HG Wells Refernce

September 10, 2012 4:46 PM

So the quote "Array of spectres that once beleaguered Prague" is a quote out of HG Wells's the first men in the Moon. Any idea what the reference is?
posted by monkeywithhat to Society & Culture (11 answers total)

Prague is notoriously one of the most (allegedly) haunted cities in Europe. Just about every street in the old sections of the city has its own ghost story. There's even a flaming turkey that shows up on Good Friday.
posted by chrisulonic at 4:59 PM on September 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Probably an allusion to this Longfellow poem?

I have read, in some old, marvellous tale,
Some legend strange and vague,
That a midnight host of spectres pale
Beleaguered the walls of Prague.

posted by Wretch729 at 5:00 PM on September 10, 2012 [5 favorites]

From the phrasing and context, he seems to be thinking of a specific incident rather than Prague's general hauntedness. Either Wells is alluding to Longfellow, or both Wells and Longfellow are alluding to some legend which was better known in their time than in ours. Some frenzied googling turned up the following snippet:

Legend says that Prague was once besieged by flocks of witches, forcing the city's terrified residents to light huge bonfires to drive away the evil invaders.

which pops up on various forums and "haunted Prague" ghost tours. I haven't been able to trace it to an older source, though.

There might be some heavily annotated scholarly edition of Longfellow out there which gives sources for the legend.
posted by pont at 5:32 PM on September 10, 2012

I assumed the Longfellow because the poem gives the old Prague legend as an allegory for faith dispersing fear, and in the H.G. Wells story the character who is thinking the line quoted is first overcome by fear and refuses to go on the trip to the moon, but later relents and agrees to come having overcome his "nerves." Though as pont points out they could both be alluding to an older legend about the same thing.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:04 PM on September 10, 2012

According to this edition of Longfellow, Longfellow got the story from Sir Walter Scott.
posted by interplanetjanet at 6:46 PM on September 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Thanks interplanetjanet! Scott, in turn, seems to be quoting someone else:

Similar to this was the Nacht Lager, or midnight camp, which seemed nightly to beleaguer the walls of Prague,
"With ghastly faces thronged, and fiery arms,"

but which disappeared upon recitation of the magical words, Vezelé, Vezelé, ho! ho! ho!—For similar delusions, see DELRIUS, pp. 294, 295.

‘Delrius’ is, I think, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex by Martin Delrio but it's unclear whether Scott's "ghastly faces" quote is a translation from that work or from something else he doesn't bother to name. (I haven't been able to turn up the phrase elsewhere, and can't find an online version of Delrio's book.)

The only other lead I have is this reference to a German book on "The night-guards, or the night camp [Nachtlager] of spirits at Saatz in Bohemia", which admittedly isn't quite Prague, and the only Saatz I can find is in Moravia (Žatec in Czech).

This is fun!
posted by pont at 7:28 PM on September 10, 2012 [3 favorites]

"With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms." is on Book XII of Paradise Lost.
posted by Marauding Ennui at 1:12 AM on September 11, 2012

Best answer: It is interesting isn't it? A German library has a scanned copy of Der Nachtwächter oder Das Nachtlager der Geister bei Saatz in Böheim online here. My German is terrible and the old text style is really hard to read, but I think it is a collection of ghost stories or folk tales and the last chapter "Das fürchterliche Nachtlager der Geister" is the one about the ghost camp.

There's also a nice frontispiece on page 6, with the magic words "Wesele-ho-ho-ho"

I'll bet Wells just knew the Longfellow poem though. Everybody used to know Longfellow.
posted by interplanetjanet at 6:05 AM on September 11, 2012

There's an online edition of the Disquisitionum Magicarum at the BNF’ Gallica site. Starting on p. 293 of that edition there's an account from the Formicarius of Johannes Nider involving spectral horsemen in Bohemia.
posted by misteraitch at 6:31 AM on September 11, 2012

Great stuff! I suspect it's going to be impossible to say where Scott picked up the legend, but it was clearly doing the rounds since at least the Formicarius. Apparently his literary career started with translations from German (including Gottfried August Bürger) so he may well have picked it up at that stage.

interplanetjanet: great find! I'll attempt the German at some point when I'm not meant to be working. Googling "wesele ho ho ho" brings up several Polish pages... the rabbit hole goes deeper. And I agree that everyone used to know Longfellow, but everyone used to know Scott as well (at least in Britain). It's possible that Wells had read both the sources.
posted by pont at 7:15 AM on September 11, 2012

I live in Prague, and have been on a couple of the ghost tours. As far as I can recall, nothing of what pont writes about was mentioned. And, believe me, on those tours they scrape the bottom of the spookiness barrel, so if it was even vaguely relevant to Prague we would have been told about it.

I'd say it's a pretty obvious reference to the Longfellow poem that Wretch729 quotes.
posted by veedubya at 11:08 AM on September 11, 2012