''The Rings of Saturn'' (german: Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt - An English Pilgrimage) is a 1995 novel by the German writer

W. G. Sebald Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the g ...

. Its first-person narrative arc is the account by a nameless narrator (who resembles the author in typical Sebaldian fashion) on a walking tour of

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include L ...

. In addition to describing the places he sees and people he encounters, including translator

Michael Hamburger Michael Peter Leopold Hamburger (22 March 1924 – 7 June 2007) was a noted German-British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic. He was known in particular for his translations of Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn an ...

, Sebald discusses various episodes of history and literature, including the introduction of silkworm cultivation to Europe and the writings of Thomas Browne, which attach in some way to the larger text. The book was published in English in 1998.

Genre and content

Combining the details of a walking tour with meditations prompted by places and people encountered on that tour, ''The Rings of Saturn'' was called "a hybrid of a bookfiction, travel, biography, myth, and memoir".

Themes and style

Themes in the book are those treated in Sebald's other books: time, memory, and identity. According to Patrick Lennon's "In the Weaver's Web" (and Mark McCulloh's ''Understanding W. G. Sebald''), ''The Rings of Saturn'' merges the identities of the Sebaldian narrator with that of

Sebald and Hamburger both being German writers who moved to England and shared other important experiences. What's more, Hamburger's identity becomes fused with that of

Friedrich Hölderlin Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (, ; ; 20 March 1770 – 7 June 1843) was a German poet and philosopher. Described by Norbert von Hellingrath as "the most German of Germans", Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism. Pa ...

, and the merging is emphasized by Sebald's (typical) omission of quotation marks for quotations, further eroding separation of speakers in Sebald's account of the narrator's recollection of Hamburger's recollection. As in all his novels, Sebald writes in very long, complex sentences. The German original is written in a curiously quaint and somewhat precious and old-fashioned language that often disregards the common placement of German verbs at the end of sentences and instead puts them in unusual places.

Title

The title of the book may be associated with thematic content contained in the two passagesone appearing as part of the book's epigraph, the other in the fourth chapter, which mentions Saturnhinting at both astronomical and mythological associations for Sebald's use of the word:

The
rings of Saturn The rings of Saturn are the most extensive ring system of any planet in the Solar System. They consist of countless small particles, ranging in size from micrometers to meters, that orbit around Saturn. The ring particles are made almost e ...
consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet's equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect.

As I sat there in
Southwold Southwold is a seaside town and civil parish on the English North Sea coast in the East Suffolk district of Suffolk. It lies at the mouth of the River Blyth within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The town is a ...
overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed a quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in the '' Garden of Cyrus'' and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of
Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second-largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. It has only one-eighth the average density of Earth; ...
an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

Editions

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Adaptations

The 2012 film, ''Patience (After Sebald)'', directed by Grant Gee is based on the book.

References

External links

Itinerary of ''The Rings of Saturn'' (wgsebald.de)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rings of Saturn, The German novels adapted into films Travel autobiographies Novels by W. G. Sebald 1995 German novels Suffolk Books about England