I was just reading Goethe and I was struck by how thematically, rhythmically, and structurally similar the two poems were. Both have similar meters as ballads, and a similar call and response structure about a child dying from a fantastic cause as they are questioned by their parent.
Goethe was an extraordinarily well-read polyglot and scholar. The oldest known published version of 'Lord Randall' is from 1629. Is there any evidence that Goethe might have been inspired by this earlier ballad?
I'm not seeing the similarity. Goethe may have heard - or seen a broadsheet version - of Lord Randall, and perhaps there was limited conscious or subliminal influence, but I am not seeing anything profound. The content has limited similarity in the dying words of someone whose life is slipping away, but that is too vague a baseline to see a connection.
Erlkönig describes an elf king who seeks to abduct the boy – a common enough fear in Germany at the time. Granted, the elf king can also be seen as a metaphor for death, but the power of the poem is this menacing idea of a supernatural creature stalking and eventually capturing the essence of the boy.
Lord Randall is about a man who slowly realizes he has been murdered by his lover with a poisoned meal.
Again, there is a shared baseline, but that doesn’t seem significant to me. What are you seeing here? Perhaps I’m missing something.