The Rider On The White Horse

Description

“The Rider on the White Horse” begins as a ghost story. A traveler along the coast of the North Sea is caught in dangerously rough weather. Offshore he glimpses a spectral rider rising and plunging in the wind and rain. Taking shelter at an inn, the traveler mentions the apparition, and the local schoolmaster volunteers a story.

The story is both simple and subtle, and its peculiar power is to surprise us slowly. It is a story of determination, of a young man, Hauke Haien, living in a remote community (Storm depicts the village with the luminous precision of a Vermeer), who is out to make a name for himself and to remake his world. It is a story of devotion and disappointment, of pettiness and superstition, of spiritual pride and ultimate desolation, and of the beauty and indifference of the natural world. It is a story that opens up in the end to uncover the foundation of savagery on which human society rests.

Theodor Storm’s great novella, which will remind readers of the work of Thomas Hardy, is one of the supreme masterpieces of German literature. It is here limpidly translated by the American poet James Wright, along with seven other shorter works, including the lyrical love story “Immensee.”

About the Author

Hans Theodor Woldsen Storm (1817 – 1888) was a German poet and author.He was born in Husum ("the grey town by the grey sea") on the west coast of Schleswig of well-to-do parents. While still a student of law, he published a first volume of verse together with the brothers Tycho and Theodor Mommsen.He worked as a lawyer in Schleswig-Holstein, but emigrated to Thuringia in 1851, leaving his mother's household, and did not return until 1864 to become a writer leaving his homeland in Denmark.He wrote a number of stories, poems and novellas. His two most well-known works are the novellas Immensee ("Bees' Lake", 1849) and Der Schimmelreiter ("The Rider on the White Horse"), first published in April 1888 in the Deutsche Rundschau. Other published works include a volume of his poems (1852), the novella Pole Poppenspäler (1874) and the novella Aquis submersus (1877).