Goethe's ballad “The Erl-king” from a paediatrician's point of view

“Der Erlkönig” is a well known classical song which depicts the death of a child assailed by a supernatural being, the Erl-King or “Erlkönig”, a ballad written by Goethe in 1782 and set to music by Franz Schubert in 1815. Goethe was supposedly inspired to write the poem by the news of a farmer from a nearby village riding desperately with his ill child in the night to look for the doctor.

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?

The father it is, with his infant so dear;

He holdeth the boy tightly clasp'd in his arm,

He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

…...

“Father, do you not see the Erl-king?
The Erl-king with crown and cape?"

“My father, my father, and dost thou not hear

The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?”

“My father, my father, he seizes me fast,

For surely the Erl-King has hurt me at last.”
........

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,

He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child;

he reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,

The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

I never liked the song as I find it oppressive with fear and sadness, in spite of the beautiful music. There are many unanswered questions about the poem itself and different interpretations in the literature. I developed my thoughts about it from a paediatrician's point of view last November when I listened to the song in Schubert's birth house in Vienna, having just read his biography. Schubert was one of the only four surviving children out of fourteen (!) births of his mother. What a tremendously high mortality rate for children at that time! (Schubert himself only lived to his beginning 30's.) Being there in this house where the Schubert family had lived and worked (his father ran a school in the same house) and listening to this ballad about the fears of a sick child before his tragic death suddenly brought home to me how precarious the life of a child was 200 years ago.

Not long thereafter I had a family of three generations in my consultation room. The grandfather accompanied his daughter bringing the ill child to the practice. Before they left, the discussion about immunizations somehow became lively. The grandfather was full of anxieties from his times when serious illness was often life threatening for children. Vaccinations were to him undoubtedly a great savior of modern medicine. To the daughter, in this day and age when children's mortality is fortunately not any more imminent except in hospitals whereas side effects from chemical drugs a real concern, the necessity of vaccinations has become questionable.

I tried to explain to both father and daughter that they have different points of view because the issues and concerns about children's health of their generation are so very different.

Next time, we shall discuss on this hot topic, the vaccinations.