Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a recurring column profiling short stories. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section.
Happy Sunday!
Today’s short story is Washington Irving’s “The Spectre Bridegroom,” a tale from Irving’s quasi-pseudonymous The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (Crayon was the first U.S. Marine ashore at Tripoli, some say.)
More seriously, Irving was one of the first American writers to win widespread success for the New World, with the serialization of the Sketch Book throughout 1819 and 1820 earning plaudits for the reimagining of older tales pulled from the forests of Germany, Holland’s lowlands, and the English countryside. Irving managed a sort of literary incrementalism, making stories familiar enough to flatter the originals and the cultures that developed them while integrating elements of his homeland that were alien to the Continent — and still are.
“The Spectre Bridegroom” is, superficially, just another fairy tale. Its construction is generic, and its twist foreseeable. But observe its treatment of aristocracy and blood feuds. A free man’s needling of caste systems and anti-growth systems is always worth a read, and Irving does it better than most.
Irving writes:
On the summit of one of the heights of the Odenwald, a wild and romantic tract of Upper Germany that lies not far from the confluence of the Main and the Rhine, there stood many, many years since the castle of the Baron Von Landshort. It is now quite fallen to decay, and almost buried among beech trees and dark firs; above which, however, its old watch-tower may still be seen struggling, like the former possessor I have mentioned, to carry a high head and look down upon the neighboring country.
The baron was a dry branch of the great family of Katzenellenbogen,+ and inherited the relics of the property and all the pride, of his ancestors. Though the warlike disposition of his predecessors had much impaired the family possessions, yet the baron still endeavored to keep up some show of former state. The times were peaceable, and the German nobles in general had abandoned their inconvenient old castles, perched like eagles’ nests among the mountains, and had built more convenient residences in the valleys; still, the baron remained proudly drawn up in his little fortress, cherishing with hereditary inveteracy all the old family feuds, so that he was on ill terms with some of his nearest neighbors, on account of disputes that had happened between their great-great-grandfathers.
You can read the rest here, listen to it here, and purchase a copy here.
The sentence, “Yet, thank Heaven! he was not a goblin,” describes the baron’s relief that his daughter’s deceased-suitor-turned-living-husband is just tops. I can’t help but compare it to the modern discovery that a younger cousin or sibling is interested in the opposite sex and may have even had a child out of wedlock.
While premarital sexual relationships and cohabitation still bear the same negative aspects they always have, the many, many more deplorable forms of modern sexual expression (furries, abuse porn, normalization of digital and physical prostitution, i.e., “sex work,” etc.) make accounts of shacking up a veritable relief to those who want the best for the rising generation.
The spectre’s story is one as old as children’s existence — parents will fret after their offspring’s prospects and don’t ever really stop. Marriage is a happy amendment to the scope and intensity of the fretting. Even pompous aristocrats bow to this law. An early American frontiersman and railroad baron would find commonality in this regard.
What caught your eye?
It’s a spring with such rainy regularity that my failures as a lawn guy have gone unpunished. Bulbs planted in the fall and later winter are sprouting, and the rabbits are doing their best to raze the new growth. Lepus bárbaros. This afternoon will see me building flowerboxes for sugar-snap peas to mount on an ornamental fence in the backyard. Yesterday was taking the Milwaukee M18 pole saw to any and all branches, twigs, and arboreal aberrations. It was a fell day.
- Fallout-Shelter Fish-Fry on the Charles C. W. Cooke podcast.
- The dangers of satirical literacy in boot camp.
- China’s purported EV success is as pointless as it is false.
Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.