The Alchemist.
The first modern edition of the chapbook of 1519 is by Lappenberg. Lappenberg was not yet aware of the existence of the 1515 edition.
The 1515 and 1519 editions were published in facsimile by Insel-Ferlag in 1911 and 1979, respectively.
An English translation by Paul Oppenheimer was published in 1972.
Editions of Eulenspiegel in German, Dutch, Flemish, French and English remained popular throughout the early modern period. By the late 17th century, Eulenspiegel and his pranks had become proverbial, with the French adjective espiègle "impish, mischievous" derived from his name. The German noun Eulenspiegelei is recorded in the early 19th century.
Modern reception
Literature
In the eighteenth century, German satirists adopted episodes for social satire, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth century versions of the tales were bowdlerized to render them fit for children, who had come to be considered their chief natural audience, by expurgating their many scatological references.The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak, an 1867 novel by Belgian author Charles De Coster, has been translated, often in mutilated versions, into many languages.
It was De Coster who first transferred Ulenspiegel from his original late medieval surroundings to the Protestant Reformation. In this version, Ulenspiegel was born in Damme, West Flanders and became a Protestant hero of the Dutch Revolt. The author gives him a father, Claes, and mother, Soetkin, as well as a girlfriend, Nele, and a best friend, Lamme Goedzak. In the course of the story Claes is taken prisoner by the Spanish oppressors and burned at the stake, while Soetkin goes insane as a result. This tempts Thyl to start resistance against the Spanish oppressors. Thanks to the 1867 novel, Ulenspiegel has become a symbol of Flemish nationalism, with a statue dedicated to him in Damme.
A French edition, Les Aventures de Til Ulespiègle, was published by Constantin Castéra in 1910.
In 1927 Gerhart Hauptmann wrote the verse Till Eulenspiegel.
Ulenspiegel was mentioned in Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita" as a possible prototype for the black cat character Behemoth.
Michael Rosen adapted the story into a 1989 children's novel, illustrated by Fritz Wegner: The Wicked Tricks of Till Owlyglass,.
Daniel Kehlmann in his novel Tyll places Tyll Ulenspiegel in the context of the Thirty Years' War.
Comics
had a 1945 comic strip based on Tijl Uilenspiegel, where Tijl and Lamme Goedzak were portrayed as a comedic duo. The series was sometimes called Tijl en Lamme too.Willy Vandersteen drew two comic book albums about Uilenspiegel, "De Opstand der Geuzen" and "Fort Oranje", both drawn in a realistic, serious style and pre-published in the Belgian comics magazine Tintin between 1952 and 1954. They were published in comic book album format in 1954 and 1955. The stories were drawn in a realistic style and in some instances followed the original novel very closely, but sometimes followed his own imagination more.
Dutch comics artist George van Raemdonck adapted the novel into a comic strip in 1964.
Between 1985 and 1990 Willy Vandersteen drew a comics series named De Geuzen of whom the three main characters are Hannes, his girlfriend Veerle and Tamme, Hannes' best friend. All are obviously inspired by Tijl Uilenspiegel, Nele and Lamme Goedzak.
Theatre
theatre director and producer Shulamit Bat-Dori created an open-air production of Till Eulenspiegel at Mishmar HaEmek, Israel, in 1955 that drew 10,000 viewers.Clive Barker incorporated elements of the Till Eulenspiegel story in his play Crazyface.
Music
In 1894-1895 Richard Strauss composed the tone poem, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28.In 1902 Emil von Reznicek adapted the story as an opera, Till Eulenspiegel.
In 1913 Walter Braunfels adapted the story as an opera, Ulenspiegel.
In 1916 the Ballets Russes adapted the story as a ballet, later re-adapted by George Balanchine for Jerome Robbins at the New York City Ballet.
In the late 1930s or early 1940s, the Russian composer Wladimir Vogel wrote a drama-oratorio, Thyl Claes, derived from De Coster's book.
The Soviet composer Nikolai Karetnikov and his librettist, filmmaker Pavel Lungin, adapted De Coster's novel as a samizdat opera, Till Eulenspiegel, which had to be recorded piecemeal in secret and received its premiere only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Magazines
Between 1945 and 1950 a German satirical magazine was called Ulenspiegel.The satirical magazine Eulenspiegel was published from 1954 in Berlin, East Germany.
Films
In 1956 the film Les Aventures de Till L'Espiègle was made by Gérard Philipe and Joris Ivens, which adapted De Coster's novel.. The film was a French-East German co-production.In 1973 Walter van der Kamp directed Uilenspiegel, a Dutch film.
Rainer Simon directed Till Eulenspiegel in 1975, which was an East-German production.
Ulenspiegel , was a 1976 Soviet film, based on De Coster's novel, and directed by Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov, "The Legend of Till Ullenspiegel".
In 2003 Eberhard Junkersdorf adapted the story into a feature-length animated film.
In 2014 Christian Theede directed the film Till Eulenspiegel.