"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood

This is just all the chapters put together into one upload. If you've been following along the whole time, there is nothing new to hear here. Although you can find extensive additional notes and annotations in the individual chapter uploads if you need some help with some of the more obscure terminology or references.

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0:00:00 Chapter 1
0:40:01 Chapter 2
0:47:46 Chapter 3
0:57:58 Chapter 4
1:56:22 Chapter 5

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This story was published in 1907, so we're talking pre-WW1 Austro-Hungarian Empire here. I would be quite shocked if this area of swampland described in this story still exists, or at least exists as described herein. Do we have anybody in the audience with recent personal experience of the Danube between Bratislava and Budapest? To be sure, the descriptions here in this chapter are absolutely amazing! I'd love to know if there is any stretch of the river still anything remotely like this?

As this is the Austro-Hungarian Empire period, the names are mostly in German, where today they are no longer known by their German names, so:

Preßburg: the German name for Bratislava
Pozsóny: the Hungarian name for Bratislava

Komorn is the German name for what is today the Hungarian city of Komárom. This helps us to better pin down their location, being north of Komárom, but south of Bratislava.

Gran is the German name for what is today the Hungarian city of Esztergom. Gran is 50km east of Komorn.

When you look on google maps between Bratislava and Komárom the Danube does look to get all weird and complex, which comports with what is suggested in this story. Although it also looks a lot more developed than it would have been 120 years ago.

12 kph = 7.5 mph
100 kilometers = 62 miles

50 miles = 80 kilometers

Undine: a water nymph

paling: a pale (i.e. picket) for a fence

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The pictures used are:

Ch 1: the Danube River near Bratislava - Slovakia, by ferobanjo, used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/).

Ch 2: an illustration by Lawrence Sterne Stevens. The text with the image suggests chapter 1, but the imagery is clearly chapter 2.

Ch 3: an illustration by Lawrence Sterne Stevens for the story.

Ch 4: "Landscape with Willows and Sun Shining Through the Clouds" (1884) by Vincent van Gogh.

Ch 5: "Lower Danube wetlands, shot from a moving train on the way to the Romanian seaside" by Gabriel (https://www.flickr.com/photos/8628950@N06/5885324176) used here under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Sure, it's Romania, not Hungary, but I wanted a shot of the Danube looking more pleasant rather than creepy, and this is what I found.

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11438/pg11438-images.html