1. 1. “Not by one avenue only can we arrive at so tremendous a secret.”
2. 2. Blixen started working on the tale in the 1950s, and it exists in no less than seven manuscripts. Its shortened version, entitled “The Secret of Rosenbad,” was published in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1962. In 1963, both the entire final English manuscript of “Ehrengard” and the Danish translation by Clara Selborn were published. For the textual history of the tale, see Lasson (1994, 470); Bunch (2013, 489-92; 2017, 89-91).
3. 3. To mention just a few examples: August von Schimmelman, the main character of “The Roads Round Pisa,” reappears in “The Poet” (both from Seven Gothic Tales), and the former story explicitly refers to the marionette comedy “Sandhedens Hævn” (1926; “The Revenge of Truth”) that Blixen had written in her youth; Pellegrina Leoni, the pursued woman and the heroine of “The Dreamers” (Seven Gothic Tales) is also the protagonist of “Echoes” (Last Tales); “The Diver” (Anecdotes of Destiny) is presented as a tale told by Mira Jama, the storyteller who is part of the frame narrative of “The Dreamers.”
4. 4. It may or may not be the same person. Ehrengard’s father is a general, while the donator of the monkey in “The Monkey” is an admiral. As Johnny Kondrup suggests in Bjergtaget (2019), Karen Blixen might have stolen the name from an 1878 novel by Henry James, The Europeans.
5. 5. See Brantly (2002, 149).