Die Sprichwörter und Sinnreden des deutschen Volkes in alter und neuer Zeit

Joseph Josua Eiselein (1791-1856), librarian and professor in Heidelberg, presented his extensive collection "Die Sprichwörter und Sinnreden des deutschen Volkes in alter und neuer Zeit" in 1838. With it, he did an immensely useful and useful pioneering work, which was only possible because of his belesenheit and his considerable philological knowledge. It represents an early scholarly attempt to register proverbs as well as possible with sources and, where necessary, with brief explanations. Everywhere one can see the interest in language and literature that led this restless and probably also ambitious private scholar to deal intensively with the oral and written tradition of the proverbial linguistic heritage. Thus, Eiselein not only recorded proverbs from older collections, but he located evidence in Old, Middle, and Early New High German literature, explored more recent literature, and conducted his own field research. The long introduction is a rich introduction to the study of proverbs, and among the numerous vouchers are previously unrecorded proverbs and proverbial sayings, with source references and sometimes terse explanations. It is thus a collection that continues to be important and, together with Wilhelm Körte's collection "Die Sprichwörter und sprichwörtlichen Redensarten der Deutschen" (1837), published at the same time, and Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wanders' "Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon," must be considered a basic work.