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Taking Reinhard's solemn asseveration in conjunction with the ascertained facts of Raspe's career, his undoubted acquaintance with the Baron Munchausen of real life and the first appearance of the work in 1785, when Raspe was certainly in England, there seems to be little difficulty in accepting his authorship as a positive fact.
The little regard which this impudent knave has to veracity makes me sometimes apprehensive that my real facts may fall under suspicion, by being found in company with his inventions. By Rodolph Eric Raspe
Henry Raspe, Landgrave of Thuringia, owed his election almost exclusively to the great prelates of the Rhine; but he died the next year and, although another King was put forward in the person of William Count of Holland, a young man of twenty, he made no progress so long as Frederick lived.
The merit of Munchausen, as the adult reader will readily perceive, does not reside in its literary style, for Raspe is no exception to the rule that a man never has a style worthy of the name in a language that he did not prattle in.
Reinhard, in an answer to an attack made upon his hero for bringing out Munchausen as a pot-boiler in German and English simultaneously, definitely stated in the Berlin Gesellschafters of November 1824, that the real author of the original work was that disreputable genius, Rudolph Erich Raspe, and that the German work was merely a free translation made by Buerger from the fifth edition of the English work.
As for Raspe, he betook himself to a remote part of the United Kingdom, and had commenced some mining operations in country Donegal, when he was carried off by scarlet fever at Muckross in 1794. Such in brief outline was the career of Rudolph Erich Raspe, scholar, swindler, and undoubted creator of Baron Munchausen.
The sixth book, "The Travels of Baron Munchausen," is said to have been written by a German named Raspé; but it is just as well not to believe this statement too positively, for it is quite possible that Raspé had nothing to do with the book. Learned scholars have held profound discussions on the source of the stories.
The two quarto volumes are a monument of patient and highly skilled industry, and they still fetch high prices. The elaborate introduction prefixed to the work was dated from Edinburgh, April 16, 1790. This laborious task completed, Raspe lost no time in applying himself with renewed energy to mineralogical work.
William West the bookseller and numerous followers have stated that Munchausen owed its first origin to Bruce's Travels, and was written for the purpose of burlesquing that unfairly treated work. A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1856 calls the book the joint production of Buerger and Raspe.
He sewed them up with sprigs and young shoots of laurels that were at hand; the wound healed, and, what could not have happened but to so glorious a horse, the sprigs took root in his body, grew up, and formed a bower over me; so that afterwards I could go upon many other expeditions in the shade of my own and my horse's laurels. By Rodolph Eric Raspe Success was not always with me.
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