Till Eulenspiegel

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Till Eulenspiegel, with owl and mirror (Straßburg edition of 1515)
Till Eulenspiegel, with owl and mirror (Straßburg edition of 1515)

Till Eulenspiegel (IPA: [ˈtɪl ˈɔʏlənˌʃpiːgəl], Low Saxon: Dyl Ulenspegel) was an impudent trickster figure who originated in the Middle Low German folklore and was disseminated in popular printed editions narrating the string of lightly-connected episodes that outlined his picaresque career, primarily in Germany, the Low Countries and France. He made his entrance in English-speaking culture late, in the nineteenth century.

"General opinion now rends to regard Till Eulenspiegel as an entirely imaginary figure around whose name was gathered a cycle of tales popular in the Middle Ages," Ruth Michaelis-Jena observes[1] "Yet legendary figures need a definite background to make them memorable and Till needed the reality of the Brunswick landscape and real towns to which he could travel— Cologne, Rostock, Bremen and Marburg among them— and whose burghers become the victims of his pranks."

According to the tradition, he was born in Kneitlingen near Brunswick in 1300. He travelled through the Holy Roman Empire, especially Northern Germany, but also the Low Countries, Bohemia, and Italy. In the legend, he is presented as a trickster or fool who played practical jokes on his contemporaries, exposing vices at every turn, greed and folly, hypocrisy and foolishness. "The fulcrum of his wit in a large number of the tales is his literal interpretation of figurative language."[2] Although craftsmen are featured as the main victims of his pranks, neither the nobility nor the pope are exempt from being fooled by him. While he is unlikely to have been based on a historic person, by the sixteenth century Eulenspiegel was said to have died in Mölln, near Luneburg, of the Black Death in 1350, according to a gravestone attributed to him there, which was noted by Fynes Moryson in his Itinerary, 1591.[3] "Don't move this stone, let that be clear - Eulenspiegel's buried here." is written on the stone in German.

The two earliest printed editions,[4] in Early New High German, Ein kurtzweilig lesen von Dyl Ulenspiegel, are Johannes Grüninger's in Strassburg, 1510-11 and 1515.[5] 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",[6] previous references to a Till Eulenspiegel actually turn out to be surprisingly elusive, Paul Oppenheimer concludes.[7] The authorship is attributed to Hermann Bote. Puns that do not work in High German indicate that the book was written in Low German first and translated into High German in order to find a larger audience.

The literal translation of the High German name gives "owl mirror", two symbols that identify Till Eulenspiegel in crude popular woodcuts (illustration). However, the original Low German is believed to be ul'n Spegel, meaning "wipe the arse". In the eighteenth century, German satirists adopted episodes for social satire, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century versions of the tales are bowdlerized, to render them fit for children, who had come to be considered their chief natural audience, by expurgating their many references to human excrement.[8]

The book has been translated, usually in mutilated versions, into many languages.

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