THERE was an old Irish jig - or was it a reel? - the chorus of which went as follows:
Some say the divil's dead, Some say he's hardly
Some say the divil's dead
And buried in Killarney.
I was reminded of it when I noticed that tomorrow, May 11th, is the 277th anniversary of the birth in 1720 of Baron Munchausen, the German mercenary soldier who travelled widely and had many picaresqoe adventures and whose fame rests mainly on his reputation as the world's champion liar.
In one of his more famous yarns, for example, Munchausen described a journey by coach in freezing weather, in course (if which the postillion blew his horn, but 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.
Munchausen's memory, however, might well have faded quickly had not an acquaintance, one Rudolph Erich Raspe, committed everything to paper. In 1785, Raspe published Baron Munchausen's Narratives of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, and not an iota of hyperbole was lost in the retelling.
Raspe was a bit of a divilish rogue himself. Born in Hanover in 1737, he landed in 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 settling in Killarney in 1794 to take charge of the copper mines which were operating at the 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.