_The historical Eulenspiegel and his gravestone._
It is scarcely necessary to enter upon the question of the historical Eulenspiegel. That there was such a person seems unquestionable. The names of his parents were Saxon names, not unfrequent, and the name of Ulenspiegel appears as early as 1337, being the name of a widow living at Brunswick, and again in 1473, in conjunction with another name. The widow Ulenspeygel has even been supposed to be the mother of our hero. But what little is known of him, is more easily to be read in the book itself than gathered from other records.
Among the objects of interest which remain to the present time, a testimony of the real existence of Eulenspiegel, is the gravestone at Möllen, the place assigned to him as his last resting-place, both by historical tradition and in the folk-book. Caspar Abel, who in 1729–32 published a collection of old German chronicles, gives one which he describes as having been the property of the family of Hetling, at Halberstadt, and which seems to have been written about 1486. In this chronicle, mention is made under the year 1350 of the ravages of the Black Death at Braunschweig, and it continues: “Thereof died Ulenspeygel at Möllen, among the Gheyseler brethren” (“_Dosulffest sterff Ulenspeygel to Möllen unde de Gheyseler Broder kemen an_”). Yet it is necessary to remark, that this statement, later than the first presumed edition of 1486—of which little is known—is not supported by any other Saxon chronicle of the fifteenth century. The next reference to the grave at Möllen, is in Reimar Rock’s _Lübscher Chronik_, in the following jest concerning the Cardinal Raymond; being the original hint, indeed, which I have amplified in the present book, in adventure the hundredth and tenth: “The Cardinal abode in the first night at Möllen. And when he comprehended the German speech, and heard of the holy-living saint Ulenspegel, an if there had been money in store—after which do all Italians and Spaniards thirst—Ulenspegel could have been entered on the Pope his calendar.” This jest, as Dr. Lappenberg well notices, is at any rate a proof, that at this time the grave was often sought out by visitors. Michael Heberer, in his voyage to Sweden and Denmark, in 1592, describes the gravestone, but not in the way depicted in our cut. He makes no mention of the figure, but only of the owl and glass; and the same description occurs in Merian (_Topographie von Nieder Sachsen_) as being there in 1614. But in 1631, in the manuscript Chronicles of Dethlev Dreyer, a description of the stone, nearly as it now stands, is given; but a basket of owls is mentioned, so it could scarcely be the same. Dreyer and Zeiller (_Reiszbuch durch Hoch und Nieder Teutschland_, 1674), both speak of the gravestone having been renewed and fenced off from the attacks of boys, and other wilful destroyers of antiquities. But the most interesting account is given by Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, who visited Möllen in the year 1710, and I shall, therefore, offer a translation of it:—