Authors who take pen names are nothing new – Mark Twain for Samuel Clemens, for instance, or even J.K. Rowling for Joanne Rowling. It's not even all that rare for authors to take single-word names, such as François-Marie Arouet's name of Voltaire, or Marie-Henri Beyle's name of Stendahl. Authors may do that for any number of reasons, known or otherwise. Now here's another one. Novalis' real name was Georg Phillipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg. That's a mouthful, but is that why he took a short pen name? Who knows?
Novalis, to use the name he's best known by, is considered today to be a pioneer in German romantic poetry. Most of his prose, like “Henry Of Ofterdingen”, was published after his death – in the case of “Henry”, some 40 years posthumously. His lifetime focus on poetry may explain some of the fragmented nature of his narrative in “Henry”. Then again, maybe I'm just not all that good at interpreting German poetry, particularly in translation. Let's see if we can tell from examining this work whether my confusion with this narrative is his doing or mine. My guess is that it's mine, but let's see.
Henry, the title character, begins this story at the age of 20. His father is a metalworker, probably a blacksmith, in a small town where Henry was born and raised; his mother comes from a fairly wealthy family in the city of Augsburg in Bavaria, the south of Germany. Unusually, the story begins with a dream of Henry's, which he particularly remembers because in it he sees a certain blue flower that makes a tremendous impression on him. His father teases Henry about his attraction to this dream, but his mother reminds her husband that many years previously he himself had a similarly powerful dream that eventually brought him to Augsburg to seek her out and marry her. Apparently this is going to be a tale full of mystical and arcane knowledge, yes?
Henry's mother shortly takes him to Augsburg to meet her father, who has never seen him. On the way, the two of them meet several interesting types, as one would in a story like this. In an inn, for instance, they encounter an older man who regales them with a number of fascinating tales. It turns out he is a master miner – he proceeds to describe the deep knowledge that work in a mine can provide. He shortly takes them to meet a hermit who lives, of course, in a cave, just outside of the town. This man has lived alone for years. It turns out that he was a soldier in his youth, and at one time participated in the Crusades – since that time he has been collecting rare books, in one of which Henry sees illustrations of things that seem to show him his future. Finally, upon reaching Augsburg, Henry encounters a poet named Klingsohr, a guest at a feast given by his grandfather. Klingsohr has a daughter named Matilda – I leave you to guess whether or not Henry and Matilda fall in love on the spot.
You may notice that through all of this narrative, Henry doesn't do much. He dreams, meets people, listens to them, decides that he wants to join their occupations – miner, soldier, poet – one after the other, and falls in love with the first attractive young woman he sees. Ordinarily, I expect the protagonist of a story to take more agency than that in their own tale, but then again Novalis was a poet rather than a novelist. And if you think the poetic approach informs the first part of “Henry Of Ofterdingen”, wait until you see what happens next.
At the home of Henry's grandfather, Klingsohr is a frequent guest, and needless to say, with his daughter Matilda in love with Henry and he with her, and everyone just delighted at this state of affairs, Klingsohr is there even more often. One evening, the assembly invites Klingsohr to recite a tale. His story tells of a mysterious king whose realm is taken by his scribe, who is jealous of the king and in love with his daughter. A kind of mystical war ensues, which involves various gods and eventually leads to the end of the world as we know it. Everyone is, however, exceedingly happy at this conclusion of all suffering. And that's the end of “Henry Of Ofterdingen”.
In all fairness, Novalis died in 1801 at the age of 28, and didn't have time to finish his work, but that still leaves a lot of open question. What happens to Henry, for instance, after Klingsohr's recitation is finished? There are hints that Henry will marry Matilda and stay with Klingsohr for training as a poet – does he do that? There's a good deal in this work about the various characters' theories about their various professions, such as Klingsohr's notion that poetry is only useful if it refers to the real world – do those theories have any impact on the rest of the story? Will those theories come together in any way into, say, an idea of the proper way to live? Or will all those theories simply remain in their separate segments of the story? And for goodness sake, whatever happened to that mysterious blue flower that Henry dreamed about way back at the beginning? Was it a prediction of Matilda's presence in Henry's life? Something else entirely? Just a flower?
We're not going to get answers to any of these questions now, of course, especially since he work we have in hand was published about 40 years after the death of Novalis. All I can say at this point, as one who has no expertise in German romantic poetry (of which Novalis is acknowledged as one of the pioneers) is that the language of “Henry Of Ofterdingen” is lovely, as near as we can enjoy it in English translation. Read it for that, or for the theories about life and literature. I'd say don't read it for the story.
Benshlomo says, Poetry and prose literature are two very different things. Be aware that some writers tend to mix them up.
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