Deep in the darkest woods, where twisting branches grasp at travellers under cover of night, folklore has long conjured images of malevolent spirits lurking in the shadows. In the eighteenth century, as Romantic ideas began to sprout across Europe, writers became fascinated by exploring the superstition associated with the forest. No one captured this more vividly than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the poem ‘Erlkönig’, an imitation inspired by a Danish ballad Herder translated under the title ‘Erlkönigs Tochter’. In this chapter, I will first analyse Goethe's psychological probing of superstition and how the poem's sinister evocation of a wood demon preying on humans inspired later Gothic works. I will then turn to Matthew Lewis’ drama One O’Clock! Or, The Knight and the Wood Dæmon (1811), which transplanted Goethe's woodland demon to the Danish borderland of Holstein, crafting a spectacle to convey the message that modern rationality can overcome such beliefs. The play was quite popular in its day but has not received as much modern critical attention as Lewis’ The Castle Spectre (1797). This chapter aims to correct that oversight.

The Erl-King

J. W. Goethe's Danish-inspired ballad ‘Erlköning’ was first included in the 1782 Singspiel entitled Die Fischerin. Here, it is sung by the main character, Dortchen, while she patches her father's fishing nets. The play is about the fishing community and their many superstitious beliefs. The ballad's theme of an evil demon in the woods killing humans represents the unsettling notion inherent in Danish ballads that humans are powerless before ancient supernatural forces in nature. The play also features a ballad about a maiden abducted by a merman, sung when Dortchen's father and fiancé believe she has drowned. Thus, one may perhaps best see Goethe's ballad as a modern, critical view of superstition and how it determines and misdirects traditional communities. However, something is lost in translation. Herder's rendering of erl as a name for the supernatural folkloric creatures, the elves, is a misapprehension of the Danish Ellefolk. Herder mistakenly referred to elves as erl-people because the Danish word ‘elle’ can also mean ‘alder’, which led Goethe to believe the elf-king was specifically a sylvan spirit.