Crowbone’s stories of Dyl U’la-Spegill are my take on the origins of the later tales of the trickster Till Eulenspiegel, or Dyl Ulenspegl — the name translates, roughly, as ‘mysterious owl-mirror’ — although the original Low German is believed to be
Till Eulenspiegel’s social satire tales are almost certainly older than the tradition that has him born in 1300. Since the same tradition has him dying in the sixteenth century, I have no trouble assigning him to an altogether darker time, before his tales were sanitised for children and turned into a tone poem by Richard Strauss in the nineteenth century, thus bringing him to the attention of an English-speaking culture.
As ever, this tale is best told round a fire against the closing dark. Any mistakes or omissions are my own and should not spoil the tale.
