Tales of a Wayside Inn

Tales of a Wayside Inn is a collection of poems by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Contents

Overview

The poems in the collection are told by a group of adults in the tavern of the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, 20 miles from Cambridge, and a favorite resort for parties from Harvard College. The narrators are friends of the author who, though they were not named, were so plainly characterized as to be easily recognizable. Among those of wider fame are Ole Bull, the violinist, and Thomas William Parsons, the poet and translator of Dante. Each of the three parts has a prelude and a finale, and there are interludes which link together the tales and introduce the narrators.[1] The prelude for the first part begins:

"One Autumn night, in Sudbury town,
Across the meadows bare and brown,
The windows of the wayside inn
Gleamed red with fire-light..."

Most of the stories were derived by Longfellow from his wide reading — many of them from the legends of continental Europe, a few from American sources.[1] The best known inclusion is the previously-published poem "Paul Revere's Ride". It also includes "The Saga of King Olaf"; Longfellow started working on that poem as early as 1856, making it the oldest in the collection.[2]

Publication history and composition

Longfellow undertook the large-scale project in part to combat grief over the death of his wife Fanny in 1861.[3] He originally intended to call the collection The Sudbury Tales, but was afraid it sounded too similar to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and renamed it Tales of a Wayside Inn.[4] Longfellow visited the real-life Wayside Inn in 1862 with his friend and publisher James Thomas Fields. At the time, the inn was called the Red Horse Tavern and had closed after the owner, Lyman Howe, died in 1861. It would not reopen as an inn until 1897. Longfellow referred to it as "a rambling, tumble-down building".[5]

The collection was first published in 1863 with an initial print run of 15,000 copies.[5] A second series was published in 1870,[6] and a third published in 1872–1873. Though they sold well, the latter two volumes were less popular than the first.[7]

References

  1. ^ a b  William B. Cairns (1920). "Tales of a Wayside Inn". Encyclopedia Americana. 
  2. ^ Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004: 233. ISBN 0807070262.
  3. ^ Knight, Denise. Writers of the American Renaissance: An A to Z Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003: 245. ISBN 9780313321405
  4. ^ Wagenknecht, Edward. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966: 143.
  5. ^ a b Gale, Robert L. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003: 258. ISBN 0-313-32350-X
  6. ^ Calhoun, Charles C. Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004: 242. ISBN 0807070262.
  7. ^ Gale, Robert L. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003: 259. ISBN 0-313-32350-X

External links