Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 2: Gottfried August Bürger and Lenore

Nosferatu's Kindred header image, with shadow of Nosferatu

Continuing the series that celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu with an overview of German vampire literature.

While Heinrich August Ossenfelder introduced vampires to German poetry in 1748, it would be decades before another poet took up his lead: the next canonical work of vampire poetry, Goethe’s “Die Braut von Korinth” (“The Bride of Corinth”), eventually appeared in 1797. The interim, however, did see one work that warrants a mention. This was Gottfried August Bürger’s ballad “Lenore”, which debuted in the literary journal Göttinger Musenalmanach für 1774 (published in 1773, despite its title).

Horace Vernet's 1839 painting "The Ballad of Lenore, or The Dead Travel Fast" showing a frightened woman riding with a ghostly horseman.
Horace Vernet’s 1839 painting of Lenore’s nocturnal ride.

“Lenore” makes no mention of vampires. The same, of course, can be said of Charles Maturin’s influential 1820 novel Melmoth the Wanderer, about a man who sells his soul to the Devil to have his life extended by a century and a half – yet any author who explores a vampire’s mixed blessing of immortality, from James Malcolm Rymer to Anne Rice, owes a debt to Maturin and Melmoth. “Lenore” likewise provided later vampire authors with plenty of raw material – so much, in fact, that Bürger really does deserve inclusion between Ossenfelder and Goethe when examining the development of the vampire theme in German poetry.

The ballad’s narrative is set in the aftermath of the 1757 Battle of Prague. The soldiers are returning from battle, but heroine Lenore can find no sight of her lover Wilhelm amongst them. Has he found another woman, she wonders, or did he perish on the battlefield? Lenore’s mother enters the scene: “Kind, bet’ ein Vaterunser!” she says. “Was Gott thut, das ist wohl gethan/Gott, Gott erbarmt sich unser!“ (“Child, recite the Lord’s Prayer! God’s will is right. God, God, have mercy on us!”).

But the despairing girl finds scant comfort in faith, chiding her mother for this Eitler Wahn (vain delusion). “Gott hat an mir nicht wohl gethan!” she exclaims. “Was half, was half mein Beten?“ (“God has done me wrong! What use was my prayer?”) Her mother holds firm: “Das hochgelobte Sakrament/Wird deinen Jammer lindern” (“The blessed sacrament shall relieve your sorrows”). Lenore responds with a blasphemy: “Das lindert mir kein Sakrament!/Kein Sakrament mag Leben/Den Todten wiedergeben“ (“No sacrament relieves me, no sacrament can bring the dead back to life”).

On her own, Lenore then hears the sound of an approaching horseman: it is her lover Wilhelm, back at last. He offers to carry her away on a journey of a hundred miles to a place where they can be together. Although she longs for him, Lenore is uncertain about this proposal: the night is late, with the bell having rung eleven. “Sieh hin, sieh her! der Mond scheint hell“, replies Wilhelm. “Wir und die Todten reiten schnell.” (“Look, look! The moon is shining bright. We and the dead travel fast”). He assures her that she will arrive at a wedding bed that is “Still, kühl und klein!/Sechs Bretter und zwei Brettchen” (silent, cool, small, made of six boards one way and two boards the other) and that wedding guests will welcome them to the open chamber. And so, Lenore sets off with Wilhelm upon his horse.

The horse gallops through the night, at one point encountering a funeral procession uttering a mournful dirge. Lenore expresses her doubts, but Wilhelm dismisses her feelings and carries on riding: “die Todten reiten schnell!” (“the dead travel fast!”) The nocturnal jaunt reaches its destination: not a wedding venue, but a gated cemetery. There, Wilhelm throws off his clothes to reveal not a dashing lover but the traditional figure of Death, with bare skull, hourglass and scythe.

Lenore is left surrounded by Geheul aus hoher Luft, Gewinsel kam aus tiefer Gruft (howling in the air and moans from the tomb). A gaggle of dancing spirits close upon her, and impart the final lines of the ballad: “Geduld! Geduld! Wenn’s Herz auch bricht!/Mit Gott im Himmel hadre nicht!/Des Leibes bist du ledig/Gott sey der Seele gnädig!” (“Patience, patience, even if your heart is broken, do not quarrel with god in heaven! Now that you are free of your body, may God have mercy on your soul!”)

Even before the eighteenth century closed, “Lenore” had already received multiple English translations. One early (and now rather antiquated) rendition by William Taylor appeared in the March 1796 edition of the Monthly Magazine:

His head became a naked scull;
Nor haire nor eyen had he:
His body grew a skeleton,
Whilome so blythe of blee.

And att his drye and boney heele
Nor spur was left to be;
And inn his witherde hande you might
The scythe and houre-glass see.

Matthew Lewis, the author best remembered for his Gothic novel The Monk (1796), would include Taylor’s version of the ballad in his influential 1800 collection Tales of Wonder. Lewis praised Taylor’s work as “a master-piece of translation… far superior, both in spirit and harmony, to the German”. Percy Bysshe Shelley penned his own (now lost) translation of “Lenore” as a teenager, offering a glimpse of the poem’s impact upon the more macabre side of the English Romantic movement. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was still another who rendered the poem into English:

Here to the right and there to left
Flew fields of corn and clover,
And the bridges flashed by to the dazzled eye,
As rattling they thundered over.
“What ails my love? the moon shines bright:
Bravely the dead men ride through the night.
Is my love afraid of the quiet dead?”
”Ah! no;—let them sleep in their dusty bed!”

“Lenore” was also the subject of parody. 1797 saw the publication of “Miss Kitty”, an anonymous text that was presented as having been “translated from the German by several hands”. This version concludes with the heroine’s handsome lover being revealed not as the Grim Reaper, but as – quite simply – her handsome lover:

And from his haunches, quick he made
The apronstrings to flee;
That all in black, of various shades,
A parson he might be.

His head soon wore a decent hat,
A band beside had he,
His hands and face with speed he wash’d,
—Which made him fair to see.

Come 1897, a full century after the above parody, “Lenore” was still sufficiently well-known for Bram Stoker to mention it in the first chapter of Dracula. Upon the arrival of a mysterious coachman, later revealed to be Count Dracula in disguise, a bystander is prompted to utter a choice quotation:

As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s “Lenore”:—
“Denn die Todten reiten schnell”—
(“For the dead travel fast.”)
The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers and crossing himself.

Still from the film Nosferatu showing an eerie scene of a carriage in a forest.
The coach-ride sequence in Bram Stoker’s Dracula pays homage to Lenore — and was itself adapted for the screen in Nosferatu.

Although the deathly lover in “Lenore” is not strictly speaking a vampire, the eccentric scholar Montague Summers felt that the ballad was worth covering in his book The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928). Here, Summers discusses Bürger’s piece alongside Goethe’s more obviously vampire-adjacent “Die Braut von Korinth” and expresses bewilderment as to why the English Gothic authors of the eighteenth century were not inspired by these works to write vampire stories of their own:

It is a very remarkable circumstance that in spite of the extremely plain hint which might profitably have been taken from such poems as Die Braut von Korinth and Lenore the novelists of the Gothic school, soaked though they were in German literature, searching the earth and the depths of the earth for thrills and sensation of every kind, do not seem to have utilized the tradition of the Vampire. It is a puzzle indeed if we ask how it was that such writers as Monk Lewis, “Apollo’s sexton,” who would fain “make Parnassus a churchyard”; and Charles Robert Maturin who, as he himself confessed, loved bells rung by viewless hands, daggers encrusted with long shed blood, treacherous doors behind still more treacherous tapestry, mad nuns, apparitions, et hoc genus omne; the two lords of macabre romance, should neither of them have sent some hideous vampire ghost ravening through their sepulchral pages.

But while “Lenore” may not have been a direct inspiration for later vampire stories, its narrative of a nocturnal ride to a phantasmagorical graveyard certainly provided a bounty of macabre imagery to draw upon. With “Der Vampir”, Heinrich August Ossenfelder demonstrated that the vampire could act as a deathly lover; with “Lenore”, Gottfried August Bürger showed readers the haunted world in which a maiden might find herself should she fall for a lover of this sort.


Next: How Goethe turned to Greek folklore for inspiration – and showed that vampire lovers need not be male.

Series Navigation<< Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 1: Heinrich August Ossenfelder and Der VampirNosferatu’s Kindred, Part 3: Goethe and The Bride of Corinth >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

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