Das Alte Buch Und Die Reise Ins Blaue Hinein: Novellen

by Ludwig Tieck

Tieck veröffentlichte diese Novelle zuerst 1835 in der Taschenbuchreihe "Urania" des Verlegers Brockhaus.

511 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Johann Ludwig Tieck was a German poet, translator, editor, novelist, and critic, who was part of the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Tieck's importance lay in the readiness with which he adapted himself to the new ideas which arose at the close of the 18th century, rather than in any conspicuous originality. His importance in German poetry is restricted to his early period. In later years it was as the helpful friend and adviser of others, or as the well-read critic of wide sympathies, that Tieck distinguished himself.

Tieck remained influential as dramatic adviser to the theatre at Dresden, and as an editor of Hans Sachs, Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius, and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein and of Heinrich von Kleist and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.

Tieck also influenced Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser. It was from Phantasus that Wagner based the idea of Tannhäuser going to see the pope and Elisabeth dying in the song battle.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Old Book and the Journey into the Blue Distance: A Folktale-Novella

This novella by Johann Ludwig Tieck, published in 1835, made me once again think about the difference between fictional and non-fictional literature. Of course this is a complete fictional text but it is written, at least in parts, as if it was based on facts. The structure of the narrative consists of three nested story lines presented like this:

F1 → F2 → M → F2 → M → F2 → F1 → F2 → F1

F1 and F2 are Framing stories in which the fictional(?) Tieck (narrator of F1) talks about his late friend Beeskow (narrator of F2) and how he obtained a mysterious Old Book that contains a fairytale called Journey into the Blue Distance which makes up the main part (M).

The problem with this old book is that it was written a rather long time ago, in the Middle Ages, and it wasn’t particularly good. Over the centuries it also suffered some damage. Pages got lost, rotted away, have been eaten by mice, or even been used as fidibus. So over the centuries the different owners of the book rewrote it and added parts to the tale which they thought were missing or don’t fit to their respective ideology. Even Beeskow and then Tieck decided to „improve“ the text after they read it. So it’s hard to tell what the book originally was about. Maybe it wasn’t even a fairytale, or a fictional text, to begin with?

In any case, the final version we got here talks about a young man, Athelstan (probably not Æthelstan, King of England), who sets out on a journey into the blue to escape an arranged marriage. One day he learns about a fabled woman named Gloriana, who is supposed to be the Queen of the fairies and is living somewhere underground or within a mountain range not far from a mystical linden tree. Athelstan is fascinated and desires to meet this godess one day. But until he finds her he meets some bizarre people along the way, including what is called a changeling and a schoolmaster who suspiciously resembles the previous owner of the old book, the one from whom Beeskow received it.

Near the end of the novella some well known names of writers and poets appear among which a certain “William” from the county of Warwickshire sticks out. Even I knew who was meant here. If one believes the Tieck’s story it could be that Shakespeare took parts of the fairy tale, and incorporated them into his Midsummer Night’s Dream . One thing is pretty sure though: Shakespeare’s play is one of the main sources of Arno Schmidt’s Zettel’s Traum / Bottom’s Dream which I am currently reading. In this book the (fictional) character Daniel Pagenstecher is talking at great length about the (non-fictional) author E.A.Poe. Among other things Poe’s House of Usher gets mentioned quite often and in this (fictional) story we find a list of (real) books of a library, and one of those is The Journey into the Blue Distance by Tieck. So it’s quite a nice circle of references and sources we have here.

Update 11/5/16 While I continued my journey through Zettel’s Traum I found a few direct references to the Journey into the Blue Distance by Tieck. One of which is again a mentioning by Edgar Allan Poe in his Marginalia XLIX :

The misapplication of quotations is clever, and has a capital effect, when well done[…]. One of the best hits in this way is made by Tieck, and I have lately seen it appropriated, with interesting complacency, in an English magazine. The author of the “Journey into the Blue Distance,” is giving an account of some young ladies, not very beautiful, whom he caught in mediis rebus, at their toilet. “They were curling their monstrous heads,” says he, “as Shakspeare says of the waves in a storm.”

After I searched high and low for this quotation in the book without finding it I come to the conclusion that Poe may have misapplied it.


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