Sabine Baring-Gould

Sabine Baring-Gould around 1900

William Sabine Baring-Gould (born January 28, 1834 , † January 2, 1924 ) was a Victorian English priest , hagiographer , occultist , poet and writer and collector of folk songs .

Adolescent years

Sabine Baring-Gould was born in southern England, the son of a manager for the East India Company . After leaving the colonial trading group, the father and his family went on extensive trips across Europe. The young Baring-Gould attended schools in Germany and France, developed an extraordinary talent for foreign languages ​​and, at the end of his studies at Cambridge University, had mastered six foreign languages. After completing his studies, Baring-Gould taught at a boys' boarding school, and according to tradition, he is said to have attracted attention there as an unconventional educator with a penchant for the supernatural, because he came to class with his pet on his shoulder - a tame bat . At the age of 30 he received the major ordinations of the Anglican Church and took his first parish in the industrial north, in Horbury, Yorkshire .

Turning to occult topics

In the desolation of the filthy workers' settlements, the young vicar turned to particularly dark subjects. His interest in supernatural phenomena, which he shared with many of his contemporaries, had shown at an early age when he was alone on the barren Dartmoor in the west of England. Experiences on his travels as an adolescent in France had introduced him to the werewolf belief , and so in a relatively short time he wrote the first book about these shapeshifters in English, which appeared in 1865 under the title Book of Werewolves . His knowledge of various European languages ​​enabled him to study and quote even the most remote sources. A second work followed the following year, which was again devoted to strange subjects, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages .

The Book of Werewolves , which is still often quoted in circles of British werewolf experts, falls far behind the work of Wilhelm Hertz published two years earlier in terms of its scientific nature and the presentation of details . While the habilitation thesis of the German philologist was an academic work, the aim of which was to deal with the phenomenon of the werewolves historically and historically, Baring-Gould was aimed at a late romantic audience that demanded creepy reading. His Book of Werewolves can best be classified as a popular “wrench”, which differs from pure “fiction” through its orientation towards classical myths , folkloric traditions and real cases, but dispenses with an interpretation of belief in the shapeshifters and instead sets the shower effect. The level of detail with which the author devotes himself to cases that have nothing to do with the subject of werewolf was also criticized, e.g. B. the three chapters on Gilles de Rais . In the case of Sergeant Bertrand, the “werewolf” - or better: “ Ghoul ” - from Paris , opinions differ as to whether he should be in the book. Perhaps these chapters reflect anti-French prejudices of the patriotic British.

Further career

But the young pastor from a wealthy family did not only meet the expectations placed on him in the literary field: he was evidently ignorant of social prejudices, because in 1868 he married the factory worker Grace Taylor, for whom he had previously financed an apprenticeship as a future pastor's wife was appropriate. The Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was a personal friend of the pastor’s family for many years, so it is conceivable that his comedy Pygmalion , which provided the material for the musical My Fair Lady , was inspired by the unusual Baring-Gould couple .

After a ten year interlude as a pastor in Essex , Sabine Baring-Gould was finally able to take over the respected parish of Lewtrenchard on the edge of the notorious Dartmoor ( Devonshire ) in 1881 . The pastor's office was traditionally owned by the Baring-Goulds, and the income from the estate on which it belonged enabled the Reverend to enable his large family to lead a decent life. On top of that, he went on extensive educational trips, and with great zeal he collected books, without neglecting book-writing.

Literary work

There is no complete list of Baring-Gould's publications as some articles were published anonymously in journals. We are talking about more than 200 books, brochures and collections of sermons, not counting the dependent articles. These include a good 30 novels and his monumental work Lives of the Saints in 16 volumes. There are also books on theological and moral questions, social policy, local history and of course his travels, e. B. to the south of France and Iceland . According to a brochure in the “ British Library ”, with the flood of his publications he temporarily led the list of the hardest-working authors in the entire history of English literature. In one of his best-known novels, The Frobishers (1901), he denounced the catastrophic working conditions in the pottery factories of Central England, the Potteries of Staffordshire , and was one of the first writers to address environmental diseases such as the widespread lead poisoning , the effects of which many Politicians closed their eyes in the interests of the economic boom .

Baring-Gould was particularly interested in researching and recording regional folklore . His favorite collection, Songs of the West (1889; 2nd edition 1905), which is still popular today, includes folk songs from Cornwall and Devonshire. Books of folk songs for school lessons and other folkloric titles and folk tales followed . Later he did not comment on the two more occult-influenced youth works, and some websites dedicated to him also keep silent about his morbid interest in werewolves and other ghostly curiosities.

Posterity does not remember Baring-Goulds for his flood of religious writings or his collections of folk songs. Only his chorale onward, Christian Soldiers! has become common property - an example of the militant sense of mission of the Victorian era . His The Book of Were-Wolves takes second place , which is kept secret in most biographies. The A Book of Ghosts, published in 1904, also appears in almost no book list.

Last years

In 1916 his wife Grace died, who had given him 15 children during their almost fifty-year marriage. William Sabine Baring-Gould followed her eight years later, just three weeks before his ninetieth birthday, and was buried next to her in the Lewtrenchard family cemetery.

Descendants

Baring-Gould's grandson, William Stuart, inherited an interest in the dark and distinguished himself as an expert on crime fiction. He published the collected crime stories about Sherlock Holmes in a scholarly annotated edition and wrote a fictional biography of the legendary detective, where he interwoven parts of the real life story of his famous grandfather with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's meager information about the childhood and adolescence of his detective. A fictional biography of the American super detective Nero Wolfe followed later .

Works

• The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition. Smith, Elder and Co., London 1865 ( Archives )
• Curious myths of the Middle Ages . London 1877 ( Archives )
• Germany. Present and past. Vol. 1, Paul, London 1879 ( Archives )
• Germany. Present and past. Vol. 2, Paul, London 1879 ( Archives )
• Germany . Low, London 1883 Archives
• A Book of Ghosts. Methuen and Co., London 1904 ( Archives )
• Devonshire characters and strange events. John Lane, London, New York, 1908 ( Archives )
• Cornish characters and strange events. John Lane, London, New York, 1909 ( Archives )

Web links

Commons : Sabine Baring-Gould  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Sabine Baring-Gould in the catalog of the German National Library
• Shortlist of Baring-Gould's books