1 These two tales do crop up in English, though not very often.ĤFor both the framework and the setting of individual tales Hauff made abundant use of the fashion for things oriental which, as far as literature is concerned, went back to the Arabian Nights. Gillies’s Tales of a Voyager to the Arctic Ocean, which had been translated into German as Erzählungen eines Reisenden nach dem nördlichen Eismeer (Leipzig, 1826-27). However, ’Abner, der Jude, der nichts gesehen hat’ (’Abner, the Jew, who Saw Nothing’) was taken almost literally from Voltaire’s Zadig, though with changes of names and locations, and ’Die Höhle von Steenfoll’ (’The Cave of Steenfoll’) is derived from ’The Nicker Holl’ in Robert P. He actually incorporated a small number of tales from other authors into the second collection, but these have not usually been included in English editions of Hauff.
Hauff was not a collector of traditional tales like the Grimms, but composed his own tales on the basis of a rich fund of traditional and literary sources. It is a narrative model that goes back to Boccaccio’s Decameron and was used most tellingly in the Arabian Nights. Each of these collections is presented in the form of a framework story within which other tales are narrated.
This is a pity, as from this point of view Hauff is clearly a lesser Romantic writer, whereas in the annals of children’s books he is a major figure. Literary historians, however, tend to pass over this success with few words, concentrating instead on his writings for adults. He had written several short prose works and a historical novel, Lichtenstein, in the wake of Sir Walter Scott, but his lasting claim to fame rests on his fairytales. He married early in 1827 and was in the midst of an active literary career when he caught typhoid and died tragically early, just a few days short of his twenty-fifth birthday. Born in Stuttgart and educated at the University of Tübingen, he was tutor to the children of Baron von Hügel before devoting himself full-time to the pursuit of writing. During the Victorian and Edwardian periods Hauff’s tales were better known than Hoffmann’s Nutcracker or Brentano’s fairytales.ĢWilhelm Hauff (1802-27) came late in the development of German Romanticism. Equally, there has been a steady stream of English editions over the same period. His Märchen, whether published as a book or separately, have kept a firm place in German children’s reading from the time of their first appearance right to the present day. Other German collectors of traditional tales are dealt with elsewhere, but of those writers who composed their own tales Wilhelm Hauff heads the list. 1Although the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen came to dominate the world of fairytales in the second half of the nineteenth century, pushing Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy from centre stage, they were not the only collectors or authors of fairytales to gain an English-speaking public during this period.