Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures

by Anonymous

• ISBN13: 9780415937634
• ISBN10: 0415937639
• Edition: 4th
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2001-08-08
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

A classic fable of German literature,Till Eulenspiegelis a cheerfully scatological collection of 95 loosely related vignettes depicting the life and times of a famous roving jester. The trickster hero devotes his life to deflating the pompous, the rich, and the smug. The book includes the entire set of 87 sixteenth-century woodcuts, possibly by Albrecht Duerer. It also contains an introduction that establishes the historical context of the tales, discusses the use of satire in the late Medieval and early Renaissance literature.

Author Biography

Paul Oppenheimer is Professor of English and Medieval and Comparative Literature at the City College of the City University of New York

Table of Contents

Introduction	xxi
Bibliography	lxxxv
Foreword	3	(1)
How Till Eulenspiegel was born, how he was baptized three times in one day, and who his godparents were	4	(1)
How all the farmers and their wives complained about young Eulenspiegel, saying he was a rogue and scoundrel; and how he rode behind his father on a horse, quietly letting the people behind him see his arse	5	(2)
How Claus Eulenspiegel moved away from Kneitlingen to the Saale, the river, where his mother was born, where he died; and how his son Till learned to walk the tightrope	7	(1)
How Eulenspiegel relieved the boys of 200 pairs of shoes, over which they fought, making young and old tear their hair over them	8	(2)
How Eulenspiegel's mother tried to convince him to learn a trade-with which she meant to help him	10	(1)
How Eulenspiegel cheated a baker out of a sack of bread at Stassfurt, in the city, and brought it home to his mother	11	(1)
How Eulenspiegel ate the breakfast bread, or rolls, with other boys, and how he was made to overeat, and was beaten into doing so	12	(2)
How Eulenspiegel made the stingy householder's chickens play tug-of war over bait	14	(1)
How Eulenspiegel crawled into a beehive; how two men came by night, intending to steal it; and how he made them tear each other's hair and let the beehive drop	15	(2)
How Eulenspiegel became a page-boy; and how his squire taught him that whenever he found the plant hemp, he should shit on it; so he shitted on mustard, thinking hemp and mustard were the same thing	17	(2)
How Eulenspiegel hired himself out to a priest; and how he ate his roast chickens off the spit	19	(3)
How Eulenspiegel became the sexton in the village of Buddenstedt; and how the priest shitted in his church and Eulenspiegel won a barrel of beer	22	(1)
How Eulenspiegel played a trick during Easter matins that led the priest and his maid to tear the hair of their farmers and go to war with them	23	(2)
How Eulenspiegel announced that he planned to fly off the roof at Magdeburg, and dismissed his audience with scathing language	25	(1)
How Eulenspiegel pretended to be a doctor, and doctored the doctor of the Bishop of Magdeburg, who was deceived by him	26	(4)
How Eulenspiegel made a sick child shit at Peine and was highly praised	30	(2)
How Eulenspiegel got all the patients at the hospital healthy in one day, without medicine	32	(2)
How Eulenspiegel purchased bread according to the proverb ``One gives bread to him who has it.''	34	(1)
How Eulenspiegel apprenticed himself as a baker's boy to a baker-and how he baked owls and long-tailed monkeys	35	(2)
How Eulenspiegel sifted flour by moonlight into the courtyard	37	(2)
How Eulenspiegel always rode on a reddish-gray horse, and was miserable around children	39	(1)
How Eulenspiegel hired himself out as a tower bugler to the Count of Anhalt; and how, when enemies showed up, he failed to sound his horn; and how, when there were no enemies, he sounded it	40	(3)
How Eulenspiegel had his horse shod with gold shoes, for which the King of Denmark had to pay	43	(2)
How Eulenspiegel, with a superior trick, humiliated the King of Poland's jester	45	(2)
How Eulenspiegel was banished from the Duchy of Luneburg, and how he cut open his horse and stood in it	47	(1)
How Eulenspiegel bought some land from a farmer in the province of Luneburg, and sat in it, in a tumbrel	48	(2)
How Eulenspiegel painted for the Landgrave of Hesse, doing it in white, so whoever was illegitimate could not see it	50	(4)
How Eulenspiegel debated with the students at the University of Prague, in Bohemia, and emerged victorious	54	(2)
How Eulenspiegel, at Erfurt, taught an ass to read from an old psalter	56	(3)
How Eulenspiegel, at Sangerhausen, in the province of Thuringen, washed pelts for the ladies	59	(2)
How Eulenspiegel wandered around with a death's-head, amazing people with it, and made quite a profit from doing so	61	(2)
How Eulenspiegel led the city patrol of Nuremberg into following him over a narrow bridge and falling into the water	63	(2)
How Eulenspiegel ate for money at Bamberg	65	(2)
How Eulenspiegel traveled to Rome and visited the pope, who took him for a heretic	67	(2)
How Eulenspiegel cheated the Jews at Frankfurt-on-the-Main out of a thousand guilders, by selling them his excrement as prophet's berries	69	(3)
How Eulenspiegel bought chickens at Quedlinburg, and left the farmer's wife one of her own chickens as a pledge for the money	72	(1)
How the priest of Hoheneggelsen ate one of Eulenspiegel's sausages-something which subsequently did not make him happy	73	(3)
How Eulenspiegel, with a false confession, talked the priest of Kissenbruck out of his horse	76	(4)
How Eulenspiegel hired himself out to a blacksmith, and how he carried the blacksmith's bellows into his courtyard for him	80	(2)
How Eulenspiegel forged a blacksmith's hammer, tongs, and other tools together	82	(3)
How Eulenspiegel told something true to a blacksmith, his wife, his assistant, and his servant girl in front of his house	85	(2)
How Eulenspiegel worked for a shoemaker, and how Eulenspiegel asked him what shapes he should cut. His boss said, ``Large and small, like those the swineherd runs past the gate:' So Eulenspiegel cut out oxen, cattle, calves, rams, and the like, and ruined the leather	87	(3)
How Eulenspiegel sprinkled a soup for a farmer, putting filthy-smelling fish oil on it instead of bread and drippings, and thought that was good enough for the farmer	90	(1)
How a bootmaker in Brunswick larded Eulenspiegel's boots, and how Eulenspiegel knocked the windows out of his room	91	(3)
How Eulenspiegel sold a shoemaker of Wismar frozen filth for tallow	94	(1)
How Eulenspiegel became a brewer's assistant at Einbeck, and how he boiled a dog called Hops, instead of hops	95	(3)
How Eulenspiegel hired himself out to a tailor and sewed under a tub	98	(2)
How Eulenspiegel made three tailor's boys fall off a bench-and told people the wind had blown them off it	100	(2)
How Eulenspiegel called all the tailors of Saxony together to teach them a skill that would help them and their children	102	(2)
How Eulenspiegel beat wool on a holy day, because the clothier had forbidden his having Monday off	104	(3)
How Eulenspiegel hired himself out to a furrier and shitted in his workroom for him, because one stink is supposed to drive out another	107	(2)
How Eulenspiegel slept among pelts for a furrier-dry and damp, as the furrier told him to	109	(1)
How Eulenspiegel, in Berlin, made wolves for a furrier, instead of ``wolf pelts.''	110	(2)
How Eulenspiegel, in Leipzig, sold the furriers a live cat sewn into a rabbit skin, in a sack, for a live rabbit	112	(2)
How Eulenspiegel boiled leather-along with chairs and benches-for a tanner in Brunswick on the Damme	114	(2)
How Eulenspiegel cheated the wine-tapster at Lubeck, by giving him a jug of water instead of a jug of wine	116	(1)
How people tried to hang Eulenspiegel at Lubeck; and how, with clever trickery, he got out of there	117	(3)
How Eulenspiegel had a giant purse made at Helmstadt	120	(1)
How Eulenspiegel cheated a butcher of Erfurt out of a roast	121	(2)
How Eulenspiegel cheated a butcher of Erfurt out of another roast	123	(1)
How Eulenspiegel became a carpenter's boy in Dresden, and failed to win much praise	124	(2)
How Eulenspiegel became an optician, and found no demand for his services in any country	126	(2)
How Eulenspiegel hired himself out as a cook and houseboy to a merchant in Hildesheim, and behaved quite mischievously	128	(5)
How Eulenspiegel became a horse-dealer in Paris, and removed the tail from a Frenchman's horse	133	(1)
How Eulenspiegel played a huge joke on a pipemaker at Luneburg	134	(3)
How Eulenspiegel was tricked by an old farmer's wife and lost his purse	137	(3)
How Eulenspiegel tricked a farmer at Ueltzen out of some green fabric from London by making him believe it was blue	140	(2)
How Eulenspiegel shitted in the baths at Hanover, believing that the place was a House of Cleansing	142	(2)
How Eulenspiegel bought milk from the country-women in Bremen, and mixed it all together	144	(2)
How Eulenspiegel gave twelve blind men twelve guilders-how they took them, how they spent them, and how in the end they lived miserably because of them	146	(4)
How Eulenspiegel, in Bremen, basted his roast from his behind, so nobody wanted to eat it	150	(1)
How Eulenspiegel sowed stones in a city in Saxony; and how, when he was asked about it, he said he was sowing rogues	151	(2)
How Eulenspiegel hired himself out to a barber in Hamburg, and entered his shop through his windows	153	(2)
How a woman who had snot hanging out of her nose invited Eulenspiegel for a meal	155	(1)
How Eulenspiegel ate the white jam by himself, by letting a lump fall into it, out of his nose	156	(2)
How Eulenspiegel shitted inside a house and blew the stink through a wall to a host who disliked him	158	(2)
How Eulenspiegel, at Eisleben, frightened an innkeeper with a wolf he had promised to catch	160	(4)
How Eulenspiegel shitted on an innkeeper's table in Cologne, telling him he would come and find it	164	(1)
How Eulenspiegel paid the innkeeper with the sound of his money	165	(2)
How Eulenspiegel took his leave of Rostock	167	(1)
How Eulenspiegel killed a dog, paying an innkeeper with its skin, because the dog had eaten with him	168	(3)
How Eulenspiegel convinced the same innkeeper that Eulenspiegel was lying on the wheel	171	(1)
How Eulenspiegel seated a lady-innkeeper in hot ashes on her bare arse	172	(1)
How Eulenspiegel shitted in his bed and convinced his innkeeper that a priest had done it	173	(2)
How a Dutchman ate Eulenspiegel's baked apple, into which he had put saffron, off his plate	175	(1)
How Eulenspicgel made a woman break all her pots at the market in Bremen	176	(2)
How a farmer taking plums to the market in Einbeck gave Euleaspiegel a ride in his cart, and how Eulenspiegel shitted on them	178	(2)
How Eulenspiegel counted the monks into vespers at Marienthal	180	(2)
How Eulenspiegel fell ill at Molln, how he shitted in the pharmacist's medical book, how he was brought to ``The Holy Ghost,'' and how he said a sweet word to his mother	182	(1)
How Eulenspiegel was told to repent of his sins-so he repented of three sorts of tricks he had not played	183	(2)
How Eulenspiegel prepared his legacy-in which the priest covered his hands with shit	185	(1)
How Eulenspiegel divided his possessions into three parts-one for his friends, one for the Council of Molln, and one for the priest there	186	(2)
How Eulenspiegel died and how pigs knocked over his bier during the vigils, so he took a tumble	188	(1)
How Eulenspiegel was buried, as he was to be buried not by religious or lay people but by beguines	189	(2)
How Eulenspiegel's epitaph and inscription were carved over his grave at Luneburg	191	(2)
Notes on the Tales	193