Lenore - a horror
Lenore pined for her husband to come back from the Battle of Prague, 6 May 1757.
And her story leads to horror.
We learn of Lenor because we look at a letter mentioning the Battle of Prague.
Then when we look up information on the Battle of Prague, we find there is a ballad made of a woman, Lenore, waiting for her husband to come back from that battle.
Since this is a Fort Loudoun blog site, we use this opportunity to make the most tenuous of connections.
Captain George Mercer hears about this Battle of Prague while in Charleston SC.
Back then it was called Charles Town.
Our Captain George Mercer, aid de camp to Col George Washington is on loan with his and one other company to keep law and order in South Carolina while the locals are out defending the Indigo Plantations and the frontier from threatened hostilities.
While there in Charles Town, Captain George Mercer reads about the Battle of Prague in the South-Carolina Gazette (Charleston), 4 Aug. 1757.
He writes on 17 August 1757, Col George Washington who is currently stationed in Fort Loudoun about that Battle of Prague along with many other matters in that letter.
So that is our tenuous connection.
We use this as a springboard to know more about this ballad of Lenore.
We find that this epic poetic ballad referenced that battle many years later.
This ballad upended traditional story telling.
It forever impacted Romantic and Horror Literature.
And that leads us back to this Lenore.
She pines for her Prussian soldier, William, to return.
She is so upset that he is not among those who have returned.
In fact she rails at God for being no good..
Now our Captain George Mercer writes about the victory of Frederick the Great at the Battle of Prague:
.
We have Advice here and it seems to be well attested that the Austrian Army met with ⟨a⟩ total Defeat. They had upwards of 7000 taken Prisoners about 9000 killed in the Field above 200 Pieces of Cannon and all their Field Equipage fell into the Hands of the Prussians, wh⟨illegible⟩ immediately entered Prague Sword & Hand, where they made Prisoners & killed the greatest Part of the Austrian Army who had taken Refuge there—You will I hope hear it confirmed e’er you see this—No one doubts it here.
. . . .
Our latest News is of so long a Date that I imagine it coud be none to you before this will come to Hand. The Defeat of the Austrians is confirmed.
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Source:
But Lenore?
Forever more, waiting on her love, William, the missing Prussian Soldier.
She continues to rail against God.
This is publicly risky.
When the other warriors return from the war without William,
she begins to quarrel with God,
complaining about His unfairness
and proclaiming that He has never done her any good,
which prompts her mother
to ask for her daughter's forgiveness
because she knows that such a thought
is blasphemous and
will condemn her to Hell. See Source.
This poem ballad goes viral.
Not just in the region of all the Germanic principalities.
But also in France and England.
When was this poem written?
It is written 16 years after this battle of the Seven Years War.
The ending is the kicker:
Lenore doesn't stop thinking of her love, William, the Prussian soldier, despite her own mother saying if William was still alive that maybe he found somebody else to love.
Lenore's inability to heed her mother's Christian advice to give up on her dead husband and the poem's repeated repurposing of the genre of the Kirchenlied were signs of the poem's radical ''Oiesseitsorientierung'' or worldliness. Lenore was not only a challenge to a particular theological world-view (or a world view as theologically understood).
So one night, and it had to be midnight:
At midnight,
a mysterious stranger
who looks like William
knocks on the door
searching for Lenore
and asks her to accompany him
on horseback
to their marriage bed.
Lenore happily gets on the stranger's black steed
and the two ride at a frenetic pace,
under the moonlight,
along a path filled with eerie landscapes.
Terrorized,
Lenore demands to know why
they are riding so fast,
to which he responds that they are doing so because
"the dead travel fast"
("die Todten reiten schnell").
Lenore asks William to "leave the dead alone" ("Laß sie ruhn, die Todten").
At sunrise, their journey ends and they arrive at the cemetery's doors.
As the horse goes through the tombstones,
the knight begins to lose its human appearance,
and is revealed as Death,
a skeleton with a scythe and an hourglass.
The marriage bed is shown to be the grave where,
together with his shattered armour,
William's skeleton lies.
The ground beneath Lenore's feet begins to crumble
and the spirits, dancing in the moonlight,
surround dying Lenore,
declaring that "no one is to quarrel with God in Heaven"
("mit Gott im Himmel hadre nicht").
However, Lenore, punished with death,
still has hope for forgiveness
("des Leibes bist du ledig/Gott sei der Seele gnädig").
Source:
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That's it.
That's the story.
But there's always more.
Skip around
Read bits and pieces.
Compiled by Jim Moyer 8/19-20/2021, updated 10/16/2022
See this link for more on Lenore:
The Vampire, his kith and kin:
More on the Vampire origins and Frankenstein
YOUTUBE VIDEOS ON THIS
'Lenore' - Gottfried August Burger
Gothic Poetry Narration
By Stephanie Swan Quills
Henri Duparc - Lénore (1875)
Source
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TRISTANIA - My Lost Lenore (cover by Ruby Bouzioti feat. Babis Oikonomopoulos & Stelios Kravvaritis)
3 Reasons why 2 companies of the Virginia Regiment are in Charleston SC:
Captain George Mercer is the Captain of one of two companies of the Virginia Regiment sent to South Carolina.
The other company was under Lt Col Adam Stephen), the founder of Martinsburg WV.
This action was agreed upon in March 1757 in a conference of southern governors with Lord Loudoun in Philadelphia.
They are now stationed in Charleston SC, then called Charles Town.
They are under the overall command of Colonel Bouquet, who in the next year in 1758 is to the Forbes Expedition overall field commander, and who helped retrieve in 1764 some hostages taken from the Winchester VA area, the Clowsers.
These 2 Virginia Regiment companies were promised to help patrol Charles Town against any Black uprising.
They were there to cover for the town's elite who were working their Indigo plantations.
They were also there to cover for the South Carolina provincial forces sent to the frontier to stop any Cherokee uprisings, despite the Cherokee being allies to the Virginia Regiment working out of Fort Loudoun Winchester VA.
To sum up, Charles Town (Charleston) did not have any leadership or enough militia to protect this town, the plantations or the frontier from any of those 3 potential threats.
Who did this Ballad impact?
"Lenore" was an immediate sensation in Germany and was widely translated into different languages, which brought it a great deal of popularity in many European countries and the United States, and also generated numerous "imitations, parodies, [and] adaptations".[6]
Its first English translation was published in March 1796,
when William Taylor's rendering of the ballad, "Ellenore", appeared in the Monthly Magazine.[9][10]
The translation, however, was completed in 1790, and it had already been "declaimed, applauded and much discussed in Norwich literary circles".[11]
Walter Scott
famous author of IVANHOE:
After Walter Scott heard how enthusiastically a crowd at Dugald Stewart's house had reacted to a reading of Taylor's version done by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, he attempted to acquire a manuscript of Bürger's original. In 1794, when he had finally received one, he was so impressed by it that he made his own rendering, William and Helen, in less than a day. Scott's version was passed from hand to hand, and was extremely well received.[11]
TRANSLATIONS:
In 1796, three new English translations were published by William Robert Spencer, Henry James Pye and John Thomas Stanley.[11] Translations by James Beresford and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were published in 1800 and 1844, respectively, and both have been hailed as the most faithful translations of Bürger's original work.[11][12]
Other notable translators of "Lenore" into English include Frederic Shoberl, Julia Margaret Cameron and John Oxenford.[12]
Sigmund Zois and France Prešeren translated the ballad into Slovenian,[13] while Vasily Zhukovsky and Pavel Katenin published translations in Russian.[14] A version in Italian was made by Giovanni Berchet and both Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto and Juan Valera made their own translations to Spanish. Gérard de Nerval, who was obsessed with the text, published five translations in French, two in prose and three in verse.[15]
COLERIDGE:
Between 1797 and 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote Christabel,
which according to some German critics was influenced by Bürger's "Lenore".[16]
INFLUENCE ON SHELLEY:
Percy Bysshe Shelley was also impressed by "Lenore" and treasured a copy of the poem which he had handwritten himself. Shelley biographer Charles S. Middleton further suggests that "it is hinted, somewhat plausibly, that the Leonora of Bürgher first awakened his poetic faculty. A tale of such beauty and terror might well have kindled his lively imagination".[16]
Shelley's wife is the author of "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus"
As we might expect, the young Shelley was enchanted by Lenore, and Medwin relates how the poet long treasured a copy of the whole poem, which he made with his own hand. "[18] Dowden tells the story how one Christmas Eve Shelley dramatically related the Burger ballad with appropriate intonation and gesture "working up the horror to
{p. 277}
such a height of fearful interest "that the company fully expected to see Wilhelm stalk into the parlour.
SOURCE:
https://archive.org/stream/VampirismPdf201005112102481735/vampirism%20pdf%20201005112102481735_djvu.txt
Influences of Bürger's poem on "Monk" Lewis, John Keats and William Wordsworth have also been noted,[6] and some of its verses have been used by other authors on their own works.
INFLUENCE ON DRACULA:
The verse die Todten Reiten schnell ("The dead travel fast") is also particularly famous for being cited by Bram Stoker in the first chapter of his novel Dracula (1897).[17][18]
Influence on Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens alludes to the thought that "The dead travel fast" in A Christmas Carol (1843), during an exchange between Scrooge and the ghost of Marley ("You travel fast?" said Scrooge. "On the wings of the wind," replied the Ghost.)
The verse Laß sie ruhn, die Todten ("Leave the dead in peace") and the poem would later inspire a story of the same title by Ernst Raupach
Source:
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Edgar Allan Poe
uses that name Lenore in a poem by same name:
See this link for more on Lenore:
The Vampire, his kith and kin:
More images
More images
We even see some resemblance of this story to The Legend of Sleep Hollow, with a headless horseman.
Other notes for later research:
The American cause during the American War of Independence benefitted greatly from examining the lessons of Frederick the Great. In fact, it also directly benefitted from one of Frederick's former officers. A onetime protege of Frederick's, von Steuben left the Prussian army during peacetime looking for employment...so a shout out to Alt Fritz and a great sing along march...and apologies to our resident Hessians Kati Wölfi and Ramona Sconyers
Fridericus Rex Grenadiermarsch [German march and folk song][+English translation]
2,393,430 views
Sep 6, 2018
Dr. Ludwig
179K subscribers
SUBSCRIBE
New version: https://youtu.be/RKAnt7UxxgM The Fridericus Rex Grenadier March (Army March II, 136 (Army March II, 198)) was composed by the Prussian military musician Ferdinand Radeck in the mid-1860s. In the trio of the march he used the melody with which the composer Carl Loewe in 1837 had written the recently written by Willibald Alexis ballad Fridericus Rex (Latin for Frederick II of Prussia). During this period of Prussian expansionism, in which Frederick the Great again received great veneration, both Radeck's march and Loewe's ballad enjoyed great popularity with his name. Even today, the Fridericus Rex Grenadier March is one of the most famous German military marches. He is one of the traditional marches of the 10th Panzer Division in Sigmaringen, the Feldjägertruppe of the Bundeswehr and generally the armored combat troops. At 3:00 they sing vortrefflich not ordentlich, sorry. Disclaimer: All videos are apolitical and this channel is against any form of extremism or hatespeech! Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/arminius1871 ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬♬❈ LYRICS❈ ♬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬●
Günter Wewel - Fridericus Rex, unser König und Herr 1998
fritz51266
339K views
See this link for more on Percy Shelley and the poem Lenore:
The Vampire, his kith and kin:
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