Ludwig Tieck's Blond Eckbert is considered one of the first Romantic fairy tales. Tieck drew some inspiration from the popular book Folk Tales of the Germans by Musäus, which you can see in this drawer. Another source of inspiration is probably an anonymously published follow-up volume called New Folk Tales of the Germans. It was written by the almost forgotten author Benedikte Naubert. Tieck's Blond Eckbert is most likely based on Naubert's fairy tale The White Woman, which is five years older. Here the main character is called: Blond Bertha. She deals with the tragic story of her ancestor, also called Bertha, who haunts a lonely forest castle as a ghost. The ghostly Bertha laments:

Oh God! I might still have been happy if I had been able to shed the monastic stubbornness I had grown accustomed to in my solitude. My husband was kind, why did I not love him? [...] He left me and loved others. I was angry, so unforgiving, that when he returned, when he begged forgiveness at my feet, I left him proudly, and sought refuge in my brother's arms. O God! Judge between him and me! How will you judge? 

Madness, loneliness and inbreeding reign in Naubert's The White Woman - just as they do later in Tieck's Blond Eckbert. Both stories tell of the fates of young women who have been cast out into solitude in the forest because of their emancipation. Naubert's artistic fairy tales show that Romanticism was also shaped by anonymous female authors who experimented with suspense and folk traditions at an early stage.