Undine

vii, [1], 141, [4] pp. Translated from the German by Edmund Gosse. Includes the full text of Undine, with an introduction entitled La Motte Fouque: A Critical Study, and illustrations from woodcuts by Allen Lewis. A novel by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque concerning Undine, a water spirit who marries a Knight named Huldebrand in order to gain a soul. It is an early German romance, which has been translated into English and other languages. During the nineteenth century the book was very popular and was, according to The Times in 1843, 'a book which, of all others, if you ask for it at a foreign library, you are sure to find engaged'. The story, which has resemblances to The Little Mermaid by Andersen, is descended from Melusine, the French folk-tale of a water-sprite who marries a knight on condition that he shall never see her on Saturdays, when she resumes her mermaid shape. It was also inspired by a text of Paracelsus. George Macdonald thought Undine 'the most beautiful' of all fairy stories, and the references to it in such works as Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and Louisa Alcott's Little Women show that it was one of the best loved of all books for many 19th-century children. The first adaptation of Undine was E.T.A. Hoffmann's opera in 1814. It was a collaboration between E.T.A. Hoffman, who composed the score, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouque who adapted his own work into a libretto. The opera proved highly successful and in his review of Hoffmann's opera, Carl Maria von Weber admired it as the kind of composition which the German desires - 'an art work complete in itself, in which partial contributions of the related and collaborating arts blend together, disappear, and, in disappearing, somehow form a new world'.