Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818)

1.        Matthew Lewis is best remembered for The Monk (1796), one of the most influential, and controversial, Gothic novels in English. This novel was written in ten weeks and published before he was twenty. He was a Member of Parliament for Wiltshire; his interests were not in politics, but in literature and the stage. His The Castle Spectre (1797) was a popular stage play, which enjoyed a long run. He also translated a number of works from German, such as The Minister (1797, a translation from Friedrich Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe).

2.        Lewis became deeply influenced by German literature in July 1792, when he travelled to Saxe- Weimar-Eisenach (where Sir Brooke Boothby was British ambassador to the court of Duke Karl August) to prepare himself for a diplomatic career in accordance with his father’s wishes. During his stay, he developed an interest in folklore, mediated through Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose Volkslieder (Leipzig, 1778–9), contained a number of Scandinavian songs and poems.

3.        The text of “The Water King” was first incorporated into The Monk, among a number of other passages drawing on folklore. It appears as a song performed outside the convent of St. Clare, Spain, where a subplot of the action takes place. In the lead up to the song, Theodore, Don Raymond’s faithful page, describes how Danes believe in elemental “Daemons”. The Water–King is such creature, who wears the appearance of a “Warrior” and “employs himself in luring young Virgins into his snare”. According to Theodore, the moral of the ballad is the danger “for young Women to abandon themselves to their passions”. [1]  The supernatural ballad is here given in a context, where it plays on the credulity and superstition of the Catholic nuns in the convent. In this way, it forms part of Lewis’s attacks on Catholicism throughout the novel.

4.        Lewis translated the poem from Herder’s Volkslieder collection, where it has the title “Der Wassermann”. Herder knew the ballad from the Danish collector Anders Sørensen Vedel’s It Hundrede udvaalde Danske Viser (1591; One Hundred Selected Ballads), which was expanded by Peder Syv with another 100 ballads in 1695, with eight re-printings in the eighteenth century.

5.        Herder’s ambition was to rediscover the true and authentic voice of national character through folklore (the collection was later re-titled Stimmen der Völker in Liedern). But what Lewis provides is an English version of “Der Wassermann”, which pays little attention to philological principles of translation. Instead it is a free adaption focussing on the horror of the tale. The theme of abduction and drowning (only hinted at in the original) are expanded to constitute a long melodrama, to which are added other shock effects. Nonetheless, Lewis still emphasized the provenance of the song in genuine folklore, footnoting the piece (in the 1798 edition of The Monk) with the information that he has since met with two old Scottish ballads resembling it.

6.        The “Water King” was reprinted in Lewis’s collection Tales of Wonder (1801; actually late 1800), a two-volume edition with 60 ballads. The first volume contains original poems and translations by Lewis (17 poems), Walter Scott (5), Robert Southey (8) and others. Lewis included other Danish ballads, “Elvers’s Hoh”, “The Erl-King”, and “The Erl-King’s Daughter”, as well as two Norse songs, “The Sword of Angantyr” and “King Hakon’s Death Song”, all of which Herder had translated into German.

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