I'll finish up my posts on Volume One of Evening Tales for the Winter with a brief discussion of the remaining three stories.
"The Cavern of Death" is a longer novella in the gothic style, set (of course) in the depths of the Black Forest. It starts out well enough, with a handsome young couple in love, an interfering father, intrigue, family skeletons, and the mysterious dark cavern of the title. I confess that I gave up about midway through. Full-blown gothic isn't one of my preferred genres, and this got a little too gothic for me.
Despite the story's German setting, I couldn't find any indication that the story itself is actually German. It first appeared in 1794, as a serial in the newspaper The True Briton, and seems to be inspired by other (English authored) popular Gothic novels of the time, such as The Castle of Otranto. It proved to be quite popular, going through several editions, as well as translations into other languages.
In 1802, the novel came out in abbreviated chapbook form as The Black Forest; or, The Cavern of Horrors! A Gothic Romance. Another abbreviated version appeared in 1830 as The Black Forest; or The Cavern of Death, A Bohemian Romance. I suppose that the version in Evening Tales for the Winter is one of these shorter versions, though I haven't read any of them to compare.
While doing research for this tale, I was amused to discover an 1800 German translation of the novel by Friederike Caroline Schlege. If I've deciphered the title page correctly, her translation is from the French!
If you are interested in reading the original 1794 novel, it's been reissued by Valancourt Books, with an introduction by Allen Grove. Most of the information that I've given here is from Grove's introduction.
"The Dervise Alfouran" and "Hassan Assar" are both originally from the 1764 collection Tales of the Genii by "Sir Charles Morell, Formerly Ambassador for the British Settlements in India to the Great Mogul." They were supposedly translations of a Persian work by an imam named Horam.
In reality, the tales are an English-authored pastiche of The Arabian Nights, which first appeared in English over the period 1706-1708 as an anonymous translation of Antione Galland's French translation (1704-1717). Galland's translation is the first European appearance of the story cycle known as One Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights. The author of Tales of the Genii, James Ridley, briefly held a chaplaincy with the East India Company, though I can't tell whether he ever went to India (I think he didn't). At the time that he wrote Tales of the Genii, Ridley held a church living in Essex that had been handed down from his father. He died in 1765.
I'm sure that "The Dervise Alfouran" and "Hassan Assar" are fine stories, but I must admit that I skipped over them. Remember, when I started reading Evening Tales for the Winter I was looking for ghost stories and potential material for my Winter Tales series. These stories, as great as they may be, clearly weren't going to fit in that category, so I've skipped reading them, for now.
Reference: Comparison of the Contents of Various Editions of Arabian Nights, from The Thousand Nights and a Night website.
And that's it for Volume One! I plan to start posting about Volume Two as soon as I can. Stay tuned!