“The Tiger’s Cave” was a story from Volume Two of Evening Tales for the Winter, which I identified in a previous post as first appearing in The Monthly Magazine, March 1831. It’s a pulpy piece about the adventures of the narrator and his friends in the mountains of Quito, where they come upon the titular cave.
At the time, I surmised that it was probably a translation of a story from the Danish literary magazine Laesefrugter, edited by Adolph Frederik Elmquist. Since I don’t read Danish, I couldn’t research any further—in particular, I couldn’t find out what the original story was, when it was published, or who wrote it.
But recently, commenter Tara Challoner let me know that she had found an earlier English appearance of this story—May 30, 1829—that itself seemed to be from the Edinburgh Literary Journal. This earlier appearance indicated that the original story was German. Ah!
Following Tara’s lead, I tracked down the version she found to the Edinburgh Literary Journal No. 19, Saturday, March 21, 1829, p 260, where it appears with the note:
Translated from the Danish of Elmquist and the German of Döring, by one of the Authors of the “Odd Volume.” “Tales and Legends,” &c.
This puts the Danish (and, of course, the German) version earlier than March 1829.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack from this new discovery. The first item is that the Edinburgh Literary Journal version (henceforth, the “ELJ version”) is a different translation. Not only is the wording of the ELJ version slightly different from the Monthly Magazine (henceforth, “MM”) version, it also omits the introductory section: the equivalent of the first six paragraphs of the MM version.
But both versions have the same title, which makes it likely that this is also the title of at least the Danish version (a lot of stories change titles when they change languages), and quite possibly, the German version as well. The DeepL translator tells me that The Tiger’s Cave in Danish is either Tigerens hule or Tigerens Grotte. In German, it’s Die Höhle des Tigers or Die Tigerhöhle (with variations in spacing and hyphenation).
Finding the Original Story #
I tried the German first, and quickly hit paydirt. The story “Die Tigerhöhle” appears in the collection Apollonia: Eine Sammlung auserlesener Schilderungen (Apollonia: A collection of exquisite descriptions and stories for the instructive entertainment of inquisitive youth), published in 1828 by F. P. Wilmsen. Searching a bit more in the book, I discovered the phrase “die Tigerhöhle von Döring” (the Tiger’s Cave from Döring) in the introduction, which verifies the author credit.
So now, we know the story dates back to at least 1828, though since Apollonia is an anthology, I don’t think that this is the original publication. It may, however, be the source that Elmquist and/or the ELJ translator used, since the ELJ attribution parallels the Apollonia attribution in its lack of a first name. The translator of the ELJ version is one of the so-called “Misses Corbett”, the collective name for the two Scottish sisters Walterina Cunningham and Grace Corbett. The sisters jointly produced the anthologies The Odd Volume (Vol 1 1826, Vol II 1827) and Tales and Legends (1828), along with a number of other anthologies, novels, poems and plays. They seem to have been familiar with the contemporary British fad for German gothic, and it makes sense that at least one of them would be literate enough in German to translate. Whether they knew Danish, I don’t know.
But who is this Döring? I don’t know for sure, but my guess is someone named “Georg Döring.” At the Internet Archive, I found what appears to be a literary almanac (a year-end collection of stories) by a “Dr. Georg Döring” called Phantasiegemälde für 1828 (Fantasy painting for 1828), which does sound like it would contain stories of the appropriate genre. It does not contain “Die Tigerhöhle”.
Dr Döring may or may not be Georg Christian Wilhelm Asmus Döring, the author of the also rather pulpy-sounding Die Mumie von Rotterdam (The Mummy of Rotterdam), and a few other works that may be in a similar vein, at least judging by the titles at Projekt Gutenberg-DE.
This is as far as I got. We know the original story, approximately when it was published, and we have a good guess at the author. This is not quite all the way to the answer, but it's pretty far! Especially considering that I don’t even like this story….
EDIT: Right after I hit "publish" on this post, I realized a logical hole: I'm not positive the story went from German to Danish. It's also possible that Döring translated a story that he read in Laesefrugter. We can't know until we know when Elmquist published the story. But I think German to Danish is the more likely direction
Holes Yet to Be Patched #
In addition to not being entirely confident of the author’s identity, we still don’t know when (or where) “Die Tigerhöhle” first appeared; I imagine it was around 1827-1828. We also don’t know when it appeared in Laesefrugter. Some creative internet querying led me to the Royal Danish Library, and I believe they might have a copy of the appropriate volume online, but I won’t be able to find it; anyone who is fluent in Danish is more than welcome to try. Again, my guess is that the appropriate year would be 1827 or 1828.
Nor do we know who is responsible for the English translation in The Monthly Magazine.
So there we have it! Any Danish or German literary sleuths who feel like verifying my work or filling in any holes, please do. And thank you, Tara Challoner!