The Romantic Way

A literary journey through the heart of Switzerland

1. Introduction

For a number of years, I enjoyed the great privilege of living and working at the Ecole d’Humanité, a small international school in the heart of the Swiss Alps. Part of what I enjoyed about it was that, as a teacher of English, I had the opportunity to indulge my passion for literature on a daily basis, and part of it was that the Ecole resides in one of the world’s most breathtakingly picturesque mountain ranges. But these two cherished aspects of my Ecole experience—my involvement in literary instruction and my love of the school’s spectacular locale—were never distinct, never segregated, because the Ecole sits at one end of a literary traveller’s trail known as the Romantic Way. During the nineteenth-century boom in the Alpine tourism industry, more than a dozen of the most revered figures of world literature followed that trail from Interlaken through the towns of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald and onward into Meiringen in the Haslital, just beneath the spot on which the Ecole’s mountainside campus would later be built. Fortunately, regular Alpine hikes are a core part of the Ecole’s curriculum, and so it was that I sometimes found myself retracing the footsteps of these writers with a group of Ecole students in tow. For me, then, writing and walking became intertwined at the Ecole, and the following account of the writers who walked the Romantic Way has been born from that experience.

These notes are in no sense a reliable hiking guide, so anyone intending to follow the trail should be sure to purchase at least a 1:25,000 map of the area before setting off. This book is, rather, an attempt to affix words written long ago to a number of recognizable geographic and topographic features of the Berner Oberland. The dramatic landscapes linked together by the Romantic Way are beautifully, almost impossibly symmetrical, as if sculpted by a designer with an artistic sensibility. A lush valley stretches out at either end of the trail, each one sheltering a remarkable waterfall and buttressing an almighty glacier, and two parallel Alpine saddles—the Große Scheidegg and the Kleine Scheidegg—intercede between those two valleys and Grindelwald at the midpoint of the route. All of those features of the Romantic Way, and many more in addition to them, inspired eloquent remarks and powerful works of art by a number of men who wielded words to make a living, and the purpose of this book is to describe in simple terms a journey along the Romantic Way that attributes those words to those features in their order of appearance. My hope is that what I’ve written here will prove useful to those who wish to appreciate the literary legacy of the Romantic Way while following the trail, and that it will inspire those who have not yet walked the path to head for the hills and the wonders they contain.

2. Lauterbrunnen and the Lauterbrunnental

In 1968, the fantasy novelist JRR Tolkien wrote a letter to his son in which he reminisced on a journey through the Bernese Alps that he embarked upon as a schoolboy more than fifty years earlier. “I am... delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland,” he wrote, “and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me.” He recalled having travelled “on foot... mainly by mountain paths, to Lauterbrunnen and so to Mürren and eventually to the head of the Lauterbrunnenthal in a wilderness of morains,” and then “eastward over the two Scheidegge to Grindelwald, with Eiger and Mönch on [my] right, and eventually reached Meiringen. I left the view of Jungfrau with deep regret: eternal snow, etched as it seemed against eternal sunshine, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue: the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams.” The Silvertine is one of the three peaks that rises above the dwarf city of Moria in Tolkien’s most celebrated fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien went on to freely acknowledge the extent to which his Alpine hike had contributed to the creation of the fantasy world known as Middle-Earth. In his novel The Hobbit, he confessed, the hero’s journey “from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures [in Switzerland] in 1911.”

Stepping off the train from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, hikers intending to walk the Romantic Way can set off along the path by turning left, heading up the main street of town, and following the signs that point in the direction of the Staubbach Fall and the Trümmelbach Falls. As you pass by the supermarket, the bank, the pubs, and the cafés, you'll leave behind the bustle of the town and you'll find yourself on rural roads bound for a small church with a cemetery nearby. The majestic Lauterbrunnental will open up in front of you, a broad valley enclosed on either side by soaring cliffs—cliffs over which some seventy-two different waterfalls flow on a regular basis—and with the awesome, snow-covered Jungfrau standing sentry at the southern end.

Far from being the first writer of romantic literature to take inspiration from this part of Switzerland, however, Tolkien arrived at the end of a long line of novelists and poets who had been similarly inspired for more than a century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had visited the area long before Tolkien, and he was followed in short order by English poets such as Lord Byron and William Wordsworth, and by a stream of American writers including James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Mark Twain. “A noble torrent foamed on our left while a mountain frowned on the right,” wrote Cooper of his visit to the Lauterbrunnental in 1828:

Everything seemed appropriate, and on an Alpine scale. In a few miles we came to a point where the valley, or gorge, for it was scarcely more, divided into two parts, one inclining still further to the south, and the other diverging eastwardly. Each had its torrent, and each its wildness and beauty, though the first evidently was of the most savage aspect.

Cooper was, at that time, fresh off the success of his most recent novel, The Prairie (1827), the final volume in the trilogy of “Leatherstocking Tales” with which he chronicled the life and adventures of Natty Bumppo, the American frontiersman introduced in The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Longfellow, conversely, was a young poet in the making, almost two decades away from publishing his masterpiece The Song of Hiawatha (1855) when he toured the area in 1836. He was no less taken with the scenery, however, and was moved to fictionalize his escapades in his novel Hyperion (1839). “The Valley of Lauterbrunnen was filled with a blue haze,” he wrote:

Far above, in the clear, cloudless heaven, the white forehead of the Jungfrau blushed at the last kiss of the departing sun... Fair is the valley of Lauterbrunnen with its green meadows and overhanging cliffs... In calm serenity the snowy mountains rise beyond. [The] frowning precipice looks down upon us; and, from the topmost cliff, the white pennon of the Brook of Dust shimmers and waves in the sunny air! ... Every dewdrop and raindrop had a whole heaven within it [in] the Valley of Lauterbrunnen,—the Valley of Fountains-Only.

“How beautiful the Jungfrau looks this morning!” exclaims Flemming, Longfellow’s protagonist and a thinly-veiled version of Longfellow himself. “And the mountains, beyond... the Monk and the Silver-horn, the Wetter-horn, the Schreck-horn, and the Schwarz-horn, all those sublime apostles of Nature, whose sermons are avalanches! Did you ever behold anything more grand?” No doubt that’s the question you'll be asking as you draw towards that “white pennon,” that “Brook of Dust,” the Staubbach Fall, cascading over a cliff to your right.

3. The Staubbach Fall

Few sights in the Lauterbrunnental have been as beloved, and as honoured in literature, as the Staubbach Fall. “Staubbach” literally translates to “Stream of Dust”—and, as breezes sweep aside the tumbling water and whittle it down into faint wisps and vapours, it’s not hard to see why it was given that name. “We soon caught a view of a thread of spray falling from an immense height into the narrow opening before us,” Cooper wrote of his first encounter with the waterfall:

It contained as much water as would turn a large mill—and fell over the face of a stupendous rock, itself an imposing object, seen as it then was by twilight, beetling above the narrow valley. The perpendicular, or lower fall, is said to be eight hundred feet. About a third of the distance, the fluid descends towards the eye in a sort of thick spray; it then seems to be broken into falling mist, until it touches a projection in the mountain, where it resumes the more palpable character of the element, and descends, washing the base of the rock, to the spectator, flowing past him in a limpid current. It is well named, for so ethereal or dust-like is one of its sections, that once or twice it appeared about to sail away like a cloud, in the duskiness of the evening, on the wings of the wind.

But, he concluded, his words were too weak to adequately convey the beauty of a natural sight that one could only appreciate if one faced it directly. “I despair of making [a reader] see Lauterbrunnen through the medium of the mind’s eye,” he wrote.

Others, however, had ventured towards the Staubbach Fall long before Cooper ever did, and they had met with more success in turning their sense of wonder into words. In 1779, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe toured the Lauterbrunnental and took the Staubbach Fall as inspiration for a poem. Already a literary celebrity throughout the German-speaking world at the tender age of thirty, thanks largely to the rapturous reception of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Goethe quickly penned a letter to a friend in which he waxed lyrical about what he saw:

The clouds broke in the upper air, and the blue sky came through. Clouds clung to the steep sides of the rocks; even the top where the Staubbach falls over was lightly covered. It was a very noble sight... then the clouds came down into the valley and covered all the foreground. The great wall over which the water falls, still stood out on the right. Night came on... In comparison with the immensities, one is, and must remain, too small.