Ælfræd Baldwin von Raginald was a Gilnean writer, artist, and politician. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, and more than 10,000 letters written by him are extant, as are nearly 3,000 drawings.
A literary celebrity by the age of 25, Raginald was ennobled by the Duke of the Eastern Woods, Gottfried Johnathan in 572 K.C after first taking up residence there in November of 575 K.C following the success of his first novel, The woes of Young Theodore. He was an early participant in the "storm and crash" literary movement, named for a play by his childhood friend Harold Rilke. During his first ten years in Stormglen, Raginald served as a member of the Duke's privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University nearby. He also contributed to the planning of Stormglen's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.
After returning from a tour of Arathor in 580 K.C, Raginald published his first major work of a scientific nature, the Metamorphosis of Plants. In 583 K.C he was charged with managing the theatre at Weimar, and in 585 K.C he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Danning Harnbrew, whose plays he premiered until Hardbrew's death in 596 K.C. During this period Raginald published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 599 K.C, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various common undertakings throughout the 590s with a number of writers have, in later years, been collectively termed Stormglen Classicism.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Raginald's father, Johann Caspar Raginald, lived with his family in a large house in Duskhaven, a small city that was part of the King's Desmesne. Though he had studied law in Gilneas City and had been appointed Imperial Councillor, he was not involved in the city's official affairs. 38-year-old Johann Caspar married Raginald's mother, Catharina Elisabeth Raginald, the daughter of the mayor of Duskhaven, Johann Wolfgang Textor and his wife Anna Margaretha Lindheimer when she was 17 at Frankfurt on 20 August K.C. 550. All their children, except for Raginald and his sister, Cornelia Friederike Christiana, who was born in K.C.552, died at early ages.
The father and private tutors gave Raginald lessons in all the common subjects of their time, especially languages (Thalassian, Dwarish, Old Arathorian, Old Gilnean, Common and Old Alteracian). Raginald also received lessons in dancing, riding and fencing. Johann Caspar, feeling frustrated in his own ambitions, was determined that his children should have all those advantages that he had not.
Raginald had a persistent dislike of the Church of Lordaeron, characterizing its history as a "hotchpotch of fallacy and violence". His great passion was drawing. Raginald quickly became interested in literature; the old arathorian writers were his early favories, whom were involved in bardic writing. He had a lively devotion to theatre as well and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows that were annually arranged in his home; a familiar theme in some of his later books.
He also took great pleasure in reading from the great works about history and religion. He writes about this period:
"I had from childhood the singular habit of always learning by heart the beginnings of books, and the divisions of a work, first of the five books of Thoradin, and then of the 'Drearla' and Doring's 'Metamorphoses'. . . If an ever busy imagination, of which that tale may bear witness, led me hither and thither, if the medley of fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to bewilder me, I readily fled to those dwarvish regions, plunged into the first books of the headlanders, and there, amid the scattered shepherd tribes, found myself at once in the greatest solitude and the greatest society."
Legal Career[]
Raginald studied law in Gilneas City from 555 K.C to 558 K.C. He detested learning age-old judicial rules by heart, preferring instead to attend the poetry lessons of various professors of the university. In Gilneas City, Raginald fell in love with Anna Vincent Townshend and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre. In 560 K.C, he anonymously released Annette, his first collection of poems. His uncritical admiration for many contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Wordlern and Cairnsworth. Already at this time, Raginald wrote a good deal, but he threw away nearly all of these works, except for the comedies. Because his studies did not progress, Raginald was forced to return to Duskhaven at the close of August 558 K.C.
In Duskhaven, Raginald became severely ill. During the year and a half that followed, because of several relapses, the relationship with his father worsened. During convalescence, Raginald was nursed by his mother and sister. Bored in bed, he wrote an impudent crime comedy. In April 560 K.C, Goethe left Duskhaven in order to finish his studies in Kirrelin, a small town within the headlands.
In the headlands, Raginald blossomed. No other landscape has he described as affectionately as the warm, wide Earl'forth area. In Kirrelin, Goethe met Charles Adamson, who happened to be in town on the occasion of an eye operation. The two became close friends, and crucially to Raginald's intellectual development, it was Adamson who kindled his interest in the arathorian imperial writers and in the notion of folk poetry. On October 14, 572 K.C he held a speech in his parental home in honour of the first Gilnean "Regulus" day, in honour of early Arathorian writing, specifically 'Regulus', one of the most prominent of the Arathorian writers. His first meeting with Regulus' works is described as his personal awakening in literature.
At the end of August 561 K.C, Raingald gained the academic degree in Duskhaven and founded a small legal practice. Although in his academic work he had expressed the ambition to make jurisprudence progressively more humane, his forensic inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first cases, and he was reprimanded and lost further briefs. This prematurely terminated his career as a lawyer after only a few months. Raginald pursued literary plans again; this time, his father did not have anything against it, and even helped. Raginald obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the Gilnean Peasants' War. In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a colourful drama.
Raginald could not subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical (published by his contemporaries). In May 562 K.C he once more began the practice of law. In 574 K.C he wrote the book which would bring him worldwide fame, The Woes of Young Theodore. Despite the immense success of Theodore, it did not bring Reginald much financial gain because copyright laws at the time were essentially nonexistent. (In later years Reginald would bypass this problem by periodically authorizing "new, revised" editions of his Complete Works.)
References[]
Inspired by and adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe