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Lenore, sometimes translated as Leonora, Leonore or Ellenore, is a poem written by German author Gottfried August Bürger in 1773, and published in 1774 in the Göttinger Musenalmanach. Lenore is generally characterised as being part of the 18th century Gothic ballads, and although the character that returns from its grave in the poem is not considered to be a vampire, the poem has been very influential on vampire literature. William Taylor, who published the first English translation of the ballad, would later claim that "no German poem has been so repeatedly translated into English as Ellenore". ==Background== In the 18th century there were more than eighteen hundred different German-speaking political entities in Central Europe. During this period, due to influences from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Latin and French dominated over the German language, and German literature had mostly been modelled after French and Italian literature. These factors lead few scholars to recognize the existence of a distinct German culture or literature. In order to gain acknowledgement for the German language and thus acquire a distinctively German literary tradition from which it would be possible to get a sense of nationality, philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder believed that it was necessary to preserve German idioms, for they are the element that gives a language its idiosyncrasies and distinguishes it from other languages:〔 "The idioms are the elegances of which no neighbor can deprive us and they are sacred to the tutelary goddess of the language. They are the elegances woven into the spirit of the language, and this spirit is destroyed if they are taken out. () Take the idiomatic out of a language and you take its spirit and power. () The idioms of the time of the ''Meistersänger'', of Opitz and Logau, of Luther, etc. should be collected () And if they are good for nothing else they will at least open the way to the student of the language so he can understand the genius of the nationality, and explain one by the other. The idioms of every language are the impressions of its country, its nationality, its history." After reading ''Reliques of Ancient English Poetry'' by Thomas Percy and James Macpherson's Ossianic poems, Herder thought the means through which Germany could create a unique literature of its own would be to collect folk songs among the lower classes of Germany:〔 "It will remain eternally true that if we have no ''Volk'', we shall have no public, no nationality, no literature of our own which shall live and work in us. Unless our literature if founded on our ''Volk'', we shall write eternally for closet sages and disgusting critics out of whose mouths and stomachs we shall get back what we have given." Bürger answered Herder's plea by publishing Lenore, which had been suggested to him by a Low German Volkslied, similar to the Scottish ballad of ''Sweet William's Ghost'' collected in Percy's ''Reliques''. William Taylor has also compared Lenore to "an obscure English ballad called The Suffolk Miracle", in which a young man appears to his sweetheart, who has no knowledge that he had already died, and carries her on horseback for forty miles until the man complains he has a headache, which leads the maid to tie her handkerchief around his head. After they depart, the young maid returns home and is informed by her father that her lover had in fact died, whereupon he goes to the young man's grave and digs up the bones, finding that his daughter's handkerchief is tied around the skull.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lenore (ballad)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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