"The Rider on the White Horse” begins as a ghost story. A traveler along the coast of the North
Sea is caught in dangerously rough weather. Offshore he glimpses a spectral rider rising and
plunging in the wind and rain. Taking shelter at an inn the traveler mentions the apparition
and the local schoolmaster volunteers a story. The story is both simple and subtle and its
peculiar power is to surprise us slowly. It is a story of determination of a young man Hauke
Haien living in a remote community (Storm depicts the village with the luminous precision of a
Vermeer) who is out to make a name for himself and to remake his world. It is a story of
devotion and disappointment of pettiness and superstition of spiritual pride and ultimate
desolation and of the beauty and indifference of the natural world. It is a story that opens
up in the end to uncover the foundation of savagery on which human society rests. Theodor
Storm's great novella which will remind readers of the work of Thomas Hardy is one of the
supreme masterpieces of German literature. It is here limpidly translated by the American poet
James Wright along with seven other shorter works including the lyrical love story
"Immensee.”
