Fluke of European history: we had a Bavarian King of Greece for a while.
I am pleased to be presenting this week to the Chania Historians and Archaeologists group at their monthly 1st-Thursday meeting in Crete. It’s a hybrid meeting. From Bavaria, I present online to the group gathered at the local meeting site. The topic is related to my current preoccupation. The first King of Greece was Otto von Wittelsbach, uncle to Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Last castle tour before an autumn vacation, morning commute. Crossing the Lech, I let the bike coast to admire the chalky green-blue river. In the calm, cool air this morning, the surface rippled like stained glass. Reflected light revealed river banks, garbed in autumn leaves, veiled in mist, and leading to Füssen’s first houses coming into town. The peak of Breitenberg pointed above. The high castle showed bright in morning sun, St. Stephen’s monastery in shadow.
Then came the swans. In April, the nesting pair caught my eye. One rested on the nest of gathered grass amid reedy clumps. The other fed along the shore. In May the cygnet hatched. It was gray-brown, a color like Lech mud. On the way between tours, morning and evening, I watched it grow through the summer. First I’d spot the adults, their white shinning in the waterscape. Only then could I discern the grayling, always nearby, mixed into the color of bank brush. By August, white pointed the gray. Today, its neck was bleached to the waterline. Light plumes streaked the folded wings. The family paddled downstream, the adults before and behind the cygnet.
I braked the bike and dismounted, fumbling for the camera in my pack. A couple shots taken, I paused to breathe the river air. Listened to distant chirps, morning birds. Then, beckoned by the day’s tour, I stowed the camera and remounted.
Foot on pedal, a splash drew my attention riverward. The cygnet footed across the surface, neck outstretched, wings flapping. Leaving the water, it slipped into air. A few quick beats of wings, dappled gray and white, brought it into a silent glide above stained glass reflecting a pure white breast. It tilted into a gentle arc. Slid again into water.
It was over in a moment. A moment without thought. A moment of being. A moment passed in simple witness to nature. A moment of grace.
The Lech tumbles through the mountains in a narrow, rocky bed. It pours onto the Bavarian plateau at the town of Füssen and turns north. In times not so long past, where it met level terrain, it spread out into a braided river, flowing around narrow islands, as it meandered toward the Danube.
During the time of Ludwig II, from the bridge behind the old Hohenschwangau ruins—and later the castle construction site—the view of the plateau beyond was not unlike the view today. The braided river Lech ran through the far half along the length of today’s Forggensee.
The Bayerische Wasserkraftwerke (Bavarian waterworks) dammed the Lech river near Roßhaupten /rose-HOWP-ten/ in 1954 to form Germany’s largest reservoir and fifth largest lake. Its purpose: to regulate runoff from spring rain and snowmelt, and so prevent flooding, and to generate electricity. It is the second barrage on the Lech. The first is at Füssen, where the river skirts the town. These are part of a system of more than two dozen barrages that regulate water flow between the Alps and the Danube.
The reservoir is called the Forggensee. See, in German, means lake, and Forggen is the name of a village that now lies beneath the lake’s surface. Several families were moved out of the village before it was drowned. Modern settlements also drowned were Deutenhausen and parts of Weidach (in Füssen), Brunnen (Schwangau), Dietringen, and Dürracker. These are accompanied at lake bottom by ancient sites: the ruins of a Roman villa and a few kilometers of a Roman road, the Via Claudia Augusta.
To catch spring rains and melt water, the lake is partially drained in the winter. With the water at its lowest annual levels in March and April, historian Magnus Peresson guides tours into the muddy lake bed. He shows the exposed features, including the Roman ruins and foundations of homesteads, and he tells stories about the people who lived there.
I followed Peresson’s tour last April. Not only a historian, Peresson is also an architect. Walking among washed-out ruins, he points to a rectangle where walls once stood. “That was the kitchen,” he says, “see that pipe?” And where a wide wooden timber lay level with the mud, “That was the threshold to the stable.”
Look for “Faszination Forggensee” led by Magnus Peresson at Allgäu Schlosspark.de in late winter and early spring into April.
At the moment in Schwangau is an exhibit about the submerged villages, now 70 years gone. Curators Ernst Walz and Christine Velle put together an impressive display of photographs, graphics, newspaper articles, and accompanying text that show the area as it was before and during the dam’s construction.
You can see “Sunken Hamlets” at the Schlossbrauhaus in Schwangau, Saturdays, Sundays, and Wednesdays, 17:00-20:00, until 5 November, and 1 November 14:00-17:00.
Forty degrees and drizzling rain, mid-September, Hohenschwangau—Guiding tours, the worst days are the cold and rainy days. But I’ve had worse best days at other jobs. The most rewarding part of the cold and rainy days is when I’m telling stories to a crowd of tour guests, up to thirty at a time. It’s the hundred-and-somethingth time I’ve told these stories, but I put all the emotion and enthusiasm into them as though I just wrote them this morning. I know them by heart, so I have time to enjoy the telling as much as those listening.
Rain patters on overhead leaves. Gusty wind rattles branches. From green hills beyond, mist rises into blue-gray clouds on a close horizon. An odor of damp, decayed wood wafts in the air. The audience is a diverse crowd of folks of all ages, from different countries, different cultures, from all around the world. They came to a small corner of Europe to see a castle built by a crazy guy who enjoyed going to the opera and building monuments to his idols and to his own imagination. They came to go inside the castle. They didn’t expect to be outside before going in, listening to all these stories about the man who built it and how he came to do so.
Still, here they are, huddled under umbrellas and bundled up in parkas and scarves, arms around each other for warmth—as surprised to be standing there, in the cold and rain, as I am that they stay. They stare holes through me while I talk, some with furrowed brow, some with creased smile. They nod when they recognize some historical fact. They ooh and aah at the intriguing parts. They laugh at the funny bits. After the story about a knight, I point to his statue on the castle’s peak, a silhouette against clouds. They say that was a great story. I tell them I can do better. After the story about a dragon, they say they see the dragon, there in the landscape, shrouded in mist, and they say that was the very best story. Rain runs along umbrella ribs, while time stands still. Time spent in communion with the past and with our fellow humans from way back then and from just now. Time in the cold and rain. Time not they nor I regret not getting back.
With Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari changed the way humans think about history. With that framework in place, the historian-philosopher turned our attention to what happens next in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Now, I’m looking forward to his upcoming book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.
From the book blurb:
“Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.”
Release date September 10. Pre-order now.
Disclaimer: The links on this page go to Bookshop.org, of which Stephen is an affiliate. All book sales made through Bookshop.org directly benefit independent bookstores, and when you click through and make a purchase, Stephen earns a commission. Thank you for your support.
I have mentioned before the legend of the Neuschwanstein Dungeons. The dungeons are more easily fabricated in our imaginations than in reality. If they exist, I have identified three ways that we might enter into the unexplored depths beneath a mad king’s castle.
The legend itself points to the tall dark archway, bottom center at the rear of the structure. If the narrow windows above it are four feet in height, the opening may be about ten feet wide and some 40 feet high.
Off the south side of Marienbrücke (opposite the castle), directly below, the Pöllat River falls down an eroded rock formation. Just to the cascade’s left, a cavern gapes. The spelunker’s entrance would be a winding passage, descending beneath the river and leading, one would think, to the dungeon’s lower levels.
The two previous points of ingress are difficult to access. The first requires a hazardous climb up from the Pöllat Gorge. The second, a climb down into a flooded cavern. Because the gorge trail is currently closed to the public, braving either might earn an encounter with local authorities.
The third entrance is less perilous. Here, we have still to avoid the authorities, but at the base of the north facade, to the left of a sally port, a simple wooden door looks like it might open into a root cellar. More likely, it’s a service entrance to the sewer. A sewer entrance to the dungeon is an old fantasy trope. It’s a trope for a reason.
The legend is clear on the point: no one has ever come out of the Neuschwanstein dungeons alive. If they exist, dungeons are dangerous places.
The latest issue of my newsletter went out to subscribers today. In this issue of A Peregrine’s Path, you’ll read about how a Tennessee boy left the island of Crete for the castles of Bavaria.
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A Peregrine’s Path
EXPLORATION—DISCOVERY—ADVENTURE
Peregrine are travelers with whom we cross paths and share stories.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Celtic tribes spread out of Bohemia onto the Alpine Foreland and up into the river valleys of the southern mountains. These people became known as the Baiuvarii /by-you-var-ee/, which may have meant “people from Bohemia.” From this word we get Bayern in German and in English Bavaria.
The Baiuvarii were a fierce and independent people. The tribes were led by chieftains. Their spiritual leaders were druids. The druids were wise men and women who served as legal authorities and judges, lore keepers, healers, and advisers to the chieftains.
The druids were also sorcerers. They drew power from nature: from rush of wind, from steady of stone, from fall of water, and from heat of flame.
Then came the Franks from the east. They dominated the Baiuvarii and set up the first dukes to rule over them. The Franks feared the power of the druids and, so, tried to repress them. To defend themselves, the druids called up from the earth a great dragon.
The dragon was big as a mountain. On wide wings, it swooped in the air, its scales were hard as rocks, it moved quick as a river, and it breathed great gouts of fire. The dragon defended the druids against the Franks.
In the 8th century, Charlemagne came. Charlemagne fought the dragon and subdued it. He was then crowned emperor in the year 800. His son Louis the Pious appointed the first king of Bavaria. There followed a series of six Bavarian kings in the 9th century. These kings were fabulously wealthy, the next more wealthy than the previous.
Now the dragon had been subdued but not defeated. And when the last of the six kings died, the dragon collected the treasure of the Bavarian kings and brought it to the Alpsee. It dropped the treasure to the bottom of the lake. The dragon then lay down beside the lake, with the Crown of Bavaria upon its head, and slept.
Do you see the dragon…?
The castle is the Crown of Bavaria atop the dragon’s head.
The dragon’s snout lies in front of the castle. Behind the castle, the hill crest runs up its neck to its back, the tallest hills. Its wings, green hills, spread behind the lakes on either side. The tail stretches into the background, right.
I may have made up parts of this story. Druids are commonly associated with the Celts earlier in history. We don’t hear so much about them later. This is perhaps due to two reasons: one, it was first the Romans, then later Christian conquerors, who repressed the druids for fear of their power, and two, in compliance with their own customs, the druids didn’t write.
I’m sure I’ve exaggerated the Bavarian kings’ wealth, and as far as history is concerned, druids did not call dragons. Some of us know better.
“…the participants can then be allowed to make their first descent into the dungeons beneath the ‘huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses.’”—Gygax and Arneson, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: Men & Magic
Some say Ludwig II was a genius. For others, the king was mad. The vast castle he built is yet far from ruined. Though when the time comes, the pile will be huge.
“And the dungeons beneath?” a friend asked after I posted yet another photo like the one above on social media. Since I left the Isle of Myth a year and a half ago, base town is across the river from Bavaria’s most famous castle. In reply I recited a local legend:
An old man lives outside the village in the castle’s shadow. He is blind and frail, so doesn’t often leave his hovel. But if you bring him a bottle of single malt and tell him stories of daring adventures of youth, he’ll tell you to go, on a winter’s day, to the bridge behind the castle. Bouncing planks take you high above a gorge. Cool mist rises from a laughing cascade below. It brings an odor of pine and earth. The sun at its zenith reaches deep between two central towers. There, dazzling rays reveal to the keen observer a cavernous portal of unknown depth, into which few have ventured and from which none have returned.
This article was originally published on DONJON LANDS, April 10, 2024.