Hieroglyphic Tales — Edition Insights

Mock Scholarship and the Unreliable Editor

The preface establishes Walpole's editor as a figure of comic self-importance. He frets that the art of printing "will ere long be totally lost" and lists lost ancient arts such as "teaching elephants to dance on the slack rope" and "writing epic poems that any body would read after they had been published a month." This catalogue of absurdities undercuts the very seriousness he claims for his own work. The footnotes throughout the tales continue the game: in Tale IV, a note defends an apparent anachronism—a queen sitting in her mother's lap as an adult—by citing Grotius and Puffendorf on royal infancy. The note's pedantic tone mimics real scholarly apparatus while arguing for a patently ridiculous point. Walpole thus invites the reader to question not only the tales' content but the reliability of any editorial framing.

Absurdist Plots and Parodic Genealogy

The tales themselves revolve around preposterous events treated with deadpan seriousness. In Tale IV, the succession crisis of the kingdom of Kilkenny is resolved when the Archbishop of Tuum, mistaking a preserved foetus for a peach in brandy, eats the infant prince. The narrator reports this with the formulaic gravity of a chronicle: "This fortunate event put an end to the contest." The story then traces the Fitzpatrick lineage to the archbishop's son by his sister, a detail presented without comment. Walpole's parody targets both the genealogical obsessions of antiquarian history and the romance convention of miraculous births. The tale's notes reveal that it was written for Anne Liddel, Countess of Offory, and refer to real miscarriages, grounding the absurdity in specific personal circumstances—a characteristic blend of private joke and public satire.

Orientalist Framing and Its Subversion

Several tales adopt orientalist settings: Tale V is subtitled "A Chinese Fairy Tale" and features Prince Mi Li, his godmother the fairy Hih, and fortune-telling via tea-cup. Yet Walpole undercuts the exoticism by having the fairy's oracle deliberately designed "to perplex, not to inform," a meta-commentary on the obscurity of oracles in romance. The Chinese setting is a thin veneer for a satire of courtly intrigue and prophecy. Similarly, the epigraph from Crébillon's Le Sopha—a French orientalist novel—signals Walpole's engagement with a European literary fashion that he simultaneously exploits and mocks. The tales do not attempt authentic representation; instead, they use the trappings of the East as a stage for logical absurdities and scholarly parody, revealing the artificiality of the genre itself.

Readers approaching Hieroglyphic Tales should attend to the interplay between text and paratext: the preface, footnotes, and mock-scholarly apparatus are as much the work's substance as the tales themselves. Walpole's satire is erudite and allusive, drawing on real genealogies and contemporary literary fashions while gleefully violating every convention of narrative coherence. The tales reward attention to their specific targets—antiquarianism, romance, orientalist cliché—rather than a search for consistent plot or character. This edition preserves the original's archaic spellings, which reinforce the period flavor of Walpole's editorial persona.

Reading Walpole’s footnotes that mock their own authority, I remembered sitting in a library carrel, laughing at how The Sundering Flood — A Closer Reading quietly does the same—pretending to explain while only deepening the mystery. Both books feel like a friend telling a story, then winking. That wink stays with me, long after the tale fades.