Generations can recognize the " William Tell Overture " within a few notes of its launching , thanks to its endure association with vintage Lone Ranger reruns and a 2013 cinematic remaking of the same name . But who was William Tell , and did he really dart an apple off his son ’s head ?
Tell was a granger and Swiss tribe champion . He literally stand up as a symbolization of political freedom ; there is a bronze statue of him in Uri , a peck village that is the birthplace of modern Switzerland . As the country ’s founding father , Tell is both fable and legendary . As the account goes , in 1307 , an agent of the Hapsburg duke of Austria placed a Hapsburg hat on a pole and ordered passersby to absent their caps . Tell resist and was then ordered to buck an apple off his Word ’s head with an arrow at 120 paces or he and his Logos would both be killed . severalize obliged and win in hit the Malus pumila off his boy ’s head in a single dead reckoning .
What happened next kicked off a revolution among the wretched , medieval inhabitants and direct to an upset of capricious foreign linguistic rule . The agent involve Tell why he had a second arrow in his crownwork , to which Tell answer , " If the first arrow had killed my boy , I would have shoot the second at you , and I would not have leave out . "
Tell was pronto detained and deported by boat , bound for a donjon in a neighboring castling . He escaped , galvanized others in an rising and the eternal sleep is a gallant part of Swiss chronicle .
Unfortunately , many scholars doubt that Tell was really a material person . There ’s no evidence that he ever exist or that anyone in Uri shot an arrow off a child ’s headway . More likely , the taradiddle is amalgamation of outcome veridical and think .
While the uprising against Austria is steep in world , the addition of Tell ’s daring exploit probably come from a remarkably similar story originating in 18th - century Denmark . In it , aVikingchief jactitation of his marksmanship to a king , who readily ordered the Viking to prove it . The king target an apple on the Viking man ’s son and ordered the Viking to frivol away it off his forefront with a single arrow . The Viking did so , and when asked why he had another arrow in his singlet , replied , " To kill you , forefather , had I killed my Logos " [ source : Wernick ]
Even the first publish account of Tell ’s exploit – look 250 years after the supposed result occurred – had to be revised to tally other chronicle of Switzerland ’s bud independency , summate even more system of weights to the fact that Tell ’s life story may have been a improbable story after all [ sources : Wernick , Britannica ] .
