Loreley (Alexander Nix)
Loreley is a fantastic story by Alexander Nix , which aims to recount the German myth of the Loreley for the present day. The historical events told in the novel are historically documented. The 398-page book was published by Marion von Schröder Verlag in 1998 .
content
The historically fantastic novel is set in the German High Middle Ages , in 1320. Two girls are growing up in a castle on the banks of the Rhine. The main character of the novel is the boyish Ailis, daughter of Count Wilhelm's body hunter. Ailis is endowed with fantastic hearing, which - as she only ascertains in the course of the story - also enables her to make supernatural perceptions. She does an apprenticeship with the coarse but good-natured blacksmith Erland at the home castle Rheinfels . Ailin's best friend is Fee, the spoiled niece of Count von Katzenelnbogen . Fee's mother died giving birth and her father left because of grief, so that she grew up as a child with his brother, Count von Katzenelnbogen and his childless wife. The countess still adheres to the pre-Christian belief in the fairy kingdom Faerie, which she practices behind closed doors. From childhood on, Fee and Ailis are inseparable - until Ailis discovers the family's terrible secret. Ailis was deliberately given to Fee as a playmate from an early age so that she would not feel the loss of her twin sister. Fees didn't know anything about this twin sister. First, Ailis assumes the sister was stillborn. Then it turns out that in the body of the sister who was killed by her own father in childbirth, the spirit of a being from the fairy world was banished into her body. Father Fees, who had to kill not only his own daughter but also his beloved wife when giving birth to avert harm from the human world, returns to Rheinfels Castle. After his life story is revealed to Fee, he commits suicide.
First, Ailis witnesses the Count and her father's hunt for a little five-year-old girl who is caught in the forest with a magical hunting net on the Lurlinberg. The Lurlinberg is a steep rock high above the Rhine, later the Loreley rock. There the five-year-old is thrown into a deep well shaft, grilled with sharp iron thorns. Ailis has to swear to Count Wilhelm that she won't tell anyone about what happened and the little girl in the barred well shaft. What at this point in time no one except the Count knows is that the girl's body is that of Fees' twin sister, who was killed during the birth, in which the being Echo is located. Ailis cannot escape the child's strange charisma. Although a traveling minstrel warns her about the Echo from Lurlinsberg, she has to go back to where the little one (Echo) is locked up and where the entrance to the Faerie fairy is supposed to be. She is fascinated by the magical chants of the little ones and even loses her family and friends. When a trader brings the news that the Naddards - people in the shape of adder who worshiped the old gods - are said to have reappeared for the first time in centuries, it quickly becomes clear that - should that be true - the Lurlinsberg, the high altar of the old, pre-Christian one Belief will be their goal. After all, it's not Ailis, but Fee, who falls under the spell of Loreley. Fee's mind seems to become confused. She frees the little girl - and evokes unspeakable horror. Because in the body of the Loreley lurked the fairy creature, which is as old as the world, and was just waiting to tear down the borders to the magical realm of Faerie and to bring damnation over the land on the Rhine. Echo takes possession of Fee's body and her mind merges with Fee's, so that a shy, reserved young woman becomes a power-hungry woman who, thanks to her sexual charisma, makes her husband, Ritter Bann, the tool of her evil games.
Ailis has now joined a group of minstrels who can quickly travel from place to place through their music in a magical world in between. With her help, she wants to free the beloved fairy from ghost echoes. However, this cannot succeed because the Echo Fee has taken possession of her body and displaced her mind. In a seemingly hopeless struggle with the echo, Ailis and the last minstrel manage, to their own surprise, to banish the echo through the power of their music into the infinite intermediate world of tones and colors.
The novel ends with an appendix in which the historical references to the novel are explained.
background
The Loreley rock, mentioned for the first time in the Fulda annals, was named Lurlinberg or Lorberg in the Middle Ages. The ending Ley means rock or slate rock in Rhenish parlance. The prefix Lore could go back to Middle High German lure for lurking, but it could also be related to the river goddess Lohra, who was worshiped earlier by the residents of the Rhine. Sometimes she is also associated with the dwarf and elf king Laurin , which fits the story that inside the mountain there is an entrance to the fairy kingdom. The story of the blond virgin Loreley, who lures boaters to ruin with her singing, does not seem to be an ancient legend, but rather goes back to the ballad of the poet Clemens Brentano from his novel Godwi from 1802. Brentano tells the story of a girl in love who is betrayed by her lover and who throws herself from a rock into the Rhine out of grief. In the following adaptations of this topic by Joseph von Eichendorff , Heinrich Heine and others, the image of the tragically in love girl changed into the mermaid figure Loreley.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Loreley. Novel. von Schröder, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-547-77164-1 .
- ↑ Explanations in the appendix by Loreley. Novel. von Schröder, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-547-77164-1 .