In Tyll, Daniel Kehlmann explores the German folklore figure Til Eulenspiegel. In common legends, Eulenspiegel is known for playing practical jokes on his contemporaries, exposing their foibles and hypocrisies. The first printed collection of Eulenspiegel stories dates to 1510, and it places his life as taking place in the early 1400s. Early printings were mostly illustrations with a few lines of text; many of Til’s pranks were scatological. Tradition holds that he was born in Kneitlingen (in Lower Saxony) and died of the plague in Mölln (between Hamburg and Lübeck). There is some evidence that there was an actual Til Eulenspiegel, including records of a Till van Kneitlingen who was jailed for a year in the city of Brunswick on charges of highway robbery. He is not one of your harmless jokers or Robin Hood folk heroes.

Kehlmann transposes Til to the era of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and takes Tyll Ulenspiegel as the spelling of the character’s name. In Kehlmann’s telling, Tyll is a skilled acrobat and juggler, a good singer, dancer and storyteller, and finally something of a magician. He’s also a harbinger, as the first of the novel’s eight sections makes clear. Tyll begins with a first-person narrator telling readers how hard her walled town with 105 houses had prayed to keep the war away. They had prayed to the Almighty and to the Good Virgin, of course, and also to the lord of the forest and to the little people of midnight, to St. Gerwin, to Peter the Gatekeeper of Heaven, to St. John the Evangelist, and just to be sure to Old Mela who rides across the heavens with her followers on the raw nights when the demons are allowed to roam free. They prayed to the horned ones of the old days and to Bishop Martin, and of course to St. Moritz. The narrator does not say how long the war has been going, but the does say that the tax farmers came twice per year “and always seemed surprised that we were still there.” (p. 7, all translations mine)

Tyll Ullenspiegel is also already well known by the start of the novel. When Tyll and his small troupe — a young woman, an older woman and an older man — trundle into town and set up their wagon, people are quick to say “Tyll is here!” “Tyll has come!” “Look, Tyll is there!” (p. 8) and everyone knows who they’re talking about. The town is self-sufficient but sleepy, and Tyll’s group brings some welcome entertainment. They play a tragedy, then they play a comedy, and between the two so much time has passed that the cows are starting to complain that they haven’t been milked, and many other chores have been left undone. Tyll sing songs that made fun of the Winter King, whose election in Prague had started the war, and others that made fun of the Kaiser, praying away in his cold rooms in Vienna. The songs lead to a dance with the young woman from the troupe, and the two of them hold the crowd spellbound with their skill and lightness. After the players pass the hat for money, the show continues with a rope that has suddenly appeared between the church tower and the town hall, which Tyll soon alights on and runs up and down effortlessly. From there, he eggs the crowd into a game of thrown shoes, but when he tells them to recover their shoes, the game descends into a brawl. Some people can’t recognize their own shoes or decide to improve their footwear at a neighbor’s cost. Hidden feuds come out into the open, slips turn into kicks and punches, and people give free rein to their violent urges. By the time the townspeople return to their senses, Tyll’s wagon — when did he come down from the rope anyway? how did they pack up so fast? — can barely be seen on its way out of town. One man died with a knife of unknown origin in his back, another was left lame, and many lost a tooth or several. A year later, war comes to the town leaving almost no survivors.

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