Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  7 The Popish Plot was a purported plot by Jesuits in 1678 to assassinate King Charles II so that his Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York (later King James II), could ascend to the throne. The plot was a fabrication of a fanatical Anglican clergyman, Titus Oates, and resulted in the execution of at least thirty-five innocent people, most of them Roman Catholics.

  8 See “Lost Hearts,” n. 3.

  9 See “The Mezzotint,” n. 11.

  10 The Italian town of Tivoli was founded by the Romans as Tibur. A circular temple of the Sibyl, now in ruins, dates to at least the first century C.E.

  11 There are more than one hundred places in Ireland named Kilmore. MRJ is probably referring to Kilmore in county Armagh in what is now Northern Ireland, the site of an important cathedral of the Church of Ireland. The Bishop of Kilmore in 1754 was Joseph Story (d. 1757).

  12 There are two ancient writers named Polyaenus. Polyaenus of Lampsacus (d. 271? B.C.E.) was one of the early disciples of the philosopher Epicurus; his works survive only in fragments. MRJ is probably referring to Polyaenus, a Macedonian rhetorician of the second century C.E. who wrote Strategemata (manual of military strategy) in eight books. It was first edited in 1549 by Justus Vulteius. Other editions followed in 1690, 1756, 1809, and 1887 (Teubner text).

  13 Job 2:21 (“but” for “and” in KJV).

  NUMBER 13

  “Number 13” was first published in GSA and reprinted in CGS. In the preface to CGS (ix) MRJ dates the story to 1899. That was the year of his first visit to Scandinavia, as MRJ, James McBryde, and Will Stone traveled through Denmark and southern Sweden. But MRJ did not visit Viborg, the setting of the tale, until 1900, so perhaps he was in error as to the date of composition. In this ingenious tale, the “ghost” is not that of a person, but of a room.

  1 Viborg is a city in Viborg province in central Denmark. Its origins can be traced to before 800 C.E. It was declared a bishopric in 1060. The “new” cathedral is of the Roman style, and was built in 1864-76 over the remains of the original cathedral, which was begun c. 1130 and completed c. 1180; only the crypts of this older cathedral remain. Jutland (Juylland) is the name of the main peninsula of Denmark.

  2 Hald is a small region southwest of Viborg and one of the most distinctive natural preserves in Denmark.

  3 The exact Danish name is Erik Klipping. The murder took place in a barn in Finderup (a town west of Viborg), where the king and his men were resting for the night. It is true that Marsk Stig Andersen was, along with others, convicted for the murder, but to this day it is debated whether he was really involved or just a scapegoat for larger political figures of the time.

  4 Both the Hotel Preisler and the Hotel Phoenix are (or were) actual hotels in Viborg. The latter was a fine, luxurious hotel catering to the respectable middle classes of the time.

  5 A sognekirke is a parish church. A raadhuus is the city hall.

  6 The rigsarkiv is the record office. MRJ probably refers to the Landsarkivet for Nørrejylland, built in 1891 and extensively expanded in 1962. Denmark converted to Lutheranism in 1536. Viborg played a central role in the religious debates of the period.

  7 I.e., “the First Book of Moses [Genesis], chapter 22,” recounting Abraham’s offer to God to sacrifice his son, Isaac.

  8 Jørgen Friis (1493?-1547) was only twenty-eight years old when he was appointed bishop in 1521.

  9 A Troldmand (literally, “troll-man”) is a sorcerer, magician, or wizard.

  10 There was in fact a Rasmus Nielsen (1809-1894) who was a Danish professor of philosophy, but it does not seem likely that MRJ is referring to him.

  11 In this sense, a terrier is “A book in which the lands of a private person, or of a corporation civil or ecclesiastical, are described by their site, boundaries, acreage, etc.” (OED).

  12 A chambermaid.

  13 “. . . and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names and blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, and having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication” (Revelation 17:3-4). A tendentious Protestant interpretation of Scripture as referring to the Roman Catholic church.

  14 Baekkelund is unidentified.

  15 The village of Silkeborg began developing in the 1850s, but it was not until 1900 that it was officially deemed a town.

  16 Emily St. Aubert is the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). She is frequently given to breaking forth in verse at critical moments in the narrative. The specific reference is to the beginning of ch. 7: “and while she leaned on her window . . . her ideas arranged themselves in the following lines:” (there follows the poem entitled “The First Hour of Morning”).

  17 “Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.” Psalm 150:6 (Vulgate).

  18 The comment probably refers to the fact that Denmark had on numerous occasions been at war with Germany, so that Germans would be hated and feared by many Danes. In 1864 Denmark lost a major battle to the German army, and for a time Viborg itself was occupied by 4,500 Prussian soldiers.

  19 [Hans] Sebald Beham (1500-1550) was a German engraver, etcher, painter, and designer of woodcuts. His illustrations chiefly focus on scenes from the Bible or classical antiquity.

  20 Daniel Salthenius (1701-1750) was a professor of Hebrew at the Lutheran University of Königsberg in Prussia. In MRJ’s visit’s to Sweden in 1901, he had come upon “two contracts with the devil written (and signed in blood) in 1718 by Daniel Salthenius who was condemned to death for writing them” (letter to his parents, 18 August 1901; cited in Cox1, 110).

  COUNT MAGNUS

  The story was first published in GSA and reprinted in CGS. The Swedish topographical background was largely derived from MRJ’s visits to Sweden in 1899 and 1901. It was apparently written in 1901 or 1902. In a brilliant paper, Rosemary Pardoe (see Further Reading) has investigated MRJ’s use of the actual Swedish family whose name he used in the story. There was a Count Magnus de la Gardie (1622- 1686), a nobleman in the court of Queen Christina; but Count Magnus’s dwelling, Råbäck, is probably based upon Ulriksdal, an estate outside Stockholm, occupied by Ulrika Eleonora (1688-1741), sister of King Charles XII of Sweden and briefly Queen of Sweden (1719- 20). She is mentioned in the story. Magnus de la Gardie owned Ulriksdal for a time in the seventeenth century. The name of the narrator may be an allusion to Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall (1751- 1831), a British historian and member of Parliament, and author of Cursory Remarks Made in a Tour through Some of the Northern Parts of Europe, Particularly Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Petersburgh (1775). Richard Ward (see Further Reading) makes a sound case for the influence of the story upon H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927).

  FURTHER READING

  Rosemary Pardoe, “Who Was Count Magnus? Notes towards an Identification,” Ghosts & Scholars No. 33 (2001): 50-53.

  Rosemary Pardoe and Jane Nicholls, “The Black Pilgrimage,” Ghosts & Scholars No. 26 (1998): 48-54. Rpt. in PT 601-8.

  Richard Ward, “In Search of the Dread Ancestor: M. R. James’s ‘Count Magnus’ and Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” Studies in Weird Fiction No. 36 (Spring 1997): 14-17.1 Horace Marryat (1818-1887), A Residence in Jutland, the Danish Isles, and Copenhagen (London: John Murray, 1860; 2 vols.).

  2 The Pantechnicon was an immense storage warehouse built in 1830 on Motcomb Street in southwest London. It was almost entirely destroyed by fire on 13 February 1874.

  3 MRJ refers to Erik Jönsson, Count Dalhberg (1625-1703), Suecia antiqua et hodierna (1691-1715; 3 vols.), a collection of drawings by Dahlberg and others representing towns, palaces, and antiquities in Sweden. An engraving of the estate of Ulriksdal (see introductory note) is included in this volume.

  4 I.e., Skåre, a city in Vormlands Lan province in southern Sweden, five miles northwest of Karlstad.

  5 Most of these titles are eithe
r fictitious or unidentified. The Turba Philosophorum (“Assembly of Philosophers”) is an alchemical work in Latin, apparently derived from an Arabic work of c. 900. It exists in three different versions, one of them first published in Auriferae artis [volumina] (1572) and later in Guglielmo Grataroli’s Turba Philosophorum (1613). This version was translated into English by A. E. Waite in 1896.

  6 Chorazin was a city in Galilee rebuked by Jesus because it refused to accept his message even though he had performed miracles there: “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! . . . for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matthew 11:21).

  7 The allusion is to such passages as Ephesians 2:2: “Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air” (i.e., Satan).

  8 This was an actual belief found in a number of early medieval Christian writings. Rosemary Pardoe and Jane Nicholls (see Further Reading) identify the first such reference as occurring in the Revelation of the Pseudo-Methodius, an apocalyptic tract of the late seventh century C.E.

  9 Belchamp St. Paul is a town in Essex, two miles southeast of Clare (Suffolk).

  “OH, WHISTLE, AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD”

  This story was first published in GSA and reprinted in CGS. It was apparently written in 1903; at any rate, it was read at a Christmas gathering at King’s College in that year (see PT, 95). The title derives from the first line of an untitled song (1793) by Robert Burns (“O, whistle, and I’ll come to ye, my lad” in Burns). It contains perhaps the most distinctive “ghost” in MRJ’s corpus, which may have derived from a dream. In the late and apparently autobiographical tale “A Vignette” (published posthumously in the London Mercury, November 1936), MRJ writes of a creature he has seen in a dream: “It was not monstrous, not pale, fleshless, spectral. Malevolent I thought and think it was; at any rate the eyes were large and open and fixed. It was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows.” A somewhat similar entity is featured in “The Uncommon Prayer-Book” (in WC and CGS), which speaks of a roll of white flannel that “had a kind of a face in the upper end of it.

  FURTHER READING

  Jacqueline Simpson, “The Riddle of the Whistle,” Ghosts & Scholars No. 24 (1997): 54-55.

  ———, “The Whistle Again,” Ghosts & Scholars No. 30 (2000): 26-27.1 MRJ’s coinage, presumably meaning “Professor of Reality” (onto-referring to existence in general or specific existing entities), or one who doubts the existence of spirits or of the supernatural. St. James’s College is fictitious.

  2 Burnstow (fictitious) is identified by MRJ (CGS, viii) as stand-in for Felixstowe, Suffolk, where MRJ’s friend Felix Cobbold lived. MRJ visited there in 1893 and 1897-98 (Cox2, 313).

  3 The Knights Templar were a military order founded in Palestine in 1119, during the Crusades, to protect pilgrims to holy sites in the region. A preceptory is an estate or manor supporting communities of the Knights Templar; there were twenty-three such preceptories in England.

  4 I.e., the Long Vacation, or summer vacation.

  5 In Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-48), Dr. Blimber is the proprietor of a school to which the young Paul Dombey is sent. Blimber, in ch. 12, never utters anything approaching the remark that MRJ’s character attributes to him, but he constantly expresses his disapproval at being interrupted while speaking during a dinner for the boys and the faculty.

  6 As Cox2 (313) notes, Disney refers to the Disney professor of archaeology at Cambridge.

  7 Literally, “of a wild nature,” the customary Latin expression for a wild beast.

  8 Aldsey is fictitious.

  9 A rather loose quotation from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678-84): “Then I saw in my Dream, that . . . poor Christian was hard put to it, for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul Fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon” (Part 1). It is later said of Apollyon that “he was cloathed with scales like a Fish (and they were his pride) he had Wings like a Dragon, feet like a Bear, and out of his belly came Fire and Smoak, and his mouth was the mouth of a Lion.” MRJ reports that Ottiwell Charles Waterfield, the headmaster at Temple Grove when MRJ was there (1873-76), would read The Pilgrim’s Progress to the boys on Sunday (E&K, 10-11).

  10 In Daniel 5:1-30, the prophet Daniel deciphers the words (“mene mene tekel upharsin”) that mysteriously appear on the wall of the palace of King Belshazzar of Babylon, correctly predicting Belshazzar’s death and the destruction of his kingdom.

  11 There has been considerable scholarly debate as to the significance of these words or letters. Perhaps the best conjecture is that it is the Latin phrase Fur, flabis, flebis (“Thief, you will blow, you will weep”), suggesting that Parkins (a “thief” in obtaining the whistle) will blow upon it and come to regret the act.

  12 An adaptation of Isaiah 63:1 (“Who is this that cometh from Edom?”), rendered in the Vulgate as Quis est iste qui venit de Edom?

  13 “Believe one who has experienced it,” a common Latin utterance.

  14 A bourdon is “The low undersong or accompaniment, which was sung while the leading voice sang a melody” (OED). The quotation has not been identified.

  15 A cleek is “A large hook or crook for catching hold of and pulling something; or for hanging articles on, or from a rafter, or the like” (OED).

  16 The Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle is, in the Anglican rite, on 21 December; in the Roman Catholic church, on 3 July.

  THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS

  This story, whose composition was dated by MRJ (CGS, ix) to the summer of 1904, was first published in GSA and reprinted in CGS. The German setting of the tale reflects MRJ’s work, in July 1904, on the stained glass in the chapel of Ashridge Park in Hertfordshire, the subject of a later pamphlet, Notes of Glass in Ashridge Chapel (1906), in which he writes: “All the glass seems to me to be cent. XVI . . . I imagine that all of it probably came from one Church, the Abbatial Church of Steinfeld in the Eifel district. This was founded as a Benedictine Abbey in 920 . . . after 177 years the Benedictines, grown lax, were turned out . . . in favour of the Premonstratensians” (cited in Cox2, 315). MRJ’s subsequent discussion indicates that he never actually visited Steinfeld Abbey. The cipher featured in the tale inevitably recalls Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and perhaps reflects MRJ’s avid reading of detective stories.

  FURTHER READING

  Nicholas Connell, “A Haunting Vision: M. R. James and the Ashridge Stained Glass,” Hertfordshire’s Past 49 (Autumn 2000): 2-7.1 The Eiffel (more properly, Eifel) is a region in northwest Germany. “Premonstratensian” refers to the Premonstratensian Canons or Norbertines, an order founded by St. Norbert (1080?-1134) at Prémontré, near Laon, France. The order followed the Rule of St. Augustine, which included abstension from meat among other austerities. It had become virtually extinct by the early nineteenth century. The title of the fictitious book Sertum Steinfeldense Norbertinum translates to “A Garland [Pertaining to] the Norbertine [Abbey at] Steinfeld.”

  2 Auro locus est in quo conflatur (“There is . . . a place for gold where they fine [i.e., melt] it”). Job 28:1.

  3 A conflation of two verses: Et habet in vestimento et in femore suo scriptum (“And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written”), Revelation 19:16; and Habens nomen scriptum quod nemo novit nisi ipse (“And he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself”), Revelation 19:12.

  4 Zechariah 3:9.

  5 Parsbury is fictitious.

  6 I.e., Coblentz (Cologne), Germany.

  7 A Turk’s head broom is a round long-handled broom or brush.

  8 MRJ refers to the Polygraphia (1518) of the German historian and theologian Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), one of the pioneering works of cryptography. Later editions (1606f.) use the title Steganographia.

  9 Gustavus Selenus (pseudonym of August II, duke
of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 1579-1666), Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae Libri IX (1624), which contains a paraphrase of Trithemius. MRJ has erroneously rendered the genitive on the title page (Gustavi Seleni).

  10 Sir Francis Bacon’s De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), a Latin translation and expansion of his earlier treatise, The Advancement of Learning (1605), is a landmark in intellectual history but has nothing to do with cryptography.

  11 “Let him who touches it beware.”

  12 From Psalm 113:13 (Vulgate) = 115:5 (KJV).

  13 There are several Eliezers in the Old Testament, but MRJ probably refers to Eliezer the Damascene, Abraham’s chief servant (Genesis 15:2-3). Rebekah was the daughter of Bethuen, Abraham’s nephew (Genesis 22:23), and wife of Isaac. Jacob was the son of Rebekah and Isaac and the twin brother of Esau (Genesis 25:26). In the district of Harran, Jacob lifted a stone covering the mouth of a well so that his cousin Rachel could give water to her sheep (Genesis 29:1-11). He later married her.

  A SCHOOL STORY

  “A School Story” was first published in MGSA. The tale was written for the King’s College Choir School. MRJ’s friend A. C. Benson records in his diary that he heard MRJ read the story on 28 December 1906 (see Cox2, 316-17). In the preface to CGS (viii) MRJ identifies the setting as Temple Grove, the preparatory school he attended in 1873-76.