Eulenspiegel, TILL

Eulenspiegel, TILL, the prototype of all the knavish fools of later time, is said to have been born in the village of Kneitlingen, near Schöppenstädt, in Brunswick, about the end of the 13th century. His father was called Klaus Eulenspiegel, and his mother Anna Wortbeck. He was thrice baptised, in the font, in mud, having been dropped from his mother's arms, and finally in hot water, to cleanse him from the mud; he afterwards wandered over Europe, and had many conical jokes and adventures, and played many rough practical jokes and tricks on the people whom he met with. His tomb is shown at Mölln, about four leagues from Lübeck, where tradition makes him die about 1350; but the inhabitants of Damme, in Belgium, also boast of having his bones in their churchyard, and place his death in 1301. Many regard Eulenspiegel as an altogether imaginary person, whose name was used merely to father a cycle of medieval tricks and adventures; others argue that there were two historical individuals of that name, father and son, of whom the former died at Damme, and the latter at Mölln. The stories that circulate in Germany under Eulenspiegel's name were not collected, as the book containing them itself informs us, till after Eulenspiegel's death, and without doubt were originally written in the Low German tongue; from Low German they were translated into High German by the Franciscan Thomas Murner, and this translation was followed in all the old High German editions of the work. At a later period it underwent considerable alterations at the hands of both Protestants and Catholics, who made it a vehicle for the expression of their own likes and dislikes. The oldest known edition is that printed at Strasburg in 1515, of which but one copy is known to exist—that in the British Museum (new ed. Halle, 1883). Another was issued in 1519, a new edition of which was edited by Lappenberg (Leip. 1854). The next impression, that of 1520-30, originated at Cologne (not in Lower Saxony), and was reproduced by photo-lithography at Berlin in 1865. A metrical version, Der Eulenspiegel reimenweis, was made by Fischart, and published at Frankfurt in 1571. For centuries it has been a favourite Volksbuch, not only in Germany, but in many other countries. Translations of it exist in Bohemian, Polish, Italian, English (as a miracle play: A merry Jest of a man that was called Howleglas), Dutch, Danish, French, and Latin. Simrock gave a good restoration in Ein kurzweilig Lesen von Till Eulenspiegel (1878); such works as Till Eulenspiegel, by Böttger (1850), and Till Eulenspiegel Redivivus, by J. Wolff (1875), owe to it little beyond the name. A version of the story is given in Roscoe's German Novelists; and a new English translation by K. R. H. Mackenzie—The Marvellous Adventures of Master Tyll Owlglass—appeared in 1890.—Eulenspiegel is the origin of the French word espigle ('waggish'). Eulenspiegel became in French 'Ulespiegle,' which, contracted into Espigle, became a generic name for a wag.