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The Elf-King: Translation, Transmission, and Transfiguration

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Abstract

Robert W. Rix’s chapter examines Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous ballad ‘Erlkönig’ and its substantial influence on a generation of Romantic poets in Britain, Denmark, and Germany. Goethe’s German verses warrant attention in a volume concerned with Nordic Romanticism because they were inspired by traditional Danish balladry. Rix’s chapter examines Goethe’s ballad as an adaptation from traditional folklore and shows how, through its several translations, it became instrumental in the re-discovery of vernacular sources in the early Romantic period.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hartmut Fröschle, Goethes Verhältnis zur Romantik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 31.

  2. 2.

    Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballads’, in The Poetical Works of Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1847), 561.

  3. 3.

    English translation by Richard Wigmore. Reproduced courtesy of info@oxfordlieder.co.uk.

  4. 4.

    For an analysis of the Kunstballade as a poetic form dependent on the folk ballad, yet with its own history and characteristics, see Gillian Rodger, ‘A New Approach to the “Kunstballade”’, German Life and Letters 16, no. 2 (1963): 88–97.

  5. 5.

    Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass (London: George Bell and Sons, 1883): 2:460.

  6. 6.

    Johann Gottfried Herder, Volkslieder (Leipzig: Weygandschen Buchhandlung, 1779), 2:158–60.

  7. 7.

    Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 222.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 222.

  9. 9.

    Lewis had already published this poem in the October issue of The Monthly Mirror (October, 1796): 371–73.

  10. 10.

    See, for example, Robert Henry, The History of Great Britain (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1788), 3:303–305.

  11. 11.

    Walter Scott, The Chase, and William and Helen: Two Ballads, from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger (Edinburgh: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, London, 1796).

  12. 12.

    Walter Scott, Apology for Tales of Terror (Kelso: Printed at the Mail Office, 1799), 1–3.

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 73. In Lewis’ version of ‘The Erl-King’s Daughter’, the first line is ‘O’er hills and through forests Sir Oluf he wends’.

  14. 14.

    Scott, Apology, 1.

  15. 15.

    Walter Scott, ‘On the Fairies of Popular Superstition,’ included in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Longman and Rees, 1803), 2:189.

  16. 16.

    Johann Gottfried Herder, Schriften, ed. K. O. Conrady (Munich: Rowohlt, 1968), 238.

  17. 17.

    Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: A. Millar; Cambridge:W. Thurlbourn and J. Woodyer, 1762), 55.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 48.

  19. 19.

    Nathan Drake ‘On Gothic Superstition’, The Speculator (6 April 1790): 43–48, repr. The Edinburgh Magazine (December 1790): 420–22, citation on 44.

  20. 20.

    Ibid.

  21. 21.

    Ibid.

  22. 22.

    On Tales of Wonder and the ‘terror’-ballad in general, see Douglass H. Thomson, ‘The Gothic Ballad’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 77–90. For the use of Danish material in the ballads, see Lis Møller, ‘“They dance all under the greenwood tree”: British and Danish Romantic-Period Adaptations of Two Danish Elf Ballads’, Romantic Norths: Anglo-Nordic Exchanges, 1770–1842, ed. Cian Duffy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 129–52.

  23. 23.

    Both Lewis’ translations of Goethe’s ‘The Erl-King’ and the Danish ballad ‘The Erl-King’s Daughter’ had first appeared in The Monthly Mirror (October 1796): 371–373.

  24. 24.

    Matthew Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 2nd edn (London: W. Bulmer & Co., 1801), 1:55.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 66.

  26. 26.

    Walter Scott, ‘Appendix: Extracts of the Correspondence of M. G. Lewis’, in The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1861), 85.

  27. 27.

    For these changes and the relevant correspondence, see David Lorne Macdonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 151–52.

  28. 28.

    William Taylor (trans.), Ellenore. A Ballad Originally Written in German by G. A. Burger (London: J. Johnson, 1796), viii.

  29. 29.

    Prior to 1794, only a few novels were translated annually from German into English, but the number increased exponentially over the next three years (1794–1797); see, for example, Silke Arnold-de Simine, ‘Blaming the Other: English Translations of Benedikte Naubert’s Hermann von Unna (1788/1764)’, in The German Gothic and Its International Reception, 1800–2000, ed. A. Cusack and B. Murnane (Rochester: Camden House, 2012), 60–75.

  30. 30.

    William Taylor (trans.), ‘Ballad from the Original of J. W. von Goethe’, in The Monthly Magazine 6 (September 1798): 197.

  31. 31.

    Ibid.

  32. 32.

    Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations’, 564.

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Charles Lamb, The Letters, ed. E. W. Marrs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 41.

  35. 35.

    Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations’, 560.

  36. 36.

    Ibid.

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 561.

  39. 39.

    Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies [A special edition of Even-Zohar’s essays], in Poetics Today 11, no. 1 (1990); ‘Factors and Dependencies in Culture: A Revised Outline for Polysystem Culture Research’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24, no. 3 (1997): 15–34.

  40. 40.

    Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, 53–96.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 47.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 563. See Henry Mackenzie, ‘Account of the German Theatre’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 2 (1790): 154–92.

  43. 43.

    For the English translations and their reprintings of ‘Lenore’ during 1796, see Robert W. Rix, ‘1796: When the Terror Ballad Came to Britain’, Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences 18 (2020): 16–36.

  44. 44.

    Walter Scott, [Foreword], in The Chase, and William and Helen: Two Ballads, from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger (Edinburgh: T. Cadell, Jun.; London W. Davies, 1796), iii–v.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 561.

  46. 46.

    Even-Zohar, Polysystem Theory, 15–21, citation on 16.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 97–194.

  48. 48.

    Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations’, 560.

  49. 49.

    See William Wordsworth’s ‘Note on “The Thorn”’, in Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 3rd edn (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802), 1:201–2.

  50. 50.

    William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827), 2:352.

  51. 51.

    Robert W. Rix, ‘William Wordsworth’s Danish Ghost and the Ballad that Never Was’, English Studies 98, no. 4 (2017): 393–409.

  52. 52.

    William Wordsworth, ‘Essay Supplementary to the Preface’, in Poems (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1815), 1:361.

  53. 53.

    Even-Zohar, Polysystem Theory, 105–10.

  54. 54.

    Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations’, 562.

  55. 55.

    Ibid.

  56. 56.

    Robert Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Songs, from Tradition, Manuscript, and Scarce Editions, with Translations of Similar Pieces from the Ancient Danish Language and a Few Originals by the Editor (Edinburgh: A. Constable and Company, 1806), 1:209.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 217

  58. 58.

    Walter Scott, ‘Extract from Remarks on Popular Poetry and on the Various Collections of Ballads of Britain Prefixed to the New Edition of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’, in Autobiography of Sir Walter Scott (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1831), 189.

  59. 59.

    Scott, Apology, 1–2; Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 56.

  60. 60.

    Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations’, 74.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 561

  62. 62.

    Lewis, Tales of Wonder, 194.

  63. 63.

    Douglass H. Thomson, ‘This Mingled Measures: Gothic Parody in Tales of Wonder and Tales of Terror’, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 50 (2008), https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ravon/1900-v1-n1-ravon2291/018143ar/.

  64. 64.

    Lewis, Tales, 87.

  65. 65.

    Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature. A Satirical Poem, 7th edn (London: T. Beckett, 1798), 289.

  66. 66.

    Walter Scott, Harold the Dauntless: A Poem, in Six Cantos, in The Bridal of Triermain, Harold the Dauntless, Field of Waterloo, and Other Poems (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1836), 115–200.

  67. 67.

    See Lucretia Van Tuyl Simmons, Goethe’s Lyric Poems in English Translation Prior to 1800 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1919), 133–35.

  68. 68.

    Anon., ‘The Erl King’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 56 (July 1844): 63.

  69. 69.

    L. F. Klipstein (trans.), ‘The Elfking’, Magnolia, or Southern Appalachian n.s. 2 (1841): 374.

  70. 70.

    ‘L.’ (trans.), ‘The Wood Demon’, The New-England Magazine 5 (July 1833): 7.

  71. 71.

    Emanuel Sejr, ‘Indledning’, in Johann Wolfgang Goethes Erlkönig i danske oversættelser (Aarhus: Aarhus Bogtrykkeri, 1932), 10–11.

  72. 72.

    Adam Oehlenschläger, ‘Ellekonnig’, in ibid., 20–22.

  73. 73.

    Adam Oehlenschläger, Digte (Copenhagen: A. Seidelin, 1803), 56–60. See also Møller, ‘“They dance all under the greenwood tree”’.

  74. 74.

    Steen Steensen Blicher, ‘Ellekongen’, in ibid., 22–24.

  75. 75.

    These poems are reprinted in Sejr, Johann Wolfgang Goethes Erlkönig.

  76. 76.

    Schack Staffeldt, Digte (Copenhagen: Fr. Brummers Forlag, 1804), 1:110. The actual publication year was 1803.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 1:187–90.

  78. 78.

    For an account of other translations of Danish elf-lore ballads into English, see Møller, ‘“They dance all under the greenwood tree”’.

  79. 79.

    Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Elverhöi: Skuespil i fem Akter, in Samlede Skrifter (Copenhagen: Schubothes Boghandling, 1834), 2:292.

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  1. English, Germanic & Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Robert W. Rix

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  1. Centre for Languages & Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Cian Duffy

  2. English, Germanic & Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Robert W. Rix

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Rix, R.W. (2022). The Elf-King: Translation, Transmission, and Transfiguration. In: Duffy, C., Rix, R.W. (eds) Nordic Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99127-2_1

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