The amber witch Author:Wilhelm Meinhold Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE AMBER WITCH. INTRODUCTION. The descent of our biographer cannot, on account of the beginning of his work being lost, be any longer determined with accu... more »racy. At all events, he appears not to have been a Pomeranian ; for at one time he speaks of Silesia, where he had been in his youth; then he mentions far-dispersed relatives, not only in Hamburg and Cologne, but even in Antwerp, and betrays principally by his Southern German language his foreign origin. I have remarked especially the expressions, such as eim for etnem; and the peculiar derivation of many adjectives, viz.: tanein from Tanne; seidin from Seide; a kind of dialect, which, as far as I know, has never been used in Pome- rania, but rather in Swabia. Yet at the period of the composition of his work, he must have already lived a long time in Pomerania, because he still more frequently intermixes low German expressions, (plait deutsche) in every respect, just as native Pomeranian writers of that time were also wont to do. As, according to his own statements on various occasions, he is of ancient and noble descent, it is probable that some further particulars may be found in the records of the nobles of the seventeenth century, respecting the family of the Schweidlers, and conse- jg quently also respecting his probable fatherland ; but I have searched in vain among all the sources accessible to me. for that name, and should therefore conjecture that our author, as has so frequently been done, has put off his title and changed his name on his becoming a pastor. But enough, I will not here venture on further conjectures. Our manuscript, in which the large number of six chapters are wanting, and which on the immediate foregoing leaves indisputably extended over the outbreak of the thirty years' war on the isla...« less