Lorelei - Original Folklore and The Creation of The Modern Myth

Original Folklore and The Creation of The Modern Myth

The rock and the murmur it creates have inspired various tales. An old legend envisioned dwarves living in caves in the rock.

In 1801 German author Clemens Brentano composed his ballad Zu Bacharach am Rheine as part of a fragmentary continuation of his novel Godwi oder Das steinerne Bild der Mutter. It first told the story of an enchanting female associated with the rock. In the poem, the beautiful Lore Lay, betrayed by her sweetheart, is accused of bewitching men and causing their death. Rather than sentence her to death, the bishop consigns her to a nunnery. On the way thereto, accompanied by three knights, she comes to the Lorelei rock. She asks permission to climb it and view the Rhine once again. She does so and falls to her death; the rock still retained an echo of her name afterwards. Brentano had taken inspiration from Ovid and the Echo myth.

In 1824 Heinrich Heine seized on and adapted Brentano's theme in one of his most famous poems, Die Lorelei. It describes the eponymous female as a sort of siren who, sitting on the cliff above the Rhine and combing her golden hair, unwittingly distracted shipmen with her beauty and song, causing them to crash on the rocks. In 1837 Heine's lyrics were set to music by Friedrich Silcher in the art song Lorelei that became well known in German-speaking lands. A setting by Franz Liszt was also favored and over a score of other musicians have set the poem to music.

The Lorelei character, although originally imagined by Brentano, passed into German popular culture in the form described in the Heine-Silcher song and is commonly but mistakenly believed to have originated in an old folk tale. The French writer Guillaume Apollinaire took up the theme again in his poem "La Loreley", from the collection Alcools.

Read more about this topic:  Lorelei

Famous quotes containing the words original, folklore, creation, modern and/or myth:

    Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.
    Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)

    So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio—remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales—we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    A fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    In most other modern societies working mothers are not put under these special and exaggerated pressures. For example, French and English mothers often prefer to breast-feed their babies, but they do not feel that their womanhood is at stake if they fail to do so. Nor does anyone else.
    Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)

    For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)