The Enchanted Worlds of Scott, Scotland, and the Grimms Sarah
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Enchanted Worlds of Scott, Scotland, and the Grimms Sarah Dunnigan This chapter explores the imaginative, cultural, and intellectual affinities between the Grimm brothers and Walter Scott, an overlooked facet of the relationship between early nineteenth-century Scottish and German Romanticism. The Grimms’ fascination for Scottish traditional belief is also mediated through the work of the Irish antiquary, Thomas Crofton Croker, who published their essay on “The Elves in Scotland”. Here, Scott’s position as Scotland’s most eminent “fairy historian” appears supplanted by another collector of “enchantment”, W.G. Stewart. Unravelling the connections between Scott, Croker, Stewart, and the Grimms helps to illuminate shared aspects of cultural nationalism, popular antiquarianism, and neomedievalism which emerge out of fairy belief and the idea of enchantment in early nineteenth-century Europe. Keywords: Jacob Grimm; Wilhelm Grimm; Walter Scott; Thomas Crofton Croker; William Grant Stewart; neomedievalism; Thomas of Erceldoune; fairies; elves; folk revival; antiquarianism. Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), the German philologist, folklore collector and, most famously, with his beloved brother, Wilhelm (1786–1859), compiler of the most enduringly popular collection of European folk and fairy tales, once confessed that “For a long time, I have felt the immense advantage that is granted to those who occupy themselves with their native works” (Brill 1963: 489). The brothers’ complex emotional and intellectual fascination for the stories “der Heimat” was, of course, imprinted on their Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Tales for Children and the Household], first printed in 1812. Jacob’s sense of what he terms the peculiar “security” (Brill 1963: 289) fostered by the study of “native works” binds him to some key movements of European Romanticism: to antiquarianism, folk revivalism, and cultural nationalism, for example. But what is less well known is that it binds him to Walter Scott, who also sought “to contribute somewhat to the history of my native country” (Scott 1902: 175) and, in Jacob’s words, to the discovery of “songs […] oral sagas and fairy tales” (Brill 1963: 497), those “traditional materials” (Crick 2005: 7) in which he believed Scottish culture to be especially rich. Jacob Grimm’s “en- chantment” with Scottish tradition, and his interest in the antiquarian offshoots of a broader Scottish Romanticism, is perhaps unsurprising. 250 Sarah Dunnigan Edward V.K. Brill, Richard Dorson and Ruth Michaelis-Jena have commented briefly on the series of letters exchanged between Scott and Jacob Grimm from 1814 until 1815; but implications of the correspondence for studies of early nineteenth-century Scottish culture and its European contexts have not been explored in detail. This chapter returns to those letters (first published by Brill in 1963)1 to explore some possible affinities, both cultural and intellectual, between these two great architects of Romantic cultural nationalism. This exchange, however, does not encompass the whole of the Grimms’ relationship with Romantic Scotland. Another alliance, this time forged through the Irish antiquary Thomas Crofton Croker (1798–1854), reveals the extent of their particular fascination for how “belief in a people of spirits invisibly filling all nature” (Croker 1825– 28: 3: 53) is manifest in Scotland. The essays Croker publishes in his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–28) attest how the Grimms reach beyond Scott’s work to a far less well known work on the Scottish occult by W.G. Stewart. In so doing, what might be termed the Grimm enchantment with an enchanted Scotland finds its fullest expression. Such correspondences between the Grimms, Scott, Croker, and Stewart – not just literal, but intellectual and imaginative, too – can help to refine our understanding of the interrelated worlds of Scottish and German Romanticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the role played by the influence of German literature in Scott’s own creative development. The correspondence between Scott and Jacob Grimm is one particular link in a long-established chain of Scottish-Germanic cultural influences and inspirations. In the later part of the nineteenth century, the fairy-tale fantasies of George MacDonald owe much of their mystical and spiritual impulses to the poetic philosophies of Novalis (the pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801)). German philosophical currents are, of course, most deeply embedded in the work of Thomas Carlyle who was clearly an avid reader of the German Künstmarchen, or literary fairy tale, exemplified by his translations published in 1827 of Karl August Musaeus and Ludwig Tieck, inventors of artful and esoteric fairy tales. To earlier 1 The English translation provided here of Grimm’s German letters (based on Brill’s transcription) is provided by Stefanie Lehner. I am enormously grateful to Dr. Lehner for all her generous assistance and advice. Further archival information about the source and provenance of these letters can be found in Brill 1963. .