Till Eulenspiegel (; ) is the protagonist of a European narrative tradition. A German chapbook published around 1510 is the oldest known extant publication about the folk hero (a first edition of is preserved fragmentarily), but a background in earlier Middle Low German folklore is likely. The character may have been based on a historical person.
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, at every turn exposing vices. 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.
Eulenspiegel's surname translates to "owl-mirror"; and the frontispiece of the 1515 chapbook, as well as his alleged tombstone in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein, render it as a rebus comprising an owl and a hand mirror. It has been suggested that the name is in fact a pun on a Low German phrase that translates as "wipe-arse".From the Middle Low German verb ulen ("to wipe") and spegel ("mirror"), the latter term being used in the meaning of "buttocks, behind" (used in hunting jargon of the bright tail area of fallow deer); ul'n spegel would then be the imperative, "Wipe the arse!". Paul Oppenheimer, "Introduction", in Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures, Routledge, 1991, p. LXIII. See also "Swabian salute".
Modern retellings of the Eulenspiegel story have been published since the latter 19th century. The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak, by Charles De Coster (1867), transfers the character to the period of the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt; the novel's Ulenspiegel (in modern Dutch, Tijl Uilenspiegel) was adopted as a symbol by 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 (Landfahrer), 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 –1512 in Strasbourg. It is reasonable to place the folkloristic origins of the tradition in the 15th century, although, in spite of suggestions to the effect "that the name 'Eulenspiegel' was used in tales of rogues and liars in Lower Saxony as early as 1400",Ruth Michaelis-Jena, "Eulenspiegel and Münchhausen: Two German Folk Heroes", Folklore 97.1 (1986:101–108) p. 102. 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 (active from at least 1502). Sodmann (1980) 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.Hill-Zenk (2011:331f.
There are several suggestions as to the author of the 1510 chapbook, none of which has gained mainstream acceptance. Candidates include Thomas Murner,Authorship was first attributed to Murner by Lappenberg (1854) and was long taken for granted, but is "no longer taken seriously" (Oppenheimer 1991:xxviii). Hermann Bote, Hieronymus Brunschwig, or an author collective surrounding Johannes Grüninger, including Thomas Murner, Johannes Adelphus, Tilemann Conradi and Hermannus Buschius.Jürgen Schulz-Grobert, Das Straßburger Eulenspiegelbuch, Niemeyer, Tübingen (1999). Authorship of Bote was suggested due to the acrostic ERMAN B being formed by the initials of chapters 90 to 95. In support of Bote being the author: Siegfried H. Sichtermann, Die Wandlungen des Till Eulenspiegel (1982). Schulz-Grobert argues against Bote's authorship, assuming that the acrostic, if genuine, more likely refers to 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.fol 2r.: Als man zalt von Crist geburt. M.ccccc. bin ich, N, durch etlich personen gebetten worden, dz ich dise hystorien und geschichten in zu lieb sol zesammen bringen [...] "In the year 1500 counted from the birth of Christ, I, N., have been asked by several persons that I should collect these stories and tales to please them [...]"
The literal translation of the High German name "Eulenspiegel" is "owl-mirror" (hence owle-glasse). 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 (in which he rides behind his father and exposes his rear-end to the townspeople) and persisting until his death bed (where he tricks a priest into soiling his hands with feces).
In modern scholarship, there have been some attempts to find evidence for the historicity of Till Eulenspiegel's person. Hucker (1980) mentions that according to a contemporary legal register of the city of Brunswick one Till van Cletlinge ('Till from/of Kneitlingen') was incarcerated there in the year 1339, along with four of his accomplices, for highway robbery.
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 (including the date of 1350) 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.moelln-tourismus.de The 1544 stone is mentioned by Fynes Moryson in his Itinerary of 1591. Moryson also reports that in his time, the citizens of Mölln held a yearly festival in Eulenspiegel's honour, on which occasion they would present the clothes worn by Eulenspiegel when he died.John A. Walz, "Fynes Moryson and the Tomb of Till Eulenspiegel" Modern Language Notes 42.7 (November 1927:465–466) p 465; Walz quotes Moryson's description of "a famous Jester Oulenspiegell (whom we call Owlyglasse)": "the towns-men yeerly keepe a feast for his memory, and yet show the apparell he was wont to weare." The earliest reference to the gravestone is of the mid-sixteenth century, in Reimar Kock's Lübscher Chronik (1550). By the 17th century it was noted as "often renewed".
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 proofs were discovered in 1971 in the binding of a Latin edition of Reynard. Peter 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.Paul Ulrich Hucker , see Paul Oppenheimer, Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures (1991), Introduction, p. xxix. 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 (numbered to 96 as chapter number 42 is missing). The 1515 edition is 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."Peter E. Carels, "Eulenspiegel and Company Visit the Eighteenth Century" Modern Language Studies 10.3 (Autumn 1980:3–11) p. 3. (Previously, Goethe made a similar observation.Quoted in Paul Oppenheimer's introduction to Till Eulenspiegel:His Adventures, paperback published by Oxford University Press, 1995, , page xxii. "Eulenspiegel: alle Hauptspässe des Buches beruhen darauf, dass alle Menschen figürlich sprechen und Eulenspiegel es eigenlich nimmt" ("Eulenspiegel: all the chief jests of the book depend on this: that everybody speaks figuratively and Eulenspiegel takes it literally.")) 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 yet and is usually used in modern editions to provide the sections that are missing in the surviving 1510/12 copy.Paul Oppenheimer, Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures (1991)
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 (as it were "owl-glass"). Later English editions, derived from the Antwerp group, were printed by William Copland in London, in 1547 and 1568.Hill-Zenk (2011:2)
Owleglasse is mentioned in Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington (1599) and again in Ben Jonson's comedic play The Alchemist (1610).