“Marrying and mourning are not so unlike”

“Marrying and mourning are not so unlike” is Father Heilmann’s grave warning as Huldbrand prepares to marry Bertalda, and its force lies in the wedding it places beside the funeral it anticipates. Spoken while the priest waits near Ringstetten Castle after refusing to bless the second union, the saying turns a familiar contrast into a prophecy: Huldbrand’s apparent new beginning is bound to the grief and danger of his first marriage to Undine.

Occasion and Speaker

Father Heilmann speaks the expression after Huldbrand’s messenger summons him to Ringstetten Castle to perform the second wedding. The aged priest travels with unusual haste, urging his failing body onward with the hope that the danger may still be prevented. He arrives late in the evening and, rather than join the betrothed pair, finds shelter in a rough hut made from branches, moss, and brushwood. Asked why he remains nearby if he will not give the nuptial blessing, he answers that blessings exist beyond the marriage altar and that he may attend another solemn ceremony.

The saying is thus not a detached maxim about the likeness of joy and sorrow. It is delivered by a priest who has come to oppose the marriage, and its immediate setting makes the threatened ceremony and the hinted mourning inseparable. The accompanying remark about other blessings broadens the warning: the wedding blessing Huldbrand seeks is not the only sacred rite that may soon matter. The expression’s grave wit depends on saying this obliquely. Father Heilmann does not name the death he fears, but his refusal to attend the wedding and his expectation of another solemn occasion make the implication plain.

The First Marriage Behind the Warning

The threatened marriage is intelligible only against Huldbrand’s first union with Undine. Their wedding was arranged suddenly at the fisherman’s cottage, after Huldbrand declared that they were pledged to each other and asked the priest to unite them that very evening. The fisherman and his wife were astonished, though they consented; the bride’s preparations included two consecrated tapers, while Huldbrand disengaged two rings from his gold chain to exchange with her.

The ceremony carried a significance Huldbrand could not initially understand. When Father Heilmann advised Undine to attune her soul to her husband’s, she replied that she had no soul. Her answer unsettled the company; she then wept at the prospect of possessing such a burden. Later, she explained that elemental beings pass away without a trace and that only union of affection with a human can give one of her kind a soul. She declared that she now possessed one through her marriage to Huldbrand. The first wedding was therefore not merely an earlier attachment that could be replaced by another ceremony: it had changed Undine’s condition and bound her future to her husband’s fidelity.

The Warning Rejected

Before Huldbrand’s second wedding, Father Heilmann tells him that Undine has appeared in his dreams for a fortnight, wringing her hands and pleading that she is still alive and that the priest should save Huldbrand’s life and soul. He does not claim certain knowledge of the mysterious state in which she exists, but insists that she was a faithful wife and that Huldbrand remains hers. His warning joins spiritual and bodily danger: he urges Huldbrand to leave Bertalda, and tells Bertalda that she will never be happy if she continues toward the marriage.

The three listeners sense that the priest speaks truly but resist his appeal. The fisherman, once opposed to the match, has been moved by Bertalda’s tears and gentler manner; Huldbrand persuades himself that Father Heilmann’s warning is mere fancy. The priest leaves without accepting even a night’s shelter or refreshment. At dawn, Huldbrand asks a priest from a nearby monastery to perform the ceremony instead. In this context, the saying measures the distance between warning and choice: the wedding proceeds not because the first bond has been disproved, but because the characters refuse to let its uncertainty govern their decision.

Marriage, Fidelity, and the Anticipated Mourning

The aphorism also gathers force from the rules Undine has disclosed. Her relatives may claim her if Huldbrand treats her angrily while they are on or near water; in the underwater conversation Huldbrand later dreams, Kuhleborn states that if Huldbrand remarries and is unfaithful, Undine is bound by the laws of her element to take his life. Undine answers that she has sealed the fountain against herself and her kind, preventing them from reaching him through it. She has arranged the dream as a warning, yet Huldbrand misreads it and leaves his plans unchanged.

On the night of the second wedding, Undine enters Huldbrand’s chamber after the spring has been opened. Her words, “They have opened the spring,” connect the reopened waterway to the return of the bond he had tried to set aside; she then tells him that he must die. The earlier saying does not itself narrate this encounter, but prepares its meaning: the proposed marriage and the anticipated mourning are not separate events, because the second wedding reactivates the peril attached to the first. Father Heilmann’s compact warning gives that tragic reversal its memorable form, placing the nuptial altar and the mourning that follows within one moral and dramatic frame.