Tintin Forums

According to the Huffington Post: Palle Huld, Inspiration For Tintin, Dies At 98

I had no clue about this person, but thought that someone here might know.

The news service France 24 made the same claim about Huld being the inspiration for Tintin back in 2009 and there's even a photograph of him dressed a la Tintin "wearing golfing trousers".

Herge is often quoted as estimating Tintin to be about 15-16 years old so that ties in with Huld travelling as a "teenager would-be-reporter around the globe".

The team were approached by the media about this story recently, to see if there was any evidence for it.

I have to say that I am very sceptical, as I said to them, as the fact is that by the time Huld embarked on his journey in 1928, Hergé had already sent Totor the boy-scout on globe-trotting adventures two years earlier.

Totor is a far more obvious model for Tintin than the later Huld, and my feeling is that a misunderstanding has arisen on the following fallacious logic:

Hergé based Tintin on a globe-trotting scout;
Huld was a globe-trotting scout;
therefore Huld was the basis for Tintin.

If you exchange “Totor” for “Huld” in the above, it still holds true.

I’d be interested to know, though, if Huld wasn’t in fact the one being influenced, and that it was Hergé and Totor who inspired him in his travels.

From the tone of the article, it sounds like Huld was the only inspiration for Tintin. However, as Bourdurian Thug's link hinted at, when one is creating a fictional character, one rarely-if ever-draws from only one source. Great characters like Tintin come into the world based on many sources; famous travelers/explorers of the time, Herge's own brother, and, (I think) the part of Herge that longed for adventure and excitement.


This would be great!

I find that rather doubtful. Totor was created for a magazine for Belgian boy-scouts - unless there's evidence that his stories were also published in Denmark. Besides, Huld got to travel as a result of winning a competition held by a newspaper.

As noted above, there were plenty of other sources of inspiration for Herge. It's a bit like James Bond: researchers are always coming up with different sources of inspiration: Ian Fleming himself, Sidney Reilly, Eddie Chapman, and various other war heroes have been cited as models for Bond.

Yes, but firstly it is at least possible - scouting being an international fraternity, with many events which lead to scouts from many nations meeting at camps and jamborees, where no doubt stories and magazines change hands.

Secondly, it certainly doesn’t seem any less likely to me that Huld as a Scout might have heard of Totor, than that Hergé took Huld’s voyage as the reason to create a non-scout character.

There just doesn’t seem to be any primary source for the Huld story other than proximity of dates, and the current crop of articles just seem to be circulating heresay.

I agree entirely that there can always be revelations about who and what influenced the creation of stories and characters; however, this one certainly doesn’t have the ring of authenticity that the discovery of Sexé as a possible source for Tintin’s adventures did.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/dec/07/man-who-inspired-tintin

Having been doing some further digging amongst the current crop of press mentions, I'm still not convinced that he's a major model for Tintin; however, as mct16 pointed out in his link, many of them do mention the plus-fours, so on that front I'm prepared to give room for doubt, and say that maybe Hergé gave Tintin Huld's trousers, perhaps as a bit of an in joke.

But then again, they were in fashion at the time, were seen as the dress for a reporter (if you read Edgar Wallace's "The Feathered Serpent", the intrepid reporter in that is identifiable as such by his plus-fours), so again, nothing is certain...

Personally I think he's more of an influence on La Roux.