The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Abdallah or the Horrible Sacrifice (1795)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Abdallah or the Horrible Sacrifice (original: Abdallah oder das Furchtbare Opfer) was written by Ludwig Tieck. Tieck (1773-1853) was one of the foremost early German Romantic writers. Tieck is best-known today for his literary fairy tales, the kunstmärchen. Abdallah, though not regarded by critics as one of Tieck’s better works, is nonetheless fairly interesting.

Abdallah is set in a generic Arabian kingdom ruled by the cruel tyrant Sultan Ali. Ali’s archenemy is Selim, a good, brave, and just man who lives in isolation in his tower with his son Abdallah and Omar, Abdallah’s tutor. Abdallah trusts Omar and values him as a friend, but Omar is not a good man. His thirst for knowledge had been so great that he went in search of Mondal, an enormous, misanthropic “fallen angel” who no mortal had ever seen. Mondal, the “monster of destruction,” was supposed to know the secrets of the universe, which Omar desired. When Omar found Mondal he swore allegiance to Mondal as a way to gain power. Mondal then sent Omar back into the world of men to bring destruction and misery to humanity. But Omar took pity on the impoverished Selim, whose wealth had been unjustly confiscated by Sultan Ali, and revealed to him where some buried treasure might be found. For this act Mondal punished Omar by trapping him in the crack of a mountain and exposing him to endless torments. Omar’s only chance of release, according to Mondal, is to cause a son to bring about the death of his father. Omar chooses to use Abdallah and Selim in this way. Selim has vowed to curse Abdallah if he does not marry the daughter of Selim’s close friend Abubeker, but Abdallah loves Zulma, the daughter of Sultan Ali. Omar plays on Abdallah’s anger and regret at being forced to choose between obeying his father and following his heart. Omar preaches a decadent philosophy to Abdallah, one which equates vice and virtue and which privileges pleasure as the highest goal in life. Once Abdallah is convinced, Omar follows up by telling Abdallah that he has the right to enjoy Zulma’s favors regardless of what Selim says. Omar then tells Abdallah about Omar’s alliance with undefined supernatural beings and sends Abdallah into a cavern, populated by ghosts and owl demons, where Abdallah sees his future, including a vision of his father’s mutilated body.

This convinces Abdallah that Selim’s death is inevitable and irreversible and that his death is the only way that Abdallah can be happy with Zulma. At this point Abdallah receives a scroll from Nadir, a man who in the past had belonged to a secret society of which Omar was also a member. The scroll reveals to Abdallah Omar’s true master, Mondal, and foretells the evils awaiting Abdallah if he follows Omar’s advice. Abdallah isn’t sure if the scroll is a fake or not, but when Nadir promises him a way to make both he and his father happy, Abdallah agrees to obey him. He follows Nadir’s orders and goes back to the cavern of demons. Abdallah attempts to prove to himself that they, and consequently his previous vision of his future, were just a hallucination, but the ghosts circle him, chanting “Vatermörder!” (“Father Murderer!”). This is too much for Abdallah, whose will falters, placing himself in jeopardy. Now desperate, Abdallah uses a magic ring which Omar had given him and calls on Omar, who rescues him. The next morning Abdallah allows himself to be convinced by Omar that it was all just a bad dream.

Selim is a part of a conspiracy to overthrow Sultan Ali, but Omar betrays the conspiracy to the Sultan so that when Selim’s forces attack Ali’s palace, the Sultan’s men are waiting for them. In the resulting battle Selim is badly wounded and barely escapes, but he is unaware of Omar’s involvement and chalks it up to the wrath of fate. Ali, furious with Selim, offers Zulma’s hand in marriage to the man who captures Selim alive. Abdallah is forced to make a choice: Zulma, or Selim. Thanks in large part to Omar’s philosophical arguments, Abdallah chooses Zulma. Abdallah finds out that Raschid, the Sultan’s gardener, who also loves Zulma, has discovered Selim’s whereabouts and intends to inform Ali and claim Zulma himself. Abdallah murders Raschid and then betrays Selim to Ali, who is pleased that his enemy’s son has betrayed his father. Selim is executed and Ali orders the wedding of Zulma and Abdallah, but Zulma, on finding out what Abdallah has done, is now repulsed by him, his parricide having destroyed her love for him. At the wedding dinner things become unreal and strange, with the guests changed into “machines” and Abdallah himself tormented by ghosts and corpses. Abdallah appeals to Omar for help, but Omar tells him to ask God for help. Abdallah, in agony, is thinking about suicide when the corpse of Selim appears. The next morning the body of Abdallah is found with horribly “distorted” features.

The resemblance of Abdallah to other Orientalist/Arabesque Gothics, most notably William Beckford’s Vathek, is not coincidental. Tieck was fascinated with the Arabian Nights and with the early English Gothics, especially Vathek. But when he wrote Abdallah Tieck was a young man–Abdallah is generally considered among Tieck’s juvenilia–and he was obsessed with his own alienation from society, his suicidal feelings, and general nihilism. So Abdallah is in many ways Tieck’s Me character, and Abdallah itself something Tieck wrote to distance himself from his own emotional darkness--“thoughts that, if we can believe some 1792 letters to his friend and collaborator Wilhelm Wackenroder, very nearly drove him insane.”1 However, even a callow Tieck was a talented writer, and Abdallah became more than just an immature angst-fest. Roger Paulin notes that Abdallah “out-Gothicked any other representatives of that mode”2 and writes that “In Abdallah¼Tieck is trying to unite in one work the previous strands of his writing - the oriental idyll, the Gothic novel, and the sentimental 'Wertheriade' - but in a work whose strident style expresses nihilism, precocious despair in reason and virtue.”3 Abdallah follows the Arabesque Gothic model of Vathek but adds more fantastic and occult elements and includes, in the wedding dinner scene, a hallucinogenic ending the equal of Vathek’s but more horrible. Tieck further added the theme of the inevitability of Fate, something which was not present in most Gothics. Once Abdallah has given in to temptation, there is no hope for him, but almost from the beginning he (and the reader) is convinced that his betrayal of his father, and consequently his own damnation, are inevitable. Most other Gothics which dealt with the damnation of the protagonist, particularly M.G. Lewis’ The Monk and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya: Or, The Moor emphasized the free will of the protagonists, so that their fall was their own doing. It was not until Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer that a Gothic would so prominently feature a protagonist the readers knew to be doomed.

Lastly, Tieck made Abdallah weak. This is a departure not just from other Arabesque Gothics but also from the other genre of novels influential on Tieck: the Sturm und Drang tradition (see: The Robbers, Romanticism). The prototypical protagonist of the Sturm und Drang novel was Werther, from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Werther is many things: intelligent, too sensitive and highly strung for the world, and destructively pre-occupied. But neither he nor the other Sturm und Drang protagonists are weak, certainly not in the way that Abdallah is. Considering that Abdallah is a commentary by Tieck upon himself, this is a remarkable act of self-loathing and self-contempt.

Recommended Edition

Print: Ludwig Tieck, Abdallah. Eine Erzahlung (Berlin & Leipzig, 1795).

For Further Reading

Tom Lloyd, “Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853),” in Douglass H. Thompson, Jack G. Volker, and Frederick S. Frank, eds., Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographic Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002).

 

1 Tom Lloyd, “Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853),” in Douglass H. Thompson, Jack G. Volker, and Frederick S. Frank, eds., Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographic Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 439.

2 Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 59.

3 Roger Paulin, “The Early Ludwig Tieck and the Idyllic Tradition,” The Modern Language Review 70.1 (Jan. 1975): 122.

Introduction / Table of Contents / Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes / Blog / Books / Patreon / Twitter / Contact me