Till Eulenspiegel

Eulenspiegel is a native of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg whose picaresque career takes him to many places throughout the Holy Roman Empire.

Eulenspiegel's surname translates to "owl-mirror"; and the frontispiece of the 1515 chapbook, as well as his alleged tombstone in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein, render it as a rebus comprising an owl and a hand mirror.

As a vagrant (Landfahrer), he travelled through the Holy Roman Empire, especially Northern Germany, but also the Low Countries, Bohemia, and Italy.

It is reasonable to place the folkloristic origins of the tradition in the 15th century, although, in spite of suggestions to the effect "that the name 'Eulenspiegel' was used in tales of rogues and liars in Lower Saxony as early as 1400",[2] 15th-century references to a Till Eulenspiegel turn out to be surprisingly elusive.

[9][10] Scatological stories abound, beginning with Till's early childhood (in which he rides behind his father and exposes his rear-end to the townspeople) and persisting until his death bed (where he tricks a priest into soiling his hands with feces).

[11] In Mölln, the reported site of Eulenspiegel's death and burial in the plague year of 1350, a memorial stone was commissioned by the town council in 1544, now on display in an alcove on the outside wall of the tower of St. Nicolai church.

Anno 1350 is dusse / steen upgehaven und / Tyle ulen spegel lenet / hier under begraven.

Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dyl Ulenspiegel, geboren uß dem Land zu Brunßwick, wie er sein leben volbracht hatt, xcvi seiner geschichten.

In the chapbooks, Eulenspiegel is presented as a trickster who plays practical jokes on his contemporaries, exposing vices at every turn, greed and folly, hypocrisy and foolishness.

As Peter Carels notes, "The fulcrum of his wit in a large number of the tales is his literal interpretation of figurative language.

The Antwerp printer Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten is believed to have printed the first Dutch-language version of the Till Eulenspiegel story.

Michiel Hillen van Hoochstraten appears to have used for his translation a German text, in manuscript or printed, that is now lost, which antedated the Grüninger edition.

[19] Owleglasse is mentioned in Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abington (1599) and again in Ben Jonson's comedic play The Alchemist (1610).

[20] Editions of Eulenspiegel in German, Dutch, Flemish, French and English remained popular throughout the early modern period.

By the late 17th century, Eulenspiegel and his pranks had become proverbial, with the French adjective espiègle "impish, mischievous" derived from his name.

[22] Hans Sachs (1494-1576) the renowned Meistersinger of Nuremberg drew material from the Volksbuch for 46 of his comic tales (Schwänke) and Carnival plays (Fastnachtspiele).

In the eighteenth century, German satirists adopted episodes for social satire, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth century versions of the tales were bowdlerized to render them fit for children, who had come to be considered their chief natural audience, by expurgating their many scatological references.

[16] The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak, an 1867 novel by Belgian author Charles De Coster, has been translated, often in mutilated versions, into many languages.

Alfred Jarry, author of Gestes et opinions du Docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911), mentions Ulenspiegel's unruly behaviour in the Appendix chapter entitled Les poteaux de la morale: « Till Ulenspiegel, on s’en souvient, ne coordonnait point autrement ses opérations mentales : se dirigeant vers un faîte, il se réjouissait du dévalement futur.

» ("Till Ulenspiegel, we recall, did not coordinate his mental operations differently: heading toward a cliff, he rejoiced in future downfall.")

Ulenspiegel was mentioned in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita as a possible prototype for the black cat character Behemoth.

Michael Rosen adapted the story into a 1989 children's novel, illustrated by Fritz Wegner: The Wicked Tricks of Till Owlyglass, ISBN 978-0744513462.

The Italian civil law professor Francesco Gazzoni uses the name Till Eulenspiegel as a pseudonym for himself in his book "Favole quasi giuridiche" (in English, "Semi-juridical Fables").

[23] Willy Vandersteen drew two comic book albums about Uilenspiegel, "De Opstand der Geuzen" ("The Rebellion of the Geuzen") and "Fort Oranje" ("Fort Orange"), both drawn in a realistic, serious style and pre-published in the Belgian comics magazine Tintin between 1952 and 1954.

[24] Kibbutz theatre director and producer Shulamit Bat-Dori created an open-air production of Till Eulenspiegel at Mishmar HaEmek, Israel, in 1955 that drew 10,000 viewers.

[26][27] In Moscow in 1974, Grigoriy Gorin adapted De Coster's novel as a play originally entitled The Passion of Tyl.

In the late 1930s or early 1940s, the Russian composer Wladimir Vogel wrote a drama-oratorio, Thyl Claes, derived from De Coster's book.

Ulenspiegel (Legenda o Tile), was a 1976 Soviet film, based on De Coster's novel, and directed by Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov, "The Legend of Till Ullenspiegel" (1976).

In the town of Damme, Belgium, there is also a museum honoring him, and there is a fountain and statue featuring Till Eulenspiegel in the Marktplatz of Magdeburg, capital city of Sachsen-Anhalt.

The original name was inspired by a passage from Austrian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik's Masochism in Modern Man (1941),[39] in which he argues that patients who engage in self-punishing or provocative behavior do so in order to demonstrate their emotional fortitude, induce guilt in others, and achieve a sense of "victory through defeat".