Rudolf Erich Raspe

Rudolf Erich Raspe (born 1737, Hannover, Hanover [Germany]—died 1794, Muckross, County Kerry, Ireland) was a German scholar and adventurer best remembered as the author of the popular tall tales The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

After having studied natural sciences and philology at Göttingen and Leipzig, Raspe worked in several university libraries before being appointed librarian and custodian of the Landgraf’s collection of gems and coins at Kassel in 1767. One of the first to interest himself in Ossian, the supposed author of epic poetry “discovered” in Scotland by James Macpherson, and in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection of old ballads and poems first published in England in 1765, Raspe acquired a scholarly reputation and was elected to the Royal Society in 1769. In 1775, however, he was charged with stealing from the Landgraf’s gem collection and had to flee to England to escape arrest. Becoming involved in a swindle concerned with mining in Scotland, he fled to Ireland in 1791, where he later died.

While living in England, Raspe published anonymously a collection of humorous and highly coloured stories as related by the braggart Baron Münchhausen (Münchausen) on his travels to Russia. Raspe had known the baron in Göttingen, but few of the tales were actually derived from him. In 1786 and again in 1788, the poet Gottfried August Bürger translated into German and considerably enlarged Raspe’s tales. Bürger’s translations served to introduce Münchhausen to world literature, and Raspe’s authorship of the original was not revealed until 1847 by Heinrich Döring in his biography of Bürger.