Merry Pranks Of Till Eulenspiegel

Some folks will believe anything and that’s just what Till counts on as he pranks his way around the world. Till Eulenspiegel, a classic trickster character from Medieval folklore shows us how important a little foolishness can be. Zwerger's paintings are populated by a panoply of peasants and kings, who laugh with Eulenspiegel even as they are being duped.

Unfolds the life of the merry prankster Till, from his rowdy infancy to his final joke at his own funeral.

This book contains the earliest surviving English version of tales about Till Eulenspiegel, published in the mid-1500s and translated from a German text published in the 1510s, which was the first written version of oral tales that circulated in the 1400s. In the nineteenth century, when Till Eulenspiegel became a favorite subject of children's books, the tales were bowdlerized and the pranks were innocent. Eulenspiegel was often drawn wearing a jester's cap. In the original tales, Eulenspiegel is an opportunist who is always inventing schemes to avoid work and to cheat people out of their money. The humor can be crude, the character can be exasperating, and the pranks can be cruel-particularly when they are meant as revenge against those who resisted his schemes. Modern readers may well find many of the tales offensive, but they are a good example of the popular humor of Europe during the early Renaissance. The spelling and punctuation of the tales are modernized, so it is easy for contemporary readers to understand the text. They are accompanied by the original woodcut illustrations from a German edition of 1515. We are pleased to make this classic accessible to modern English-speaking readers for the first time.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.