This page Baron Münchhausen is part of the fantasy series.
Hieronymus Carl Friedrich von Münchhausen (11 May 1720 – 22 February 1797) was a German nobleman and a famous recounter of tall tales. He joined the Russian military and took part in two campaigns against the Ottoman Turks. Upon returning home, Münchhausen is said to have told a number of outrageously farfetched stories about his adventures.
Münchhausen's reputation as a storyteller has been exaggerated by writers, giving birth to a fully fictionalized literary character usually called simply Baron Munchausen.
According to the stories, as retold by others, the Baron's astounding feats included riding cannonballs, travelling to the Moon, and escaping from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair.
Münchausen syndrome and the Münchhausen trilemma are named after him.
The fictionalization of Münchhausen began in 1781–1783, when seventeen tall tales attributed to him appeared in the eighth and ninth volumes of the Vademecum fur lustige Leute.
An English version was published in London in 1785, by Rudolf Erich Raspe, as Baron Munchhausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, also called The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. However, much of the humorous material in them is borrowed from other sources. Indeed, the Baron himself was not notable for immodesty within his profession and relative to his accomplishments, and Raspe's publication rather damaged his reputation. Most historians agree that Munchhausen disapproved of some of the more outrageous of the tall tales that Raspe's book attributed to him.
Some of it is said to be a spoof based upon James Bruce.
Münchhausen was an object of numerous works of art, but the final say to his visual image belongs to an edition of the book produced in 1862 and illustrated by the artist Gustave Doré, see Doré's caricature of Münchhausen .
In 1979 Mark Zakharov shot the Russian film, based on the play written by Grigori Gorin, The Very Same Munchhausen, relaying the story of the baron's life after the adventures portrayed in the book, particularly his struggle to prove himself sane. In the movie, baron Munchausen is portrayed as multi-dimensional, colorful, non-conformist man living in a gray, plain, dull and conformist society that ultimately tries to destroy him.
Terry Gilliam adapted the stories into the 1988 film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen [sic], shot in Belchite, Spain, and at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. The film starred John Neville as the Baron and nine-year-old Sarah Polley as Sally Salt. Supporting the Baron as his faithful crew were Eric Idle, Charles McKeown, Winston Dennis and Jack Purvis. The film also featured Uma Thurman, Oliver Reed, Jonathan Pryce, Sting and Robin Williams (credited as Ray D. Tutto).
Various shorts are also known to have been made about the baron's life, including Les Hallucinations de baron de Munchhausen and Les Aventures de baron de Munchhausen by George Méliès.
Additionally, the Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics episode "The Six Who Went Far" is clearly Munchausen's troupe, but the baron himself is omitted for obvious legal reasons .
In 1998 a multi-player storytelling/role-playing game entitled The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Münchhausen was produced by James Wallis of Hogshead Publishing.
Players of the role-playing game assume the role of a noble person and challenge one another to relate an improvised tale based on an opening line given by another player (for example: "Grand Poobah, please tell our assemblage about the time you singlehandedly defeated the entire Turkish army using only a plate of cheese and a corkscrew!"). Players are able to interject and introduce a limited number of complications to the tall tale at any time ("But, my dear Grand Poobah, is it not true that you have a horrible allergy to cork?"), and eventually all vote for the best storyteller. The game has several adaptations into drinking games.
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Baron Münchhausen" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
This page was last modified 20:48, 2 September 2014.