Brutality & Compassion: Howard Pyle’s “Otto of the Silver Hand”

Dr Deavel looks at a tale by one of the formative influences on my childhood. I loved books which Pyle had illustrated, and I had many of them.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By David Deavel, PhD

Howard Pyle’s historical tale illustrates G.K. Chesterton’s claim that fairy tales tell us that “dragons can be killed.” Young Otto is not himself a dragonslayer, but he is an image of the child who can withstand the assault of hatred and brutality without taking on those characteristics himself.

Sometimes known as the “Father of American illustration,” Howard Pyle (1853-1911) plays an enormous role in American art, illustration, and children’s literature. A deeply patriotic man, his desire to train up a generation of authentically American and successful artists and illustrators led him to found what became known as the Brandywine School of art. Pyle trained approximately seventy-five artists over a decade near the Brandywine River in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware. Many of these artists, such as N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, and Anna Whelan Betts, were acclaimed for contributing to what became known as the Golden Age of Illustration in America.

Pyle was an exception to the old saying that those who can, do, and those who cannot, teach. The teacher was himself a doer. Pyle’s prolific output included murals, paintings, and countless illustrations for magazines and books. Concerning the last, many of these books were written by Pyle himself. Though often considered an illustrator more than an author, he was more than competent at using his pen to create tales—specifically, tales of adventure and romance. Pyle’s biographer Henry C. Pitz observed, “Dual talents such as Pyle’s are scarce, and it is rarer still to find them so equal and balanced.”

If the teacher was a doer, Pyle was a good one because he was always a student of both art and literature of all sorts. His patriotism didn’t keep him from looking back at the European roots of American culture and life. Probably his greatest books concerned the history and legends of the Middle Ages. Many adults and children know him from his illustrated versions of the tales of Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table, but many of his other historical tales continue to live on. Pyle’s biographer Henry C. Pitz called the 1888 novel Otto of the Silver Hand “unique among all the other fiction titles.”

Considered by some the first true novel for children, Otto of the Silver Hand did not take the then-current understanding that literature for children ought to be sanitized to avoid darkness and troubles. The plot is bracing. Pyle apparently believed that a story of a boy who survives and even thrives despite an early life of pain, loss, and even horror was one that would be read avidly.

Set in thirteenth-century Germany, the titular Otto is son of Conrad, a German baron whose way of maintaining living standards is to sally forth from Castle Drachenhausen whenever he sees any party worth robbing. The drawing that sits atop the foreword to the book bears the inscription In Tenebris (“In the shadows”) and depicts knights led by a man in a crown bearing down on unarmed men and women. One can see in this illustration and many others the influence of Albrecht Dürer on Pyle.

At the beginning of the book, Otto’s mother, the Baroness Mathilda, is still alive and begging her husband to cease being a robber and to be instead a baron with honesty and nobility. Though the “yellow-haired Baroness” is “the only one in all the world with whom the fierce lord of Drachenhausen softened to gentleness, the only one upon whom his savage brows looked kindly, and to whom his harsh voice softened with love,” Baron Conrad is unmoved: “How else could I live an’ I did not take from the fat town hogs to fill our own larder?”

Despite his wife’s fears, Baron Conrad goes out in search of loot and returns to the castle gravely injured. The pregnant Mathilda thinks him dead and falls. She then dies in premature labor. Conrad recovers days later only to find that she who loved him is dead and has left behind her a small, weak infant.

Baron Conrad takes the infant Otto to nearby St. Michaelsburg Abbey to be educated and raised by the monks there. The abbot is also named Otto; he is the boy’s great-uncle on Mathilda’s side and a man of peace and learning. He accepts the news of his niece’s death with sorrow but equanimity. He accepts the duty of caring for the boy with magnanimity: “‘Would,’ said he, ‘that all the little children in these dark times might be thus brought to the house of God, and there learn mercy and peace, instead of rapine and war.’”

Abbot Otto’s appeal to his dead niece’s husband is met with what appears to be good news: Baron Conrad will no longer be a robber. The relief only lasts for a moment, however, for Baron Conrad’s thoughts have turned from greed to vengeance. His wounds came from the nearby Baron Frederick of Trutz-Drachen, who defended the merchants being robbed.

Little Otto, however, does not take in his father’s anger. As he grows, he learns not only such skills as reading but also the imitation of the monks’ peaceful ways. Brother John, a monk who suffered a head injury as a child and has been given to visions of saints and angels, is put in charge of the boy. The bond between the two is solid, even as Otto grows old enough to be more on his own.

Sadly, little Otto’s idyllic existence is broken at age eleven, when his father decides to bring his son home to Drachenhausen, the house of the dragon. This boy of peace finds his way to the castle’s chapel, too seldom used, and to the feet of Ursela, the old servant who had cared for his mother and then the infant Otto. Ursela’s tales charm him, then bother him as she reveals the character of his father.

When Otto confronts Conrad about the truth of what he has learned about him, especially his father’s merciless killing of Baron Frederick, who had been on his knees, Conrad’s response is to declare Otto’s worry the result of “foolish notions that the old monks have taught thee.” In the world outside monasteries, Baron Conrad says, “a man must either slay or be slain.” These revelations may be hard, but, even so, Otto cannot hate his father.

We know the time in which the story is set, for it hinges on the accession of Rudolph I of Hapsburg as King of Germany or, as this emperor was styled, “King of the Romans,” in October 1273. This Swiss count is determined to gain order in Germany and summons Conrad to his court to give an account. Will Conrad ignore him as he has ignored previous imperial summonses? “Baron Conrad knew not which to do; pride said one thing and policy another.”

Baron Conrad decides that policy’s command takes precedent. Three days into his journey, however, a nephew of the late Baron Frederick raids Castle Drachenhausen, burning down many of the structures, and takes prisoner the young boy. The illustration of the heavily armored, vengeful knight holding the young boy against a wall as the elderly Ursela vainly holds on to the boy to protect him is truly horrifying.

The horror is not over with the kidnapping. In the Castle Trutz-Drachen (“dragon-scorner”) dungeon, the nephew, Baron Henry, tells Otto that he has sworn a vow to avenge his uncle on all the family of Conrad who are capable of carrying on the fight. Though Otto is too young to kill, Henry has the boy’s hand cut off. Henry’s daughter, Pauline, who is about Otto’s age, comforts him.

Whatever his faults, Baron Conrad comes to take back his son with his few followers. The rescue is perfectly told and illustrated, with vibrant images of a guard being subdued and the amputated and feverish Otto being taken over the wall of the castle by the immensely strong One-Eyed Hans.

I will not tell what happens to Baron Conrad or Baron Henry, but, suffice it to say, the little Otto, who is again taken to St. Michaelsburg Abbey for healing, eventually meets up with the gentle Emperor Rudolph, who recognizes the extraordinary quality of this young man who baldly tells him that “it seems to me that thou art a good man.” He will see to the boy’s safety and further education.

The Castle Drachenhausen, we are to know, is to rise again, with a figure much less dragon-like to head it. Rather than the iron-handed barons who have ruled in it, there will be a statesman who reigns with a hand of silver and a pretty wife whose presence dramatically symbolizes the mercy and peace that Abbot Otto desired for young children.

Pyle’s historical tale illustrates G.K. Chesterton’s claim that fairy tales do not inform children of the existence of dragons—it is obvious that children know about dragons. Instead, such tales tell us that “dragons can be killed.” Young Otto is not himself a dragonslayer in the tale, but he is an image of the child who can withstand the assault of hatred and brutality without taking on those characteristics himself. Though Pyle’s is not a theologically explicit tale, it is worth noting the illustration of Otto sitting in wonder before his favorite image in the books: that of the Christ Child, who defeated the Dragon and promised to root out the dragon from the hearts of those who followed Him.

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Dr Deavel will be giving a public seminar titled “Knights, Heroes, and Patriots: Howard Pyle and the Shaping of the American Moral Imagination” at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan, on June 20, 2026. See here for tickets and more information.

The featured image is “Otto of the Silver Hand. Written and illustrated by H. Pyle.” This image was originally posted to Flickr by The British Library. It was reviewed on 3 February 2018 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the ‘No known copyright restrictions,’ courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.