The German adventurer Karl Friedrich Heironymus, Freiherr von Munchausen, better remembered as Baron Munchausen, was born 280 years ago today, in 1720. He travelled widely, fought in the Russian campaign against the Turks, and his main claim to fame was as a champion liar.
The Baron's adventures are related by Rudolph Raspe in a book published in 1785 called Baron Munchausen's Narratives of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, and not an iota of hyperbole was lost in the retelling. The yarns include one about a horse cut in two and then sewn together, good as new, as well as one about a stag, shot with a cherry-stone, that was found afterwards with a cherry-tree growing from its forehead.
Another of the Baron's stories had to do with freezing weather. It was believed in days gone by that in very cold conditions sounds were sometimes frozen to inaudibility as soon as they were issued, only to be heard again as soon as the thermometer climbed above a certain level. Munchausen adapts this theory to a journey by coach in freezing conditions, in the course of which the postillion blew his horn. Because of the extreme cold, it was impossible for the instrument to issue any sound.
Afterwards, the party relaxed in a hostelry: "The postillion hung his horn and great-coat on a peg and sat down near the kitchen fire to forget and drown his cares. Suddenly we heard TERENG! TERENG, TENG TENG! We looked around and found the reason why. The postillion had been unable to sound his horn: his tunes had been frozen, and came out now by thawing, so that the honest fellow entertained us for some time with a variety of tunes without ever going near the instrument."
The biographer, Raspe, was something of a rogue himself. Born in Hanover in 1737, he got into trouble with the Landgraf of Hesse when he stole the latter's jewels. Fleeing to England, Raspe wrote the Munchausen book, which provided temporary funds, but then he became involved in a mining swindle in Scotland, and several others, before finally, in 1794, settling in Ireland, in Killarney, to take charge of the copper mines that were operating at that time.
Goodness knows what mischief Raspe might have perpetrated on the good citizenry of Killarney had not a typhoid epidemic taken him the following year. His death is recorded in the Parish Register of St Mary's Church of Ireland, and he is buried in an unmarked grave in the Killeaghy Burial Ground, opposite Muckross Friary on the outskirts of the town.