The Merry Men

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The Merry Men , German The great men , is a narrative of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). It appeared for the first time in 1882 in Cornhill Magazine , in 1887 Stevenson took it in a slightly revised form in his short story collection The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables .

Like Stevenson's adventure novel Treasure Island , which was created around the same time, it is about a treasure hunt on a remote island, but the pious first-person narrator Charles Darnaway increasingly loses sight of this goal, as he first has to deal with his uncle Gordon who has apparently gone mad and may have been guilty of murder. The few literary critics who have dealt more closely with The Merry Men are almost unanimous that the story as such has failed quite a bit, but that individual episodes and especially the descriptions of nature are atmospherically dense and stylistically brilliant; According to his wife, Fanny Stevenson , the author himself shared a similar view.

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Scotland in the last third of the 18th century: the first-person narrator Charles studied at the University of Edinburgh with the historian William Robertson . In old archives he came across references to one of the ships of the Spanish Armada , which, after its defeat in the decisive naval battle against the English fleet, was scattered across the North Sea in August 1588 and finally disappeared without a trace. He concludes that the wreck of the "Espirito Santo" together with her pot of gold must be on the seabed off the Hebridean island of Aros, where his uncle Gordon and his cousin Mary run a poor farm. In the summer he sets off there and hardly recognizes the inside of the farmhouse: it is filled to the roof with foreign treasures. Mary tells of a regrettable shipwreck, but cannot say anything about the origin of the beach property. Uncle Gordon puts the nephew in the picture. A few months ago, more precisely, on February 10th, the brig "Christ-Anna" got into the "dance of death" of the "great men" at high tide and was then stranded on site. The "great men" are huge swirled fall breakers who roar between the rocks in front of the island when the surf rushes with powerful, terrible voices and can pull a ship with man and mouse down into their whirlpool. When Charles asks his uncle about survivors of the ship disaster, the answer is evasive.

At the point where he believed the wreck, Charles found in the first dive, a shoe buckle, the second a human leg bone, and he discovered on the coast a fresh grave and speculates that it is the grave of a sailor of the Christ-Anna is who survived the shipwreck in February but was murdered by beach robbers, probably Uncle Gordon himself. Horrified by these bad omens, but also because of an upcoming storm, the treasure hunter has to break off the undertaking. In the stormy waters, a strange boat crew is apparently looking for gold. Charles has to watch the boat sink in the storm, as does his uncle Gordon; he enjoys the death throes of the crew from the rocky cliff with a "voluptuous connoisseur face". After the "horrific spectacle" Charles confronts his uncle at the fresh grave mentioned above and accuses him of murder out of greed in a merciless moral sermon. At that moment, a black man suddenly appears on the cabin roof of the failed boat. Uncle Gordon can't stand the sight, evidently he thinks it is the spirit of the murdered man, if not the devil himself; he rages, apparently insane, and runs away. The dark-skinned shipwrecked man, who has proven to be a person of flesh and blood, also takes part in the fateful search for the insane. He chases after Gordon Darnaway because he wants to catch the sick man, but both of them fall to their deaths over the cliff. Charles calls the uncle's end a “strange judgment of God”.

Origin and publication history

Robert Louis Stevenson, photographed in Davos in 1882.

A first, not preserved version of the story wrote Stevenson in June and July 1881 in his summer retreat at Kinnaird Cottage near Pitlochry in Perthshire ; from his correspondence it appears that the story was initially titled The Wreck of the Susanna . Like the stories Thrawn Janet and The Body Snatcher , which began at the same time , it was originally intended for a short story book with the working title The Black Man and Other Tales , which ultimately never appeared. After he had put the first four chapters of the story on paper around mid-July, he was not entirely satisfied with the result and announced extensive revisions in a letter, but he left work on the story on hold from August onwards for his first Complete Roman Treasure Island . Only in the winter, which he spent in Davos , Switzerland , did he complete the first published version. It appeared in 1882, initially anonymously , in two installments in the June and July issues of Cornhill Magazine .

In 1884, in a letter to his father, Stevenson expressed his intention to expand the story considerably and to give it a completely new ending ( Dénouement ), the shape of which, however, was not yet entirely clear to him. In February 1887, the second, now authoritative, version appeared as the first story of his short story volume The Merry Men and Other Stories and Fables . Contrary to Stevenson's announcement, it is largely identical to the first version, the most extensive changes affect the dialogues between Charles and Mary Ellen in the second and fourth chapters as well as the depiction of the shipwrecked "black man" in the fifth chapter; overall, the second version is even a little shorter.

Sources and Influences

In a letter from July 1881, Stevenson wrote that his "strange" story was above all his own creation, which at best owes some loans to Walter Scott's novel The Pirate (1821); However, later source research suggests a number of other possible literary models. It seems certain that less Scott than William Edmonstoune Aytoun's story The Santa Trinidada, published in 1842, is the direct model for The Merry Men : Like Stevenson's story, it is set in the 18th century and is about the search for the gold treasure of a galleon of the Spanish Armada, the 'Santa Trinidada' ("Holy Trinity"), which was smashed in 1588 on the coast of the Hebrides . As can be seen from a letter, the sunken Spanish ship in the original version of The Merry Men , which has not survived, still bore the name 'Sant ma Trini d ' (ie Santissima Trinidad , meaning "Most Holy Trinity"). Aytoun's protagonists are the brothers Malcolm and Donald McLean; In Stevenson's story, Gordon Darnaway's late wife comes from the MacLean clan . In The Santa Trinidada , an alien boat appears just as suddenly, without sails or oars, but manned by a lonely figure, possibly the devil himself. This appearance seems to indicate the location of the sunken treasure, and so Malcolm dives down into the depths of the sea and actually finds a chest full of silver; on his second dive, however, he is caught in a tidal vortex and drowns.

Another example of the “Gothic” horror literature of the early 19th century, Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) , can be used as a model for the description of the storm in the fourth chapter . The design of the subject , however, is primarily shaped by the three main representatives of the somewhat belatedly onset “dark” American romanticism : Nathaniel Hawthorne , Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe . The influence of Poe's horror stories and his theoretical writings (such as The Philosophy of Composition ) on Stevenson's prose is profound, well-documented, and recognized by the earliest reviewers. In The Merry Men, Burton R. Pollin and JA Greenwood identify echoes of The Fall of the House of Usher and The Gold-Bug , but especially of A Descent into the Maelström . Stevenson felt even more drawn to Hawthorne's novels and short stories, since they - in contrast to Poe's often merely aesthetic grotesques and arabesques - always bring complex moral issues to the fore. In the case of The Merry Men , the closeness to Hawthorne is particularly palpable through the portrayal of the religious fanaticism that determines Gordon Darnaway's thought and action, and ultimately drives him mad and ruin, if not damned. As in Hawthorne's stories about the Puritans , it is a particularly rigorous brand of New England Calvinism zeitigt that such sinister consequences: Gordon Darnaway is a follower of the Cameronians (a Presbyterian faction, which in the late 17th century by the Church of Scotland had solved ), “He used to read the Bible extensively and pray a lot, in the style of the Cameroonians among whom he grew up. Yes, he often reminded me of a highland preacher from the murderous times before the revolution. But he never found much comfort and, as far as I know, not even advice from his piety. He used to have his black hours when he was afraid of hell; but he had led a rough life that he looked back on with envy, and was still a rough, cold, sinister man. "To Melville, whose novels Stevenson had read at the suggestion of Charles Warren Stoddard in 1880 while in San Francisco , finally interprets the representation of the sea in The Merry Men , which appears at the same time sublime and destructive.

Themes and motifs

nature and landscape

Aros, the setting of the plot of both The Merry Men and some chapters of his novel Kidnapped (1886), is a fictionalized version of Earraid , as Stevenson revealed in his 1887 essay Memoirs of an Islet . On this the Isle of Mull upstream tidal island he had spent the summer of 1870 to his father Thomas Stevenson and his uncle David Stevenson to make society that from here from here on behalf of the Northern Lighthouse Board as chief engineer of the construction of the lighthouse on the rocky reef Dubh Artach . The description of the harsh landscape of the Hebrides takes up a large space in The Merry Men and, in terms of literary history, is in the tradition of the Scottish Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries; in particular, it is indebted to the example of Scott, who made a very similar trip to the west coast of Scotland in 1820 and incorporated his impressions into The Pirate . Like Scott, Stevenson reproduces the broad Scottish dialect of the islanders at least in the dialogues in order to underline the local color , and in a typically romantic manner also ties in with Scottish folk tales about the devil, mermen, seahorses and the like.

Stevenson was even more impressed by the sight of its windswept rocky coast than the barren heathland of the island. In a letter to Sidney Colvin , Stevenson described his story (here the original version, which has not yet survived) as a "fantastic sonata about the sea and wrecks", and to William Ernest Henley he indicated that the protagonists' actions were of secondary importance is simply a "sea view", a "story of the wreck, as they appear to the coastal residents." his fascination with the stormy sea he gave before 1880 in his poem Storm in lyrical images expression, resulting in the Merry Men find so he apostrophizes the surf in the last lines with the words:

View from the summit of Cnoc Mor to the sea around Earraid.

" Oh! merry companions,
Your madness infects me.
My whole soul rises and falls and leaps and tumbles with you!
I shout aloud and incite you, O white-headed merry companions.
The sight of you alone is better than drinking.
The brazen band is loosened from off my forehead;
My breast and my brain are moistened and cool;
And still I yell in answer
To your hoarse inarticulate voices,
O big, strong, bullying, boisterous waves,
That are of all things in nature the nearest thoughts to human,
Because you are wicked and foolish,
Mad and destructive. "

In The Merry Men , Gordon Darnaway is so enraptured by the destructive power of the sea that he lies in wait outside in every storm to watch the ships on the high seas with a "voluptuous connoisseur air", always in the hope that one might like one on the rocks shatter. His monologues do not speak of a romantic enthusiasm for the sublime forces of nature, rather he sees it as a concrete expression of the depravity of the world. Like many Puritans of the 17th century, he sees divine or even diabolical powers at work in natural phenomena, thus giving them a theological meaning. Here there are clear parallels to Melville's Moby-Dick , especially in a passage in the second chapter, which in turn is probably the model for Kurtz's famous last words ("The horror! The horror!") In Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) represents:

" But, troth, if it wasnae prentit in the Bible, I wad whiles be temp'it to think it wasnae the Lord, but the muckle, black deil that made the sea [...] If ye had sailed it for as lang as me , ye would hate the thocht of it as I do. If ye had but used the een God gave ye, ye would hae learned the wickedness o 'that fause, saut, cauld, bullering creature, and of a' that's in it by the Lord's permission: labsters an 'partans, an' sic like , howking in the deid; muckle, gutsy, blawing whales; an 'fish - the hale clan o' them - cauld-wamed, blind-eed uncanny ferlies. O, sirs, 'he cried,' the horror - the horror o 'the sea! "

"My soul, if it wasn't in the Bible, I would be tempted to believe that it was not the Lord but the wicked himself who created the sea [...] If you had sailed it for as long as I did, you would hate the thought of the sea like i do. If you had used the eyes that the Lord God gave you, you would have become aware of the malice of that false, bitter, cold, unsteady creature and everything that lives in it according to God's plan: lobsters and crabs and the like, those of the Living dead; and mighty, loud-mouthed, snorting whales, and the fish and all of them - cold-blooded, blind-eyed, sinister bred. "Oh," he shouted, "oh about the horror - the horror of the sea!"

Edwin M. Eigner refers to chapter 58 of Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) for comparison :

“ Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, you canst never return! "

“Consider the malice of the sea; do not forget that its most terrible inhabitants slide under the water, barely visible, maliciously hidden under the most heavenly azure. Consider the magnificence and satanic beauty of their most ruthless races, the delicate, graceful shape of many sharks. Remember again and again the lust for murder of the sea, whose children devour one another, one of the other's prey, in eternal wars since the world was created. Consider all of this and now turn your gaze to the green, friendly, infinitely docile earth; look at them both, the sea and the land - don't you find something in your own soul to coincide with these conflicting elements? For just as the blooming land is surrounded by the gruesome ocean, so in the human breast lies a Tahiti, a peaceful, blessed island - but surmounted by all the horrors of a life that is only vaguely conscious. God keep you! Never push off the island, you can never go back! "

Christian symbolism

The dense Christian symbolism of the story is probably primarily an addition to Stevenson's first revisions in the winter of 1882. There are numerous allusions to the Paraclete , i.e. to the Holy Spirit in general and in particular to the Pentecostal miracle , as described in the New Testament : “When the day of Pentecost came, everyone was in the same place. Suddenly there was a roar from heaven, as if a violent storm was driving by, and filled the whole house in which they were. And tongues of fire appeared to them, and they were dispersed; one perched on each of them. All were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in foreign tongues as the Spirit gave them. ”( Acts 2,1-4  EU ). This topic is prominently introduced in The Merry Men in the name of the sunken Spanish ship, the Espirito Santo (Spanish for "Holy Spirit"); Aros Jay, on the other hand, the Gaelic name of the island, means "the house of God" according to the narrator. The familiar biblical topoi, however, appear here in a strange way upside down, so on Aros it is not tongues of fire that come down from above and " speak ", but the deadly sea, the fall breakers who are always personified as" great men " :

" Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of utter blackness; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these changes in the flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of a man's nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one huge sail […] Now louder in one place, now lower in another, like the combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was hardly varied for a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I could hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of the Merry Men. At that hour, there flashed into my mind the reason of the name that they were called. For the noise of them seemed almost mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or if not mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. Nay, and it seemed even human. As when savage men have drunk away their reason, and, discarding speech, bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night. "

“Groping twilight alternated with the deepest darkness, without one being able to read the cause for it from the roaring horrors of heaven. The storm sucked your breath out of your nostrils; the whole vault of heaven was like a single, immense, thundering sail [...] Now loud, now soft, like the sound symphony of an orchestra, this constant flood of sound swelled. And high above all the confusion rang out the changing voices of the Roost and the broken roar of the "Great Men." In that hour it became clear to me in a flash where they got their name from. Because their noise, which drowned out the other noises of the night, seemed to me, if not exuberantly funny, then at least eerie, almost human joviality. Like a crowd of wild men who have drunk their minds and surrender to the power of speech, screaming their madness for hours into the night, these deadly eddies screamed in my ears and raved past Aros. "

While in the Acts of the Apostles the outpouring of the Holy Spirit enables the believers to preach the Good News in languages ​​previously foreign to them, to give them courage, confidence and also the gift of prophecy (cf. 1 Cor 14 : 1-19  EU ), the "screaming" of the sea is completely incomprehensible and fills Charles Darnaway with sheer fear, his uncle even with madness and demonic malice. Gordon Darnaway identifies with the not only destructive but devilish-looking Merry Men so much that he announced at one point that he was sure even the condemnation falling victim:

“ 'Ou,' he returned, 'if it wasnae sin, I dinnae ken that I would care for't. Ye see, man, it's defiance. There's a sair spang o 'the auld sin o' the warld in you sea; it's an unchristian business at the best o't; an 'whiles when it gets up, an' the wind skreights - the wind an 'her are a kind of sib, I'm thinkin' - an 'thae Merry Men, the daft callants, blawin' and lauchin ', and puir souls in the deid thraws warstlin 'the leelang nicht wi' their bit ships - weel, it comes ower me like a glamor. I'm a deil, I ken't. But I think naething o 'the puir sailor lads; I'm wi 'the sea, I'm just like ane o' her ain Merry Men. "

“Yes, if it weren't a sin,” he replied, “I probably wouldn't ask about it. It's sheer defiance, you see. In that sea there lives a good chunk of the old original sin; It remains unchristian, no matter how mild it is. When it rages and the wind screams - the sea and the wind are kind of cousins, I mean - and the "great men," the crazy fellows, roar and laugh, and the poor souls that long night there fighting against death on their nutshells out in the desert - yes, then it comes over me like obsession. I am a devil i know I don't think about the poor boatmen at all; I am for the sea, I am like one of its own 'great men' "

Similar to Captain Ahab, the tragic hero of Moby-Dick , Gordon Darnaway sees his personal fate and salvation connected with the rigors of the sea and is ultimately lost in it. His identification with the devilish “great men” comes, again very similar to the case of Ahab, like a rebellion against God, in between he lets himself be carried away to the blasphemous statement, “in the end the Lord will triumph; I don't doubt that. But here on earth the foolish people dare to defy him in the face. It is not wise; I am not saying it is wise; but it is a lust for life, a feast for the eyes, a spice of joy. ”When the dark-skinned shipwrecked man appears on the coast, he does not, surprisingly, believe that it is the devil himself who has come to fetch him (in many Scottish folk tales he steps in the form of a black man), but at least the ghost of the shipwrecked man whom he had murdered weeks before, at least if one wants to believe his nephew's speculations.

The Merry Men as a double psychological case study

As Edwin M. Eigner states, Stevenson, as a free thinker, is not interested in metaphysical speculations about the ultimate things , rather he observes from a critical distance “how Christians may see the world, how their faith makes it impossible for them, nature or human Nature, to accept. ”The“ dual nature of man ”(the classic phrase coined by Stevenson himself) is also the subject of Stevenson's most famous story today, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Similar to how Jekyll tries to curb his instinctuality by transferring it to his alter ego Hyde (but is just perishing from it), Gordon Darnaway may see in the black shipwrecked man an image of his sinful self. The fact that the two - like Jekyll and Hyde - find death in the floods at the same time is an indication that this is a variation of the doppelganger motif that Stevenson knew from Poe's William Wilson , but with James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) was also to be found earlier in Scottish horror literature; Such a simultaneous death occurs again in Stevenson's last novel The Master of Ballantrae (1889).

The narrative situation represents a decisive problem in the interpretation , because the events are conveyed to the reader exclusively from Charles Darnaway's first-person perspective , whose judgment, however, may be questioned and who can therefore be regarded as an unreliable narrator . It is by no means certain that Gordon Darnaway was actually guilty of murder, as his nephew makes no move to examine the alleged grave of the victim more closely. If Charles' assumption is not correct, he himself is to blame for the tragic end of his uncle, in which he believes he recognizes a "strange judgment of God" instead. Although he, the enlightened student at the University of Edinburgh, repeats his rationality (“I have emphasized a thousand times that I am not superstitious”) and dismisses the fears of his uncle and his assistant Rory as “childish superstitions”, yes he himself is not free from the tendency to seek supernatural or divine explanations for the course of things. He writes of his family that “no one of that sex” has ever been “particularly lucky”, he casually calls the island “cursed” more than once, and when his uncle finally goes mad, he doesn't see it or just doesn't see it the unfortunate victim of a mental illness, but rather sees the forces of evil at work: “The roost of the roost was mixed with the sound of a human voice, sometimes shrill and piercing, sometimes almost dying. I recognized them as those of my uncle; and a great fear of the punishments of God and of the wicked in the world took hold of me. I took refuge in the darkness of the house as if to a sanctuary and lay awake for a long time in bed brooding over these mysteries. "Ultimately, in several respects, he is the one who" cut off the madman's last resort "and promotes his leap to death, but complicity does not occur to him: “The matter had outgrown human strength; here were God's counsels before our eyes. ”The narrative as a whole is thus not only a psychological case study of Gordon Darnaway's madness, but also reveals the narrator's smug and pious arrogance.

literature

expenditure

English

The first version can be found in:

  • Anon .: The Merry Men . Part 1 (Chapters I-III) in: Cornhill Magazine , Volume 45, No. 270, June 1882, pp. 676-695, Part 2 (Chapters IV-V) in: Cornhill Magazine , Volume 45, No. 271 , July 1882, pp. 56-72. Digitized on the sides of the Internet Archive : Part 1 , Part 2 .

The second version is the authoritative one today:

  • The Merry Men . In: The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables . Chatto & Windus, London 1887 (English first edition); Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1887 (American first edition).
German

Secondary literature

  • Edwin M. Owner : Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition . Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1966.
  • Kenneth Gelder: Robert Louis Stevenson's Revisions to “The Merry Men” . In: Studies in Scottish Literature 21: 1, 1986, pp. 262-287.
  • John R. Moore : Stevenson's Source for "The Merry Men" . In: Philological Quarterly 23: 2, 1944, pp. 135-140.
  • Honor Mulholland: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romance Form . In: Andrew Noble (ed.): Robert Louis Stevenson . Vision, London 1983, pp. 96-117.
  • Tom Shearer: A Strange Judgment of God's? Stevenson's "The Merry Men" . In: Studies in Scottish Literature 20: 1, 1985, pp. 71-87.
  • Luisa Villa: Quarreling with the Father . In: Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury (Eds.): Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI 2006, pp. 109-120.

Web links

Wikisource: The Merry Men  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ For example, John R. Moore: Stevenson's Source for “The Merry Men” , p. 140; Honor Mulholland: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romance Form , pp. 109-111; Tom Shearer: A Strange Judgment of God's? , Pp. 82-85.
  2. ↑ Fanny Stevenson: Prefatory Note to The Merry Men and Other Tales , in: The Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson , Valima Edition, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1922, Volume XI, p. 6
  3. ↑ All quotations below based on the translation by Marguerite and Curt Thesing.
  4. ↑ Kenneth Gelder: Robert Louis Stevenson's Revisions to "The Merry Men" , pp. 262-263.
  5. ↑ Kenneth Gelder: Robert Louis Stevenson's Revisions to "The Merry Men" , pp. 263-264.
  6. ↑ John R. Moore: Stevenson's Source for "The Merry Men," pp. 135-138.
  7. ↑ Edwin M. Eigner: Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition , pp. 136-137; the corresponding episode can be found with Maturin in Volume I, Chapter IV.
  8. ↑ Burton R. Pollin and JA Greenwood: Stevenson on Poe: Unpublished Annotations of Numerous Poe Texts and a Stevenson Letter . In: English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 37: 3, 1994, pp. 317-349, here pp. 335 and 348.
  9. ↑ Barry Menikoff: Introduction to: Robert Louis Stevenson: The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson . The Modern Library, New York 2002, here pp. Xvi – xvii; Honor Mulholland: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romance Form , pp. 96-97, pp. 104-106.
  10. ^ Honor Mulholland: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romance Form , p. 106.
  11. ^ Frank McLynn: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography . Hutchinsons, London 1993, pp. 194-195.
  12. ^ Robert Louis Stevenson: Memoirs of an Islet . In: Memories and Portraits . Chatto & Windus, London 1887, pp. 120-132; see also Llewellyn M. Buell: Eilean Earraid: The Beloved Isle of Robert Louis Stevenson . In: Scribner's Magazine 71: 2, Feb. 1922, pp. 184-194.
  13. ↑ Both cited in: Honor Mulholland: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romance Form , p. 106.
  14. ^ Edwin M. Eigner: Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition , p. 135.
  15. ^ Robert Louis Stevenson: Storm . In: The Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson , Valima Edition, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1922, Volume VIII, pp. 568-569.
  16. ↑ Edwin M. Eigner: Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition , pp. 135-137.
  17. ^ Claire Harman : Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography . HarperCollins, London 2005, p. 463.
  18. ↑ Herman Melville: Moby Dick or The Whale . In two volumes. German by Alice and Hans Seiffert. Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig 1983 (6th edition), Volume 2, p. 25.
  19. ↑ Kenneth Gelder: Robert Louis Stevenson's Revisions to “The Merry Men” , p. 263.
  20. ^ A b Honor Mulholland: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romance Form , pp. 108-109.
  21. ^ Frank McLynn: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography . Hutchinsons, London 1993, p. 195.
  22. ↑ Edwin M. Eigner: Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition , p. 137.
  23. ^ Edwin M. Eigner: Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition , p. 142.
  24. ^ Edwin M. Eigner: Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition . P. 138.
  25. ↑ Edwin M. Eigner: Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition , pp. 139–141.
  26. ↑ Tom Shearer: A Strange Judgment of God's? , Pp. 138-142.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 15, 2014 .