The following edition was used to create this guide: Kehlmann, Daniel. Tyll. Trans. Ross Benjamin. Pantheon, 2020.

The novel is told in eight discrete episodes, each related from a different point of view. The first section, titled “Shoes,” relates the story of a German village whose residents are caught up in the fear and anxiety of the brutal war going on all about them. It is spring. A covered wagon arrives, unannounced, bearing a small traveling entertainment troupe of thespians and singers, among them Tyll Ulenspiegel, something of a celebrity known for his amazing juggling and his tightrope walking. The townsfolk are mesmerized by the performers, particularly the stunning acrobatics of Tyll on his tightrope. Inspired by their curiosity, Tyll capriciously commands them to remove their right shoe and toss it up into the air. Uncertain, they nevertheless do it only to be told by the impish Tyll to then retrieve their shoe from among the hundreds now strewn in the town square. In the ensuing tense moments, fights break out even as Tyll watches, smiling, bemused by their willingness to follow his absurd whims.

In “Lord of the Air,” the narrative returns to Tyll’s childhood. Tyll is a slacker, the son of a poor, uneducated miller, Claus, who, despite his lack of education, is something of an autodidact. He reads widely in the metaphysical works of Medieval philosophers who pondered big questions about the world and its purpose and about the meaning of life and the afterlife. In turn, the father has earned a reputation for dabbling in magic, for concocting potions that remedy his neighbors’ afflictions. His reputation brings him to the attention of two traveling representatives of the Papal court. Concerned over the implications of Claus’ investigations and by the books in his library, the papal representatives interrogate Claus and charge him with witchcraft. Despite intense interrogation and systematic torturing, Claus refuses to confess the sin of apostasy. He refuses to recant his questions about how the cosmos works. Ultimately, he is condemned to death by hanging for the crime of heresy. The day Claus is to be hanged, his son, along with a beautiful girl named Nele, the baker’s daughter, who may or may not be Tyll’s sister, flees the town under the care of a wandering, if talentless balladeer. Later the two meet another itinerant entertainer/juggler named Pirmin who sees promise in the boy’s juggling and tightrope walking skills and in the girl’s singing and dancing talent. He gets them to join his troupe.

“Zusmarshausen,” the third episode, takes place years later. The long war is winding down. A representative of the Kaiser and the court of Vienna, Martin Von Wolkenstein, looking back some fifty years after the war, recalls a mission in which he was tasked by the Kaiser to locate Tyll, now a renowned jester and juggler, rumored to have taken refuge in a remote abbey. Von Wolkenstein, a middling academic long curious about what war actually looks like, has been charged to fetch Tyll to Vienna to entertain the Kaiser. To do so, Von Wolkenstein traverses a German countryside devastated by decades of relentless war, villages pillaged, farmhouses burned, stacks of bodies rotting in the sun, skeletal survivors wracked by hunger and desperate for food. Even as he dedicates himself to the frivolous mission, Von Wolkenstein, years later, is more concerned with how to write about the mission, how best to recount the adventure. He finds Tyll in the abbey, masquerading as a monk. Tyll agrees to return. On the way back to Vienna, Tyll regales the court representatives with stories of his own adventures on the road. The party arrives at last safely at the gates of Vienna.

The next episode, “Kings of Winter,” relates the story of the hapless Friedrich V, the former King of Bohemia, and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart of Scotland. After agreeing to accept the throne of Bohemia in 1618, the weak Friedrich had been easily deposed with a few months (hence his ironic nickname, The Winter King). The king and queen, now ex-royals, were summarily dispatched into exile. His wife, the daughter of England’s King James, recalls how back in London years earlier, uneasy after the infamous Gunpowder Plot nearly killed her father, she accepted marriage to Friedrich hoping to secure a throne in continental Europe in the time before the Thirty Years’ War. Now in exile, the Winter Queen recalls with bittersweet regrets the culture and sophistication of the British court she had left behind and how now she lives, denied any kingdom, in relative poverty, in exile among a Germanic people she finds uncouth, uneducated, and coarse. She is saddled with a doltish husband she regards as both sickly and weak-willed. Her only solace is the entertainment she finds from a small troupe of court jugglers, dancers, and acrobats, among them Tyll and Nele.

In “Hunger,” the narrative returns to the story of how Tyll and Nele in the months after the hanging of Tyll’s father escaped the treachery and violence of Pirmin. The itinerant entertainer had coldly exploited Tyll’s considerable acrobatic talents and Nele’s singing and dancing and had kept them under his control through threats of violence and threats to withhold food. At last, driven by desperation and hunger, the two plot to kill Pirmin to gain their freedom.

“The Great Art of Light and Shadow” recounts how in the closing years of the long and bitter war an eccentric Jesuit theologian, Athanasius Kircher, accompanied by an accomplished mathematician, Adam Olearius, roam the ravaged German countryside to secure the blood of a dragon to create an antidote against the bubonic plague then raging across central Europe. Kircher himself has doctored data to promote the idea that the blood of the mythical creature will stop the disease’s spread. In their journey, the two happen on a traveling circus that features Tyll and Nele as well as a donkey Tyll taught to talk. Kircher well remembers Tyll—years earlier, Kircher was one of the interrogators of Tyll’s father. Nele, wearying of life on the road, agrees to marry the mathematician, but Tyll returns to the road on his own.

“In the Shaft” shares the harrowing story of Tyll, already a well-known acrobat, who, to avoid conscription into the German army, agrees to work in the mines near Brno, backbreaking and dangerous work, as a way to avoid military service. A collapsed shaft traps him and dozens of others. In the dark, buried alive, driven by hunger and fear, Tyll hallucinates wildly until he decides that being trapped in a coal mine is simply not how he will die.

In the closing chapter, “Westphalia,” the narrative turns to Elizabeth, the exiled Winter Queen. In the waning months of the war, Elizabeth, her husband dead, tries to negotiate for her only son the throne of Bohemia her husband had been promised. She arrives at Osnabrück near Westphalia where the peace treaty is being hammered out. There, the powerful ministers from her own side politely but firmly dismiss her and her claim. In her desperation, rejected and facing an uncertain future as a throne-less queen in exile, a weary Elizabeth is entertained by a retinue of dancers, thespians, and jugglers, among them Tyll. She offers the enchanting Tyll the opportunity to return with her to England and the chance to die far from the insanities of war-ravaged Germany in the peace and security of the English court. Tyll, however, happily refuses, saying he has decided not to die at all. Elizabeth makes peace with her life.