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    Otto of the Silver Hand
    Otto of the Silver Hand
    Otto of the Silver Hand
    Ebook156 pages2 hours

    Otto of the Silver Hand

    By Howard Pyle

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    A rich and engrossing thread of Romance runs through this tale of the motherless son of a valiant robber baron of Medieval Germany. Young Otto, born into a warring household in an age when lawless chiefs were constantly fighting each other or despoiling the caravans of the merchant burghers, is raised in a monastery only to return to his family's domain and become painfully involved in the blood feud between his father and the rival house of Trutz-Drachen.
    The narrative is told with Howard Pyle's consummate skill and illustrated with some of the most enchanting sketches ever done for a book of this type. Like the same author's version of The Story of King Arthur and His Knights and his collection of original stories known as The Wonder Clock, this book has become a legend, a modern story with the feel and sound of an ancient tale. It is a reading adventure that youngsters will not soon forget.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJul 21, 2014
    ISBN9780486121598
    Author

    Howard Pyle

    Howard Pyle (1853-1911) was a celebrated artist, author, and teacher -- and a primary figure in the history of children's literature. Not only did he guide and inspire such artistic talents as N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, and Jessie Willcox Smith, but he was also a master storyteller in his own right. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Pepper & Salt, and The Wonder Clock are among the many stories and folktales that he wrote and illustrated.

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    Reviews for Otto of the Silver Hand

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      A Medieval story about a young boy caught up in a murderous feud after being raised in a monastery. It all about the pictures really. They are something, the knights and men at arms in particular. The older women seem to mix later 14th &15th cent style elements and the final young maid looks to be wearing an artistic reform tea gown.
    • 3/5
      In the movie Rosemary's Baby (one of my favorite movies of all time), the character Hutch is described as being an author of "boys' adventure stories." I never knew what that meant, but it's possible that Otto of the Silver Hand might be a boys' adventure story. There's honor and revenge and violence (thankfully without gore). It reminded me of the old movies made under the "Code" back in the day in its fairly simple presentation of good and evil. Even the dude who's finally trying to do right can't have a happy ending because he's done so much bad in the past. Not that I wanted things to be hunky-dory for him, but I would prefer a little more of a reward for having a nuanced emotional life and an evolving sense of morality. Good comes only to the unambiguously and consistently good, which doesn't give much hope to the rest of us. Of course, the good have some pretty nasty things happen to them, too, so there's not a lot of hope for anyone in this book, really. Which now that I think of it, is a little odd for a children's story. I might have to bump my rating up a star just for that.
    • 4/5
      The Artwork in this book is amazing. The story is interesting and it does have a bit of a sad ending. It does make one think about the cost of violence and peace.
    • 3/5
      This was a book that impressed me as a child --I created a piano piece based on the scene when the hero's father's castle is destroyed which I called "the Fall of Drachenhausen" which involved a lot of crashing chords and one repeated note representing the ringing of the bell. The story itself I found grim, while the hero's hand being cut off while he was a child, and his nobly renouncing vengeance later, though no doubt a good morally lesson, was emotionally unsatisfying.
    • 3/5
      There are no castles like Howard Pyle's castles. The illustrations are great, but the rest of the book is a late childhood tale. The original copyright was in 1888, however.
    • 2/5
      This is a fairly old-fashioned, straight-forward adventure tale for children set in medieval Germany and told through a nineteenth-century romance filter. Otto is a snivelling weakling, monks are ultra-wise holy men, and emotions are high-running and free-flowing. Women are invisible, except when they faithfully wait for their hero to come back and marry them (offscreen, of course), or when they die in childbirth (also offscreen).The parts that do not focus on Otto do serve up some pretty solid adventuring, though, and at a little over one hundred pages this is a very quick read. I guess you could do worse if you want to know what a late nineteenth-century children's book feels like.
    • 2/5
      I didn't really enjoy this as much as I thought I would. Some exciting parts, but Otto is really a wuss.
    • 3/5
      This is a tale set in Medieval Germany. Otto is the son of a robber baron, whose mother dies soon after childbirth. Since the keep of a robber baron is unsuitable for an infant, Otto is sent to a monestary for the first twelve years of his life. Then his father comes to take the boy home and introduce him to the life of a baron and knight. All in all, the story is nice enough, but there's nothing really compelling about it. In fact, Otto himself is rather uninspiring. A pity, too, since you could probably weave a nice tale about a gentle and gracious soul encountering a rough and tumble world. Oh, well. Were I needing some waiting room material, however, this is a book I'd be glad to have on hand. (er, no pun intended...)--J.

    Book preview

    Otto of the Silver Hand - Howard Pyle

    I.

    The Dragon’s House.

    UP from the gray rocks, rising sheer and bald and bare, stood the walls and towers of Castle Drachenhausen. A great gate-way, with a heavy iron-pointed portcullis hanging suspended in the dim arch above, yawned blackly upon the bascule or falling drawbridge that spanned a chasm between the blank stone walls and the roadway that ran winding down the steep rocky slope to the little valley just beneath. There in the lap of the hills around stood clustered the wretched straw-thatched huts of the peasants belonging to the castle—miserable serfs who, half timid, half fierce, tilled their poor patches of ground, wrenching from the hard soil barely enough to keep body and soul together. Among those vile hovels played the little children like foxes about their dens, their wild, fierce eyes peering out from under a mat of tangled yellow hair.

    Beyond these squalid huts lay the rushing, foaming river, spanned by a high, rude, stone bridge where the road from the castle crossed it, and beyond the river stretched the great, black forest, within whose gloomy depths the savage wild beasts made their lair, and where in winter time the howling wolves coursed their flying prey across the moonlit snow and under the net-work of the black shadows from the naked boughs above.

    The watchman in the cold, windy bartizan or watch-tower that clung to the gray walls above the castle gateway, looked from his narrow window, where the wind piped and hummed, across the tree-tops that rolled in endless billows of green, over hill and over valley to the blue and distant slope of the Keiserberg, where, on the mountain side, glimmered far away the walls of Castle Trutz-Drachen.

    Within the massive stone walls through which the gaping gateway led, three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that even the yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness, looked down, with row upon row of windows, upon three sides of the bleak, stone courtyard. Back of and above them clustered a jumble of other buildings, tower and turret, one high-peaked roof overtopping another.

    THERE THEY SAT, JUST AS LITTLE CHILDREN IN THE TOWN MIGHT SIT UPON THEIR FATHER’S DOOR-STEP.

    The great house in the centre was the Baron’s Hall, the part to the left was called the Roderhausen; between the two stood a huge square pile, rising dizzily up into the clear air high above the rest—the great Melchior Tower.

    At the top clustered a jumble of buildings hanging high aloft in the windy space; a crooked wooden belfry, a tall, narrow watch-tower, and a rude wooden house that clung partly to the roof of the great tower and partly to the walls.

    From the chimney of this crazy hut a thin thread of smoke would now and then rise into the air, for there were folk living far up in that empty, airy desert, and oftentimes wild, uncouth little children were seen playing on the edge of the dizzy height, or sitting with their bare legs hanging down over the sheer depths, as they gazed below at what was going on in the court-yard. There they sat, just as little children in the town might sit upon their father’s door-step; and as the sparrows might fly around the feet of the little town children, so the circling flocks of rooks and daws flew around the feet of these air-born creatures.

    It was Schwartz Carl and his wife and little ones who lived far up there in the Melchior Tower, for it overlooked the top of the hill behind the castle and so down into the valley upon the further side. There, day after day, Schwartz Carl kept watch upon the gray road that ran like a ribbon through the valley, from the rich town of Gruenstaldt to the rich town of Staffenburgen, where passed merchant caravans from the one to the other—for the lord of Drachenhausen was a robber baron.

    Dong ! Dong ! The great alarm bell would suddenly ring out from the belfry high up upon the Melchior Tower. Dong! Dong ! Till the rooks and daws whirled clamoring and screaming. Dong! Dong! Till the fierce wolfhounds in the rocky kennels behind the castle stables howled dismally in answer. Dong ! Dong !—Dong ! Dong !

    Then would follow a great noise and uproar and hurry in the castle court-yard below; men shouting and calling to one another, the ringing of armor, and the clatter of horses’ hoofs upon the hard stone. With the creaking and groaning of the windlass the iron-pointed portcullis would be slowly raised, and with a clank and rattle and clash of iron chains the drawbridge would fall crashing. Then over it would thunder horse and man, clattering away down the winding, stony pathway, until the great forest would swallow them, and they would be gone.

    Then for a while peace would fall upon the castle courtyard, the cock would crow, the cook would scold a lazy maid, and Gretchen, leaning out of a window, would sing a snatch of a song, just as though it were a peaceful farm-house, instead of a den of robbers.

    Maybe it would be evening before the men would return once more. Perhaps one would have a bloody cloth bound about his head, perhaps one would carry his arm in a sling; perhaps one—maybe more than one—would be left behind, never to return again, and soon forgotten by all excepting some poor woman who would weep silently in the loneliness of her daily work.

    Nearly always the adventurers would bring back with them pack-horses laden with bales of goods. Sometimes, besides these, they would return with a poor soul, his hands tied behind his back and his feet beneath the horse’s body, his fur cloak and his flat cap wofully awry. A while he would disappear in some gloomy cell of the dungeon-keep, until an envoy would come from the town with a fat purse, when his ransom would be paid, the dungeon would disgorge him, and he would be allowed to go upon his way again.

    One man always rode beside Baron Conrad in his expeditions and adventures—a short, deep-chested, broad-shouldered man, with sinewy arms so long that when he stood his hands hung nearly to his knees.

    His coarse, close-clipped hair came so low upon his brow that only a strip of forehead showed between it and his bushy, black eyebrows. One eye was blind; the other twinkled and gleamed like a spark under the penthouse of his brows. Many folk said that the one-eyed Hans had drunk beer with the Hill-man, who had given him the strength of ten, for he could bend an iron spit like a hazel twig, and could lift a barrel of wine from the floor to his head as easily as though it were a basket of eggs.

    As for the one-eyed Hans he never said that he had not drunk beer with the Hill-man, for he liked the credit that such reports gave him with the other folk. And so, like a half savage mastiff, faithful to death to his master, but to him alone, he went his sullen way and lived his sullen life within the castle walls, half respected, half feared by the other inmates, for it was dangerous trifling with the one-eyed Hans.

    II.

    How the Baron went Forth to Shear.

    BARON CONRAD and Baroness Matilda sat together at their morning meal; below their raised seats stretched the long, heavy wooden table, loaded with coarse food—black bread, boiled cabbage, bacon, eggs, a great chine from a wild boar, sausages, such as we eat nowadays, and flagons and jars of beer and wine. Along the board sat ranged in the order of the household the followers and retainers. Four or five slatternly women and girls served the others as they fed noisily at the table, moving here and there behind the men with wooden or pewter dishes of food, now and then laughing at the jests that passed or joining in the talk. A huge fire blazed and crackled and roared in the great open fireplace, before which were stretched two fierce, shaggy, wolfish-looking hounds. Outside, the rain beat upon the roof or ran trickling from the eaves, and every now and then a chill draught of wind would breathe through the open windows of the great black dining-hall and set the fire roaring.

    Along the dull-gray wall of stone hung pieces of armor, and swords

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