See Stein and Müller, Die Geschichte von Erlangen (1898).
ERLE, SIR WILLIAM (1793-1880), English lawyer and judge, was born at Fifehead-Magdalen, Dorset, on the 1st of October 1793, and was educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford. Having been called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1819 he went the western circuit, became counsel to the Bank of England, sat in parliament from 1837 to 1841 for the city of Oxford, and, although of opposite politics to Lord Lyndhurst, was made by him a judge of the common pleas in 1845. He was transferred to the queen’s bench in the following year, and in 1859 came back to the common pleas as chief justice upon the promotion of Sir Alexander Cockburn. He retired in 1866, receiving the highest eulogiums for the ability and impartiality with which he had discharged the judicial office. He died at his estate at Bramshott, Hampshire, on the 28th of January 1880, and a monument without his name but in his memory (sometimes erroneously supposed to mark the place where an old gibbet was) stands on the top of Hindhead.
See E. Manson, Builders of our Law (1904).
ERLKÖNIG, or Erl-King, a mythical character in modern German literature, represented as a gigantic bearded man with a golden crown and trailing garments, who carries children away to that undiscovered country where he himself abides. There is no such personage in ancient German mythology, and the name is linguistically nothing more than the perpetuation of a blunder. It first appeared in Herder’s Stimmen der Völker (1778), where it is used in the translation of the Danish song of the Elf-King’s Daughter as equivalent to the Danish ellerkonge, or ellekonge, that is, elverkonge, the king of the elves; and the true German word would have been Elbkönig or Elbenkönig, afterwards used under the modified form of Elfenkönig by Wieland in his Oberon (1780). Herder was probably misled by the fact that the Danish word elle signifies not only elf, but also alder tree (Ger. Erle). His mistake at any rate has been perpetuated by both English and French translators, who speak of a “king of the alders,” “un roi des aunes,” and find an explanation of the myth in the tree-worship of early times, or in the vapoury emanations that hang like weird phantoms round the alder trees at night. The legend was adopted by Goethe as the subject of one of his finest ballads, rendered familiar to English readers by the translations of Lewis and Sir Walter Scott; and since then it has been treated as a musical theme by Reichardt and Schubert.
ERMAN, PAUL (1764-1851), German physicist, was born in Berlin on the 29th of February 1764. He was the son of the historian Jean Pierre Erman (1735-1814), author of Histoire des réfugiés. He became teacher of science successively at the French gymnasium in Berlin, and at the military academy, and on the foundation of the university of Berlin in 1810 he was chosen professor of physics. He died at Berlin on the 11th of October 1851. His work was mainly concerned with electricity and magnetism, though he also made some contributions to optics and physiology. His son, Georg Adolf Erman (1806-1877), was born in Berlin on the 12th of May 1806, and after studying natural science at Berlin and Königsberg, spent from 1828 to 1830 in a journey round the world, an account of which he published in Reise um die Erde durch Nordasien und die beiden Ozeane (1833-1848). The magnetic observations he made during his travels were utilized by C.F. Gauss in his theory of terrestrial magnetism. He was appointed professor of physics at Berlin in 1839, and died there on the 12th of July 1877. From 1841 to 1865 he edited the Archiv für wissenschaftliche Kunde von Russland, and in 1874 he published, with H.J.R. Petersen, Die Grundlagen der Gauss’schen Theorie und die Erscheinungen des Erdmagnetismus im Jahre 1829.
His son Johann Peter Adolf Erman (1854- ), a famous Egyptologist, was born in Berlin on the 31st of October 1854. Educated at Leipzig and Berlin, he became extraordinary professor in 1883 and ordinary professor in 1892 of Egyptology in the university of Berlin, and in 1885 he was appointed director of the Egyptian department of the royal museum. For an account of the Egyptological work of Erman and his school, see [Egypt]: Language.