The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains: Frederick Marryat
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Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) was a Royal Navy officer and hero of the Napoleonic wars. In later years, he took up a career as a novelist and helped pioneer a brand of naval fiction derived from first-hand experience. His wildly popular nautical adventures were known to inspire readers to become sailors themselves, while Melville, with characteristic wryness, effectively portrayed him as a literary Siren luring unsuspecting young men to sea.
However, "The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains" is conspicuous within Marryat's oeuvre. The text is taken from Chapter 39 of his supernatural horror novel about the Flying Dutchman, The Phantom Ship (1839). Due to its standalone nature and engaging narrative, the chapter is frequently anthologized as a short story, and today enjoys a better reputation than the novel itself. This land-locked chapter is more suited to instill a fear of land than a temptation to sea.
"The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains" is significant for its innovation in the history of Gothic horror. It tells the story of a 17th-century Transylvanian serf who, after murdering his wife and her illicit lover, takes his children and becomes a refugee from the law in a remote spot of the Hartz Mountains of Germany. There he tries to start a new life, but (of course) not everything is as it seems.
The Phantom Ship (chapter 39) by Frederick Marryat:
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Supplemental:
Extracts:
- "...why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrestingly glides through the green of the groves— why is this phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg?" (Moby-Dick, 42)
- "Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark." (Moby-Dick, 42)
- "Blast my eyes, but the light-ship is hid by the mist, lads:— / Flying Dutchman—odds bobbs—off the Cape of Good Hope!" ("Tom Deadlight")
- "...in giving his orders, the passionate old man made as much fuss as a white squall aboard the Flying Dutchman." (Omoo, 26)
This meetup is part in a series on Muses and Monsters.