Barbarossa sits in the Kyffhäuser, his beard growing around a stone table, waiting. Almost every German knows the legend, yet its roots are far more tangled than the picture suggests. They run from an Icelandic mountain that opens for a drowned farmer, through a Gothic king buried in a diverted river, to a Prussian monument of 1896. We go through the sources one by one and separate what the texts say, what later readers made of them, and what we simply do not know.
Let us start where the Viking-age version of the idea is told best. On the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland stands a low hill the settlers called Helgafell, the Holy Fell. In the Eyrbyggja saga, the "Saga of the People of Eyri", it becomes the stage for one of the strangest scenes in Old Norse literature. In chapter 11 Thorstein Cod-biter, son of the settler Thorolf, rows out to fish and does not come back. That same evening a shepherd from his farm is standing near the fell and sees something he cannot explain to anyone.
"He saw how the fell was opened on the north side, and in the fell he saw mighty fires … and he heard that there was welcomed Thorstein Cod-biter and his crew."Eyrbyggja saga, ch. 11; William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon, The Story of the Ere-Dwellers, London 1892 (public domain; wording abridged)
The shepherd tells Thorstein's wife Thora, who says little about it. Next morning the news arrives: Thorstein has drowned while fishing. The scene is told briefly, which is exactly why it works. Fires burn inside, the newcomers are welcomed, the dead man gets a seat in the hall. No court, no journey over bridges and rivers, just a reception among kin.
The link to Thorstein's father is no accident. In chapter 4 the saga tells how Thorolf Mostrarskegg declared the fell holy when he settled on Snæfellsnes. More on that in a moment. First, a sober question: what exactly are we looking at, an old belief or a good story?
The saga presents Thorolf as a first-generation settler who came from Norway, threw his high-seat pillars overboard and built his farm where they washed ashore. He raised a temple to Thor, and nearby lay the fell. The author lists rules for it: nobody was to look at it unwashed, and nothing was to be put to death on it.
"… that no man unwashed should turn his eyes thither … and nought should be done to death on the fell …"Eyrbyggja saga, ch. 4; Morris and Magnússon, London 1892 (public domain; abridged)
Then comes the line that matters for our topic: Thorolf believed that he and all his kin from the ness would go into that fell when they died. The saga says so outright; it is not our interpretation. The same chapter mentions the ring on the temple altar, a ring without a join on which every oath had to be sworn, a theme we explore in our article on oath rings. Temple, oath ring and death mountain belong together in this account. They form the small sacred world of one family.
Scholars answer cautiously. The story begins in the 9th century, with most events falling in the late 10th and early 11th. It was written down, as far as we know, in the 13th century; fragments from that period survive, full texts only from the 14th. The author, whom we cannot name, seems to have known the Laxdæla saga and Egils saga. He wrote as a Christian about a pagan past.
So the saga cannot be treated like a protocol. Much of it is family memory that travelled by mouth. People and places are often real, but the narrative also includes hauntings, possessed livestock and revenants. The mountain belief is therefore both source and narrative device. A 13th-century author may have known it, but he may equally have shaped or sharpened it because it fitted so neatly into the picture of the pious heathen. We cannot decide which.
A counter-example in the same saga shows how little the mountains applied to everyone. Thorolf Lame-foot, an unpopular man, dies later in his high seat, is dragged on a sledge into a valley and laid in a mound. After his death he walks, and the mountain evidently does nothing to prevent it. Revenants belong to a different world of ideas than the hall in the fell, and we discuss them in our article on the draugr. The sources know several roads for the dead side by side.
Anyone who speaks of "the" Germanic idea of the afterlife simplifies. Old Norse sources know Valhalla for the slain, the realm of Hel beneath the earth, the hall of the sea goddess Rán for the drowned as Snorri's Edda describes it, and the family mountain. Any attempt to build a system from these fails on the texts themselves: they come from different authors, centuries and regions. Our article Walhall or Helheim traces that tension in detail.
The mountain slots in as a third option with its own logic. Whoever goes into the fell does not travel to a distant afterlife. He stays near the farm, within sight of the living. Relatives know where he is, can visit him, and, as the Helgafell scene suggests, he can even send them signs. That fits what we describe in our piece on honouring the dead among the Germanic peoples: the dead remained part of the family, and their graves and mounds lay within the landscape of the farm.
A second saga shows the same thing. Njáls saga lets the dead Gunnar of Hlíðarendi go on living in his burial mound. Witnesses see the mound standing open with moonlight on it, and Gunnar sitting inside, glad of face, speaking verses. The mound here is a hall in which a dead man stays alive, not a grave in the modern sense. The Old Norse word haugr means hill and burial mound alike, and in the sagas the line between them is fluid. For background on the genre, see our overview of the Icelandic sagas.
The same saga also strikes a darker note. Flosi, leader of the burners, dreams before the journey to the Althing that a mountain opens and a huge man with an iron staff steps out, calling out names. Whoever he calls is doomed. Here the mountain is no hospitable hall but the place where fate is spoken. Reception and verdict both seem to belong to the ideas that gathered around mountains.
The Landnámabók, the "Book of Settlements", lists Iceland's first settlers and their farms. It dates from the 12th and 13th centuries and tells, in short, almost list-like entries, who settled where, whom he married and what made his land noteworthy. Thorolf's landing at Thorsness and the holiness of Helgafell appear there too, more briefly than in the saga. It is often said that the book also reports families who expected to be taken into mountains after death; we stay careful here and keep to Helgafell, which we can grasp in both texts.
How widespread the belief was therefore remains unclear. The material comes almost entirely from Iceland, from a narrow window of recording. A family sanctuary in a mountain suits a settler society taking possession of a new land with new landscape spirits; land spirits and holy mountains run all through the settlement stories. Whether Norwegians looked at their mountains in the same way, or whether the idea held in Sweden or Denmark, the sources do not say. More on holy hills and their finds is in our article on sacred mountains.
Now a leap into the German Middle Ages and its afterlife. In 1816 the Brothers Grimm included the Kyffhäuser legend in the first volume of their Deutsche Sagen, as number 23. Emperor Frederick, it says, did not die but sits enchanted in the Kyffhäuser, a hill range in Thuringia whose highest point, the Kulpenberg, stands just under 474 metres. He sits at a stone table with his head propped on his hand, and his beard grows around the table. When it has circled the table three times, the emperor will wake. On his return he will hang his shield on a withered tree, which will turn green, and better times will come.
Two small stories belong to it. In one, the mountain leads a farmer hauling grain into its interior in the year 1669 and exchanges his goods for sacks of gold. In the other, the emperor hears a shepherd piping and asks whether the ravens still circle the mountain. When the shepherd says yes, the emperor sighs: then he must sleep a hundred years longer. Ravens are an old image. Anyone who thinks of Odin's two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, is not wrong to wonder, but we cannot prove that the legend inherited them. For the bird itself, see our piece on the raven in the North.
Who is this emperor? Frederick I, called Barbarossa ("Red Beard"), drowned on 10 June 1190 in the Saleph river in Asia Minor while leading the Third Crusade. The legend ties him to the Kyffhäuser, where an imperial castle was completed under the Staufer; in nearby Tilleda an imperial palace is attested by a charter of 972. But this is precisely where the sorting-out begins.
Barbarossa's grandson Frederick II died in 1250. Soon afterwards, the expectation took hold that he was not really dead and would return to put the empire in order. One man exploited it: Tile Kolup, an adventurer who in 1284 declared himself the returned emperor in Cologne. There he was mocked and driven out. In Neuss he found followers and issued charters under a forged seal, and in summer 1285 he held court in Wetzlar. King Rudolf of Habsburg captured him there and had him burned as a heretic. That a false emperor could find serious support in the Rhineland shows how alive the hope of a return was.
The tie to Barbarossa and the Kyffhäuser is younger. English-language reference works state that the Kyffhäuser legend is documented only from the late 17th century, and older versions of the same expectation attach to Frederick II, for example in Sicily. The Grimm version mentions a farmer's experience from 1669. Between 1250 and 1669 lie some four hundred years in which we cannot grasp the emperor under the mountain. That does not mean the story was not told. It means we cannot prove it.
In the 19th century the folk legend turns into a political image. Friedrich Rückert writes his poem "Der alte Barbarossa", usually dated to around 1813, and reads the emperor under the mountain as a promise of a united Germany after the Napoleonic years. Heinrich Heine pokes fun at it in Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen: in a dream he visits the emperor, who has trouble with his horses and soldiers, is startled by the guillotine and does not understand the modern world. Karl Kraus later put it in a one-line pun, "Kyffhäuser – Kaufhäuser", mountain versus department stores.
After the founding of the German Empire in 1871 the Prussian monarchy had every reason to cultivate the legend. Wilhelm I was celebrated as Barbarossa returned. Between 1890 and 1896 the Kyffhäuser Monument rose on the ruins of the imperial castle, with a figure of Barbarossa and an equestrian statue of Emperor Wilhelm. It was dedicated on 18 June 1896, the anniversary of Barbarossa's coronation. National Socialism later made use of the Barbarossa myth as well. Anyone telling the legend today does well to keep these layers in mind: the sleeping emperor is an old expectation, but also an image that was pressed into service for national politics in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Barbarossa is not the only sleeper in the German-speaking world. The Grimms give, among others, "Emperor Charles in the Untersberg": Charlemagne sits in the Untersberg near Salzburg with crown and sceptre, and on feast days his beard is wrapped in a jewelled band. A note says that Franz Sartori took the emperor for Charles V, while others named Frederick. When the beard reaches the corner of the table for the third time, the end of the world begins: the Antichrist appears, a battle is fought on the Walserfeld near Salzburg, and the Last Judgment follows. Here the return is no longer a political hope but part of the Christian end-time.
For Aachen, the city of Charlemagne, we found no mountain sleeper in the collections we consulted. Wilhelm Ruland's Rheinische Sagen (1931) prefers to tell of Charles the story of Fastrada's ring, which an archbishop throws into water and which binds the emperor to the place where he founds Aachen. That is an origin legend, not a return story. Ludwig Bechstein's Deutsches Sagenbuch also has chapters titled "The Emperor in the Untersberg", "Emperor Charles in the Well and in the Mountain" and "Bergentrückung", "removal into the mountain". Whether a Rhenish pattern emerges from these we could not establish, and we leave the question open.
The Grimms add further sleepers: the three Tells, liberators of Switzerland who rest in a cave on Lake Lucerne and are to rise in time of need ("not yet time", says the eldest to a shepherd's son), and the Seven Sleepers in the cave, whose bodies do not decay and who are one day to preach to the heathen. Denmark knows Holger Danske, who sits in the cellars of Kronborg Castle with his beard grown into a marble table, waking only in real danger; Hans Christian Andersen retold him. From Britain comes King Arthur, whom a herdsman finds asleep with his knights in a cave, and who in Welsh tradition probably has a forerunner in Brân the Blessed. In Portugal, the Sebastianists await King Sebastian, whom they imagine on a fog-wrapped island.
Motif research has technical names for all this. Stith Thompson listed the motif as D 1960.2, the "Kyffhäuser type", and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus as D 1960.1 and tale type AT 766. The list of sleepers thus runs from emperors through freedom fighters to folk heroes of other cultures. When so many peoples tell the same story, that speaks first for a widespread human need and against Germanic inheritance.
The Visigothic king Alaric I led his army to Rome in 410 and died the same year in southern Italy, near Cosenza in Calabria. The Gothic historian Jordanes, who around 551 condensed the history of his people from a lost work by Cassiodorus, describes the burial in his Getica (section 158): the river Busento was diverted, the grave dug in the river bed, the king laid in it with his spoils, and the water allowed back into its old course. The labourers, Roman captives, were killed so that nobody could betray the spot.
The Busento is a 95-kilometre tributary of the Crati and joins it in the middle of Cosenza. August von Platen made the scene famous in 1820 with his poem "Das Grab im Busento". The grave has never been found, despite many searches. Alaric is therefore no sleeper in Barbarossa's sense; there is neither return nor expectation. What the stories share is only concealment: a great dead man whose resting place stays secret becomes a magnet for tales and treasure hunts.
How far Jordanes can be trusted is open. He wrote more than a century after the event and relied on Cassiodorus. The diversion rests on this single late report; nothing has been confirmed archaeologically. One should not build a connection with the sleeper motif out of it. More on the Goths and their history is in our article on the Goths.
Sometimes it is not a single sleeper. The Chronicle of Ursberg reports that near Worms in 1223 armed warriors were seen stepping out of a mountain and, hours later, vanishing back into it. One man took heart and spoke to one of them. The answer: they were the ghosts of fallen knights. Here the mountain belief touches the Wild Hunt, the host of the dead that, in folk tradition, rides through the air above all in the Twelve Nights. That the Wild Hunt itself is led by the Germanic god Wodan is an interpretation of Jacob Grimm in the 19th century that remains disputed; its traces in medieval sources are thinner than the picture suggests.
Worms lies on the Rhine, so the note is particularly tempting for us: it comes from a medieval chronicle, not from a 19th-century collection of legends. Still, we give it only as it stands in the tradition. We have not examined the chronicle text itself, and we treat the story as a report of a rumour, not as an eyewitness protocol.
Why so many stories choose the mountain as the dwelling of the removed has not been settled. Four explanations are offered, and none is proven.
Probably several of these layers work together, and every region weights them differently. At Helgafell the family belief with the burial mound is probably in front; at the Kyffhäuser, imperial hope and end-time thinking; with Alaric, simply the wish to hide a grave.
A word on the limits. We do not know how widespread the Icelandic mountain belief was beyond Snæfellsnes, and we cannot decide whether the author of the Eyrbyggja saga describes an old custom or shapes a story. We do not know when exactly the Kyffhäuser legend attached to Barbarossa; the oldest traceable versions date only from the 17th century. And we do not know where Alaric lies.
What is secure is the textual evidence at the individual places: Thorolf's belief in Helgafell, Thorstein's welcome in the fell, the Grimm versions of the Kyffhäuser and Untersberg legends, the role of Tile Kolup, Jordanes' report of the Busento grave, the Kyffhäuser Monument of 1896. That is a lot, and enough to tell the motif seriously. Anyone visiting the mountains of the legends should keep the difference in mind: behind the word "old" stand centuries and very different people.
Who sleeps in the Kyffhäuser? According to the legend, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, who drowned in 1190 on the Third Crusade. Older versions of the expectation concerned his grandson Frederick II, who died in 1250.
Is the legend a Germanic belief? No, the Kyffhäuser legend is medieval and early modern in character. The Icelandic belief that families enter a holy mountain is an older, separate idea, handed down only in texts of the 13th century and later.
What is Helgafell? A low "Holy Fell" on Iceland's Snæfellsnes peninsula. According to the Eyrbyggja saga the settler Thorolf Mostrarskegg declared it a holy place, and he believed he would go there after death.
Are there sleeping kings in the Rhineland too? In the collections we consulted we found no documented mountain sleeper for Aachen. Documented are Tile Kolup, who appeared in Cologne and Neuss as a false emperor in 1284, and the Chronicle of Ursberg, which tells of warrior ghosts near Worms in 1223.
Where is Alaric buried? According to Jordanes, in the bed of the Busento near Cosenza. The grave has never been found, and whether the report is true cannot be checked.
Why does the legend stay so popular? It joins a simple image, the sleeper at a stone table, with a great hope, the return of the lost. That it is still used politically makes it important to keep its layers apart.
Für Mut. Für Erinnerung. Für Legenden, die weiterleben.
The Wild Hunt · The Rauhnächte & Mother's Night · Hel – goddess and realm of the dead · How the Germanic peoples honoured their dead · The sacrificial moor of Oberdorla.
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