Anselmus thinks this is a good idea, so he looks up Archivarius Lindhoorst. His friends, including Conrector Paulmann, who has a lovely daughter, Veronica, try to snap him out of it, telling him they've heard of a strange fellow who might have some copying work for him, since his penmanship is excellent.

He falls in love with one of the snakes (the gold-green one), and kind of goes a little nuts. A bit perplexed, he moves on, until he's drawn to an elder-tree, where he sees three snakes. Here's the short version: A clumsy student named Anselmus trips over a thing of apples one day, and an old woman (the apple seller) starts screeching at him, telling him he'll end up in the crystal. Aside from the last one, whom I know because I heard of him when reading Don Quixote, I've heard of none of these guys-not even heard of them! Who knows, maybe they wrote similar stuff? At present, I can't say, so I can only conclude what I can based on what I've read of his.Īnd so we come to 'The Golden Top': One of the strangest stories I've ever read. For a small example of this, his Wikipedia entry mentions that some of his major influences were Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Carlo Gozzi, and Calderón. The other major part of it, I'm sure, is that I simply don't know enough about Hoffmann, or the time period and place in which he lived in wrote. What makes them stand out is the fact they were written in 18, respectively. Thus, here I am.įirst, I should say that neither of these stories would be very remarkable if they were written today. Nevertheless, they are so bizarre that I have to say something about them. Hoffmann's stories: 'The Golden Pot' and 'The Nutcracker.' The book is a compilation, and even though it's only got two stories, each story is not long enough to technically be a novella, so I didn't want to review them on my site (if I did that, I think I'd have to admit too many shorter stories, and comparing short stories to novels doesn't seem like a good idea).

I just finished reading my Dover edition of two of E.T.A.

The golden pot eta hoffmann