You (Haggard)

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German first edition, Hermann Costenoble, Jena 1911

It is a novel by the British writer Sir Henry Rider Haggard . The book was first published in 1886 under the title She - A History of Adventure and, with over 83 million copies in over 44 languages, is one of the best-selling books of all time. The book has been filmed many times since 1908, the best-known screen versions are She - Ruler of a sunken world from 1935 with Helen Gahagan in the title role and ruler of the desert from 1965 with Peter Cushing and Ursula Andress .

content

The first-person narrator of the novel, Ludwig Horace Holly , is a private scholar at Cambridge . In order to fulfill the last will of his only friend Vincey , he takes his underage son Leo to live with him. At the same time, Holly receives the instruction to open a certain suitcase on Leo's 25th birthday and to travel to Africa if Leo wants to after opening the suitcase and inspecting the contents. Holly hires the servant Job to help him raise Leo's up.

When Holly, Leo and Job open the suitcase on the designated day, they find, among other things, a pottery shard on which the legend of the Egyptian priest Kallikrates , from whom the Vincey family descended, is told. Kallikrates fled in 339 BC. With the princess Amenartes , who loved him, from Egypt. On the coast of Southeast Africa, her ship sank not far from an estuary. Kallikrates and Amenartes were saved by natives who took them to their white queen. The queen fell in love with Kallikrates, who in turn loved Amenartes. The queen stabbed Kallikrates in a fit of jealousy when he turned her away.

The male descendants of Kallikrates have been trying to get revenge on the queen for 25 generations . In order to find out how much truth the legend contains and to hunt big game on the side, Leo, Holly and Job travel to Africa.

Your ship is stranded at the same spot where Kallikrates' ship went down. Leo, Holly, Job and the helmsman Mahomad survive the shipwreck. They take the lifeboat inland on the river. When the boat got stuck in a swamp, they were rescued, half starved, by members of the Amahagger people, a people who, as Kallikrates wrote, put pots on the heads of strangers.

According to the instructions of their all-seeing queen, the rescued are to be spared, but Mahomad is killed in a slaughter that occurs when the Amahaggers want to put a red-hot pot on his head in order to subsequently eat him. Leo, Holly and Job are brought before the Queen, as ordered, who lives in her palace in the crater and in the walls of an extinct volcano.

The Queen Ayesha (pronounced Aisha) is a woman of unusual beauty. She wraps her body and face in wide robes and lives hidden behind a curtain, because men who see her unveiled are hopelessly ruined. When Ayesha and Leo meet for the first time, they fall in love. Ayesha is the queen who stabbed Kallikrates more than 2000 years before. She survived in unchanged beauty because she once bathed in flames of embodied life force. She thinks Leo is the reborn Kallikrates because he is exactly like his ancestor.

Ayesha and Leo want to get married and travel to England. Before that, Leo and Holly should also bathe in the flame and thereby extend their lives. The flame is located in a cave outside the palace and can only be reached after crossing a dangerous abyss. The plank that leads over the gorge is thrown into the abyss when crossing it by the fearful Job.

Ayesha bathes in the flame before Leo and Holly. She wants to show them that the bathroom is safe for them. After the bath, however, she ages in a matter of minutes in front of her companions by hundreds of years and dies. Job then goes into shock and dies too. Holly and Leo return to England without having bathed in the flame.

Sequels

Ayesha - she returns

Original title: Ayesha: The Return of She (1905)

The sequel shows many well-known motifs from the first part, so Holly and Vincey meet again primitive tribes who live in the ruins of a lost culture, which also this time have influences from Greece and Egypt. Here, too, an old man plays an intermediary role and two women compete for Leo Vincey's love.

A year after returning from Africa, Vincey and Holly are still obsessed with the memories of Ayesha, constantly wondering if there is any way to get them back. After all, Leo has a vision that leads him to believe that there is a rebirth of her living in Tibet .

For sixteen years the two have been looking for a trace of her in the Himalayas, with their lives in constant danger. Eventually they find a lama monastery that also appeared in Leo's vision. From there they travel on to the isolated (fictional) land of Kaloon, whose inhabitants speak Greek due to a temporary conquest by Alexander the Great . The people are ruled by a Khan and a Khania, who come from an ancient Egyptian dynasty.

Adjacent to Kaloon is a volcano that is inhabited by priests of a Hes cult and fire worshipers. Hes is another name for Isis , according to Holly .

While Khania Atene takes an interest in Leo Vincey and decides to kill her husband Khan Races, Holly learns that the high priestess of the mountain, Hesea, has foretold her coming and demands to meet the two of them. In Holly the suspicion arises that Atene could be the reincarnation of Amenartas and Hesea that of Ayesha. Atene initially prevents them from traveling on to the mountain and keeps them in Kaloon for several months. They escape and twenty years after the events in Kôr they learn the truth behind their experiences from Hesea.

In ancient Egypt, Queen Amenartas (Atene in a previous incarnation) fell in love with the Isis priest Kallikrates (now reborn as Leo Vincey), whom she spun off from the goddess. The priestess Ayesha (today's Hesea) was supposed to punish Kallikrates and Amenartas on behalf of the goddess, who rewarded her with unearthly beauty and long life. The servant Noot (now incarnated as Horace Holly) was put to her aid. But Ayesha fell in love with Kallikrates herself. Isis therefore punished her with the death of her lover and sentenced her to a long life full of sorrow and remorse.

After Hesea has revealed herself, she unveils herself in front of the two men and Atene. She is horribly disfigured, a mummified version of the quickly aged Ayesha at the end of part one. Still, Leo chooses not to advertise Atene for her. Through his loyalty, she regains her beauty and becomes engaged to him. However, she does not want to marry him until he has stepped into the flames of life in Kôr, an endeavor that is expected to take another two years to complete.

She also confesses to Leo that she has turned away from her gods and made a pact with the evil god Set . Her megalomania is becoming increasingly clear; based on a planned takeover of power in China, she strives for world domination and the establishment of a unified religion with her as the goddess.

First there is a war against Kaloon, which is devastated with the help of magical powers. Atene is one of the numerous fatalities. Leo, who doubts Ayesha more and more, rejects deification and only wants her as a woman. He demands that the marriage be carried out immediately without going into the flame.

After their first kiss, Leo is so overwhelmed that he dies on the spot, Ayesha, on the other hand, undergoes a thorough cleansing, she is freed from her megalomania and regains her humanity.

In order to be united with her lover in the afterlife, she too dies. At the end she gives Holly an artifact with which he can summon her at the moment of his death to join them in the afterlife. When he finally dies after returning to England, Ayesha's ghost appears to pick him up.

The book was freely interpreted in 1968 by Cliff Owen for the Hammer Studios under the title The Vengeance of She (German title: Jung, blond und tödlich ) filmed.

You and Allan

Original title: She and Allan (1921)

Allan Quatermain wants to know if he will meet Mameena, a woman he has lost, again in the afterlife. He asked the African magician Zikali about this. He referred him to a white witch (Ayesha) who, like him, was a member of a medicine man or prophet's guild and whom he was supposed to visit in the company of the chief Umslopogaas and the servant Hans, a Hottentot who was inclined to drink .

On the way they meet the former trader Captain Robertson, who has settled in the wilderness with his daughter Inez so that he can pursue his drunkenness and his preference for native women undisturbed. His farm was attacked by the Amahaggers who killed and ate his staff and kidnapped Inez to make her their goddess. These are apostates who have fallen away from Ayesha.

Billali finally saves himself and brings her to Kôr to she-who-commands, as she is still called here. She tells Allan about her youth in Yemen. As a princess, she was resented for not being interested in men, which caused disquiet since so many men wanted her. So she went around the world to study peoples and religions.

In Cyprus, she angered the goddess Aphrodite , who then cursed her for having to love Kallikrates forever. After joining the cult of Isis, she fell out of favor with this too, as she had got involved with the rival Greek goddess (Aphrodite here stands for the flesh, Isis for the spirit). Isis cursed her to have to kill her Kallikrates and then to discover the source of life so that she cannot follow him into death but must wait a long time for him.

Now there is a conflict in Kôr. The Amahagger worship the sun god Rezu, the Ayesha loyal natives the moon goddess Lulala. Rezu's followers see them as intruders because their culture is very old, so old that they have already settled ancient Egypt. The king of the Amahagger is also called Rezu, is considered the personification of the god and wants to defeat her by appointing a white ruler as well. This is Inez. In addition to the two gods, there is a third one: the truth.

After Quatermain upset Ayesha with his disbelief, she decides not to lead him into the flame of life as originally planned. Nevertheless, he should help her in the fight, as she cannot attack the king protected by Rezu directly, because he was also in the flame of life. Both Captain Robertson and Rezu are killed in the battle. Ayesha leads Quatermain over the threshold of death. In an extensive vision he sees the souls of numerous deceased, but nobody sees him. Only Mameena recognizes him because she is "full of sin and therefore not completely spiritualized".

Ayesha designs a metaphysics based on the vision : Everyone carries his own God within himself, to whom one comes closer and closer through many incarnations. The consequence is that one should be humble and never be as important to others as one believes, since others also follow their own God. Then she sees Zikali's victory over his adversary Cetywayo and answers his request to her.

In addition to the continuation of the stories about Allan Quatermain and Ayesha, this novel lives above all from the clash of Quatermain's skepticism and pragmatism with Ayesha's mystical worldview. The plot is earlier than the first band you settled.

Daughter of wisdom

Original title: Wisdom's Daughter: The Life and Love Story of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923)

In the final part, Ayesha's youth is portrayed from their own perspective. The main storyline, which claims that the novels were manuscripts from Holly's pen, is also maintained here. However, the fictional editor here claims that Ayesha herself is the author of the present book, which was written towards the end of the events of She Returns in Tibet, before the planned return to Kôr.

As a motivation, she states that she wants to resolve contradictions in her descriptions of life to Holly, Vincey and Quatermain. The fictional publisher warns the reader, however, of Ayesha's great vanity, which is actually heavily exaggerated and constantly shines through. She describes herself as responsible for some decisive events in world history, as being familiar with Isis even before she was born and chosen by her to fight a feud with Aphrodite, as being hostile to all women and loved by all men because of her unearthly beauty, etc.

During her youth in Ozal as the daughter of a chief, she decided against a life as a wife. Although there are many applicants, some of whom fight bloody feuds and wars among themselves. The result is that Yarab, Ayesha's father wins many enemies. However, she decides to devote her life to world domination and, as a prerequisite, to accumulating wisdom.

Noot, a survivor from Kôr and disgraced court magician of the Egyptian pharaoh , becomes her teacher. He decides early on to make her the keeper of the flame in Kôr. After her father is killed in the war against Egypt, she flees with Noot.

To take revenge, they travel to Egypt where she becomes a priestess of Isis in Philae . There she falls in love with the Greek Kallikrates, also a priest of Isis, a sin according to the laws of her cult. Therefore she leaves Egypt to increase her wisdom in the world.

She travels to Rome, Greece and Jerusalem and finally comes back to Egypt after years, this time to Memphis . There she meets the pharaoh Nektanebes , son of the one whose army killed her father and father of Amenartas. By means of intrigue, she brings about the overthrow of the Pharaoh through the invasion of the Persian army, who is said to remain the last Egyptian on the throne. In the meantime, she is captured by a Phoenician king, whose empire Sidon also brings her down in revenge.

During these events, Amenartas was ordained priestess of Isis and fell in love with Kallikrates, whom she met in the temple. He is torn between the carnal attraction through her and the spiritual one through his goddess, whom he sees embodied in Ayesha. After she finally kills the Persian king and throws his kingdom as well as Egypt into chaos, she has to flee and goes to Noot in Kôr.

He wants to use her as ruler. It is supposed to revive the cult of Isis, who was venerated here long before Egypt was settled under the name Lulala or Truth, as it was destroyed by the repressing idol worship of Rezu. She is also said to become the keeper of the fire after his death.

As she begins to re-establish culture and religion in Kôr, a group of Egyptians appears in her land, including Kallikrates and the pregnant Amenartas. When she faces them, she realizes that she loved Kallikrates from the beginning and still loves them. Amenartas ridicules her for her celibacy, advancing age, and inexperience in binding men to her. She realizes that this is the truth.

The plan to step into the flame of life together with Kallikrates and thus to withdraw him from his beloved matures in her. All three go to the flame. Once there, Ayesha fights a hard war of conscience, but is ultimately driven into the flame by her pride. Strengthened by the powers she wins, she renounces Isis, whom she now believes to be superior. She tries to force Kallikrates to love her. However, he remains connected to Amenartas in the end.

Ayesha realizes that the flame has given her power over death and kills her lover. A ghost of the underworld speaks to her from his corpse and curses her for having to stay in this place until Kallikrates returns to her.

In her sleep the spirit of Noot appears to her, which shows her how drastic her fall into sin is. She has gambled away all the holiness and spirituality she has acquired in her life and thrown her soul back to a barbaric level. Redemption, according to Noot, is still possible for her, but only if she faces all the bad that is now in her. She must replace her passions with gentleness, her pride with humility, and overcome her beauty by experiencing her own ugliness.

The people of Kôr are doomed to sink into the deepest barbarism. A long period of loneliness and despair now begins for Ayesha.

reception

The interpretation of Carl Gustav Jung von Ayesha as an archetype of the anima , the inner female personality in men, is particularly well known . In addition, the importance of the work as one of the first representatives of the literary genre later called Fantasy is emphasized. Critics occasionally accused the work of misogyny , racism and anti-Semitism . It has also been interpreted as a homage to Queen Victoria , who was celebrating her golden jubilee at the time of the novel's publication and whose veneration by Leo and Holly Ayesha's plans to conquer England are blocking her. Various ideas from the novels were taken up again and again by later authors, for example the idea of ​​a guardian of the source of life in the television series Lost .

Film adaptations

  • 1899: La colonne de feu (short film, director: Georges Méliès )
  • 1908: She (short film, director: Edwin S. Porter )
  • 1911: She (short film, directed by George Nichols )
  • 1916: She (Directors: William GB Barker and Horace Lisle Lucoque)
  • 1917: She (Director: Kenean Buel)
  • 1925: She (directed by Leander De Cordova and GB Samuelson, subtitles by Haggard, includes parts from all novels)
  • 1935: She - ruler of a sunken world (alternative title: Das Land des Horens , directed by Lansing C. Holden and Irving Pichel )
  • 1965: Ruler of the Desert (Director: Robert Day )
  • 1968: The Vengeance of She (alternative title: Young, blond and deadly , director: Cliff Owen , free film adaptation of the second novel)
  • 2001: She - Ruler of the Desert (Direction: Timothy Bond )
  • 2007: She (directed by Clive Nolan and Agnieszka Swita, premiere of a rock opera by the member of the English band Pendragon , released on DVD)

expenditure

  • First edition: She: A History of Adventure. Harpers, New York 1886. First UK edition: Longmans, Green and Co., London 1887.
  • Contained in: The Works of H. Rider Haggard. Walter J. Black, New York 1928, OCLC 2218624 .
  • Paperback: She. Edited with an introduction and notes by Daniel Karlin. Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics), 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-953642-9 .
  • EBook: She. Open Road, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4804-7742-1 .

It has been translated into German several times under different titles:

  • She. A novel from the darkest of Africa. Translator not named. Hermann Costenoble, Jena, 1911 (German first edition).
  • The mistress of death. Adventure novel from darkest Africa. Translated by Georg Schröder-Stettin. Vaterländische Verlags- und Kunstanstalt , Berlin, 1926. This translation was republished by Benu Verlag in 2004.
  • She. An adventure novel. Translated by Helmut Degner . Diogenes, Zurich 1970. This translation was also published by König Verlag 1973 and Heyne Verlag 1984.
  • YOU-who-you-have-to-obey Translated by Susanne Luber. Haffmans, Zurich 2006. Newly published in 2010 as a two-thousand-one paperback.

The sequels were first translated by Hans Maeter as part of the Haggard edition by Heyne, Ayesha was published in 1984, Sie und Allan and Daughter of Wisdom in 1985.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A fictional people. The name is a combination of the prefix ama for people (cf. e.g. Amazulu ) and Haggard's own name.
  2. ↑ Eike Kronshage: Sie: Interpretationsansätze. literaturen.net, December 6, 2012, accessed December 11, 2012 .
  3. ↑ Bibliography at AbLit. Retrieved December 11, 2012 .