This article examines the emergence of the Golem legend associated with the Maharal of Prague in the first half of the nineteenth century, with specific attention to the innovations found in two little-known versions by important Jewish literary figures of the era: the Bohemian-born Viennese poet and editor Ludwig Frankl and the Danish writer Meir Aaron Goldschmidt. These versions, it is argued, reveal several crucial mechanisms that help explain the shift from a Golem tale distributed among various individual places and rabbis, to one with little or no specificity at all, and finally to the Prague version that dominates the subsequent literary and artistic manifestations of the legend. The proliferation of non-Jewish renditions of the legend in the first quarter of the century, starting with the folklorist Jakob Grimm’s brief report in 1808, provides a context for several Jewish reconfigurations of the material around the centrality of Prague and its most famous rabbi, the Maharal. By 1847, the transition is complete with the near-canonical version published by Leopold Weisel in the popular and influential anthology of Bohemian Jewish tales, Sippurim. But in the decade leading up to Weisel’s publication, Frankl and Goldschmidt both produce intricate and sophisticated versions that offer a glimpse into the motifs and techniques engaged by the Jewish literary imagination of the period.

“The Concept of Byrony” examines Kierkegaard’s lyrical relation to Lord Byron. As an alternative to models of German influence, this paper discusses Kierkegaard’s quotations of Byron’s poetry and allusions to the poet himself. The paper establishes a poetical relationship between the two writers in terms of irony and metaphor. Kierkegaard’s sense of irony is creative but not unique; its roots can be located in earlier writings of the Danish Golden Age. Of particular importance is the development of irony in the works of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the young writers that surrounded him, including the young Kierkegaard himself. It was in Heiberg’s salon where Byron seems to have first stepped into the Danish literary landscape. For Kierkegaard and Danish letters in general, the reception and celebrity-status of Byron perhaps play a more important role than his verse, although another acolyte of Heiberg’s, Frederik Paludan-Müller, wrote poetry that strongly illustrates Byron’s poetical influence in Danish verse. The paper also examines the Byronic notion of the empty sign, a metaphor that points to its own meaninglessness as a further poetic relationship. Moreover, the Byronic hero as a model for a lived life provided Kierkegaard with a powerful public mask that accompanied him to his last days. I term this mask and masquerade Byrony. In its conclusion the paper marks a significant similarity between the death-scenes and epitaphs of these major nineteenth-century European writers.

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