Tales of a Wayside Inn

Tales of a Wayside Inn, series of narrative poems by Longfellow, published in three parts (1863, 1872, and 1874) and collected in 1886. The concept of a succession of tales by a group of congenial acquaintances was obviously derived from Chaucer, Boccaccio, and other authors. The setting is at a real inn near Boston, and the characters are based on Longfellow's friends. The musician is Ole Bull; the Spanish Jew, Israel Edrehi; the poet, T.W. Parsons; the theologian, Professor Daniel Treadwell; the student, Henry Ware Wales, a young Harvard scholar; the Sicilian, Luigi Monti; and the landlord, Lyman Howe, actual keeper of the inn at Sudbury. Of the 21 stories, only three deal directly with American themes:

Part First opens with the description of the inn and the members of the group. The first tale, “Paul Revere's Ride,” is told by the landlord; the poet's tale, The Birds of Killingworth, concerns Connecticut farmers who killed the small birds that destroyed their crops, and the way in which the birds were avenged by a plague of caterpillars who made the lands a desert; the theologian's tale is a love story set in rural Pennsylvania among Quakers.