Short stories
The Rider on the White Horse
Der Schimmelreiter
Theodor Storm · 1888
Opening lines
Es war im dritten Jahrzehnt unseres Jahrhunderts, an einem Oktober-nachmittag—so begann der damalige Erzähler—als ich bei starkem Unwetter auf einem nordfriesischen Deich entlang ritt.
It was in the third decade of our century, on an October afternoon, so the narrator of that time began, that I was riding along a North Frisian dyke in a violent storm.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
On the coast of North Frisia, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Hauke Haien, the son of a surveyor, teaches himself Euclid's geometry and dreams of a dyke with a gentler profile on the sea side. Having entered the service of the dyke-reeve Tede Volkerts as a farmhand, he makes himself indispensable, and earns the hatred of the head farmhand Ole Peters and the attention of Elke, his master's daughter. Having in turn become dyke-reeve, he rides a white horse that the villagers hold to be the skeleton come back from a deserted islet, and undertakes the dyke he conceived as a child.
Context
The legend had occupied the author for decades, but the novella was only written between July 1886 and February 1888; it appeared in April 1888 in the Deutsche Rundschau, three months before his death. The narrative is nested three times: a reader of old magazines, a traveller surprised by the storm, a schoolmaster who tells the tale. The hero owes much to Hans Momsen of Fahretoft, a farmer, mechanic and self-taught mathematician. The novella was brought to the screen in 1934, in West Germany in 1978 and, in a co-production of the GDR and Poland, in 1984.
Who it is for
A narrative in one piece, in which three narrators are nested within one another: it takes a few pages to know who is speaking, and this is intended.
Prizes and reception
The best known of Storm's novellas, of which Thomas Mann said that it raised the novella, epic sister of the drama, to unprecedented heights.
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