A man whose face and grave we do not know kept Charlemagne busy for years. Here we tell the Saxon Wars from 772 to the baptism at Attigny, year by year and source by source: what the annals report, what scholarship makes of it, and what legend and monuments added later.
Picture a man whose birth year we do not know, whose face and voice are lost, and whose grave nobody can prove – and who still stands on monuments, in songs, in school books and in place names more than a thousand years later. That is Widukind. He appears in the sources for only a few years, between 777 and 785, and then disappears as if history had shut the door in his face. Everything we know about him was written down by his enemies.
You will find a short overview in our article Widukind – the Saxon leader against Charlemagne. Here we tell the story at full length, year by year, with the places where it happened and the people who carry names in the annals. We narrate scene by scene, but we invent nothing: where a source is silent, we say so. Where a scene comes from later tradition, we say that too. And where all we know is what somebody else wrote about the source, we say that as well.
The frame comes from Frankish texts. The Annales regni Francorum (the Royal Frankish Annals) are a year-by-year chronicle from the circle of the royal court; a revised version later smoothed the text and added judgements. Alongside them stand Einhard's Vita Karoli – the life of Charlemagne by his learned courtier – and the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, a legal text for conquered Saxony. Later material includes the Translatio S. Alexandri (mid-ninth century), the Vita Mathildis (tenth century), the Res gestae Saxonicae by the monk Widukind of Corvey (tenth century) and the verse chronicle of the Poeta Saxo (around 890). Then there are the letters of Alcuin, the Anglo-Saxon scholar at court, who gives us a critical view from the inside.
One warning up front: because the sources are thin, any long narrative is partly reconstruction. So we keep three layers apart throughout – what the sources report, what scholarship infers from them, and what legend and the present day have made of it.
When Charles became king of the Franks in 768, his realm bordered a country with no capital. The Saxons lived between the Rhine, the Elbe and the North Sea, roughly where Westphalia, Lower Saxony and parts of Saxony-Anhalt lie today. Four groups are usually distinguished: the Westphalians in the west, the Engrians on the middle Weser, the Eastphalians towards the Elbe, and the Nordalbingians beyond the lower Elbe (more in our articles on the Saxons, on Engern and on Nordalbingia). No king united them. What bound them together was language, law and faith in the old gods.
Between Franks and Saxons there had been border war, raiding and tribute for generations. The Frankish mayors of the palace, Charles's ancestors, had marched east again and again, and the annals speak of campaigns and of tribute the Saxons had to pay. But these were raids and humiliations, not conquests. The frontier stayed a strip of land where farmsteads burned, cattle vanished and neither side owed the other anything.
Then there was the mission. Anglo-Saxon monks had been working on the edge of Saxon territory for decades. Boniface is known to have addressed a letter to the Saxons around 738, urging them to convert and appealing to the fact that they were kin of the English (we know this only from reports about his letter collection and have not read the wording in full). Missionaries such as Lebuin, whom we meet in a moment, pressed further in. Some paid with their lives. The mission was not the first cause of the war, but it later gave the war its purpose.
Important for everything that follows: the war Charles began in 772 was not the first, but it was the first designed to last. He did not want to plunder and withdraw. He wanted to fit Saxony into his realm, with church, counties and law. The Saxons understood that very well.
One scene gives us a rare look into Saxon society, and it comes from a saint's life, not a chronicle. The Vita Lebuini antiqua, a biography of the Anglo-Saxon missionary Lebuin, describes an annual assembly of the Saxons at a place called Marklo on the Weser. According to the text, twelve representatives of the nobles, the free and the half-free came from each district to give judgement and to decide on war and peace. Lebuin, the Vita says, stepped into the middle of this assembly and threatened the Saxons with divine punishment if they would not convert; they wanted to kill him and he was saved only by the intervention of one man.
How much of this scene is edification we cannot judge. Saints' lives want to prove something, and the author probably wrote decades after the events. But the picture fits what we otherwise suspect: the Saxons had assemblies in which nobles and free men had a say – the world of the thing. There were leaders chosen or accepted for war, but no king. That had an advantage – no blow against a capital could decide the war – and a drawback: when one group made peace, it did not bind the others. The Franks later called exactly that treachery. From the Saxon side it was simply each group's right to decide for itself.
In the summer of 772 Charles held an assembly at Worms and, according to the annals, resolved to march against the Saxons. The army crossed into Saxon territory and took the Eresburg, a hill fort on what is now the Obermarsberg in the Sauerland. And then Charles destroyed, in the words of the Royal Frankish Annals, the sanctuary the Saxons called the "Irminsul".
What the Irminsul was, we do not know exactly. The Franks describe it as an "idol" or a great wooden pillar; a ninth-century writer, Rudolf of Fulda, calls it a column that "held up the universe". That is the state of the tradition, and it is enough to see that this was no ordinary tree trunk. Where the sanctuary stood is disputed; the Eresburg is the plausible but not the only suggestion. Everything further on meaning, spread and controversy is in our article on the Irminsul.
Charles stayed three days, and the annals mention that gold and silver were found. The revised version adds that during a drought water suddenly flowed, a sign of divine favour; that is a Frankish interpretation, not an eyewitness report. More important than any miracle is the purpose: Charles struck deliberately at what held the Saxons together. Destroying a sanctuary signalled that this war concerned not only land but order and belief. Saxons gave hostages. That sufficed to close the campaign, not to end the war.
Widukind does not appear in the reports for 772. One can only imagine what went through the mind of a young or middle-aged Westphalian noble at the sight of Frankish warriors in the Sauerland. But that too would be invention. We note: the name is absent.
Then Charles looked south. In 773 and 774 he fought in Italy against the Lombards and made himself their king. In those months the Saxons used the gap: according to the annals they raided Frankish territory in Hesse, destroyed a church at Fritzlar and drove the garrisons out of the new strongpoints wherever they could. From 775 Charles answered with a major campaign through Westphalia, Engern and Eastphalia. The annals name the capture of the Sigiburg, the fortress above the Ruhr and Lenne at Hohensyburg, the restoration of the Eresburg and an advance as far as the Oker. Many Saxons submitted and gave hostages.
The pattern that appears here for the first time will shape the next ten years. The Franks march, take fortresses, leave garrisons and withdraw. The Saxons submit where they must. And as soon as the troops are gone, the rising comes. In 776 it did: while Charles was back in Italy dealing with another rebellion, the Saxons attacked the Eresburg and besieged the Sigiburg. How it ended, the annals tell from the Frankish side: the besiegers were beaten off. As with any war report written from the victors' side, we cannot know how much of it is propaganda.
Charles came back the same year, fast and in force. At the springs of the Lippe, at Lippspringe, he received the Saxons. According to the annals they submitted and were baptised in great numbers. And they gave a promise, which is also recorded: if they ever again opposed the king's will, they would forfeit their freedom and their property. Remember that clause. It is one of the roots of what Frankish chroniclers will later call "breach of faith". Someone who swears an oath on these terms and then takes up arms again loses, in the Frankish view, not just the war but his rights. Charles then had a fortification built on the Lippe, which the literature calls the Karlsburg and links with the forerunner of Paderborn; we have not checked its exact location ourselves.
In the summer of 777 Charles summoned the great men of his realm to Paderborn. It was the first imperial assembly on Saxon soil. A palace with a church, guests, tents, a court of law; Franks, Bavarians and Alemanni came from all directions, as did envoys from Muslim Spain asking Charles for help. And Saxons, of course. The annals say that nearly all the Saxon leaders came, submitted and declared themselves ready for baptism. Whoever did not appear was conspicuous by his absence.
You can picture the scene without inventing anything: the annals say envoys from Muslim Spain also appeared at Paderborn and asked the king for help – the trigger for the Spanish campaign of the following year. The Saxons swore loyalty, were baptised and gave hostages. For Charles it looked as if the war was won. Here our knowledge of the mood of those present ends; what went through the heads of the Saxons who swore the oath, no source says.
One man was missing, and the annals record it: Widukind. According to the Frankish source he had fled to the Northmen, more precisely to Sigfrid, king of the Danes; the two versions of the annals phrase this differently, and what is meant is the neighbouring realm to the north beyond the Elbe. (We have not laid the wording of the two versions side by side in the original.) This is Widukind's first appearance in the written record: a man who does not come. We meet him first as an empty place in an assembly.
One should not make too much of it. The sources do not say that Widukind was invited to Paderborn, nor what his rank was, nor why he left. Nor do they say that he was the head of a rising before Charles called the assembly. Only in hindsight, in the victors' narrative, does he become a figure who already in 777 "instigated the breach of faith". Whether he knew Sigfrid personally is open. Of King Sigfrid we know only that the sources call him a Danish king; what he offered Widukind remains unknown. Modern scholarship assumes that Widukind had family or political ties across the Elbe; that is a plausible assumption, not evidence.
The honest answer is short: we do not know exactly. The name is Old Saxon and means roughly "child of the wood" (widu – wood, forest; kind – child); it occurs in many variants such as Widukind, Wittekind and Wedekind. The annals never call him king. Frankish texts describe him as "dux" of the Saxons (according to the literature; we did not look up the passages ourselves), and "dux" can simply mean "war leader" rather than "duke" in the later sense; he was in any case not a duke of the Saxons in a constitutional sense. The annals speak of him as a Saxon who resists; scholarship counts him among the Westphalian nobility. Where his estate lay is not recorded. Later tradition linked him with places in Westphalia around Enger and Herford; those are attributions of memory, not of the period.
The sources also do not reveal whether he was one of many leaders or the foremost. Medieval chroniclers tend to make an opponent the originator, someone who can be named and condemned. The Royal Frankish Annals do this with Widukind. When they present him as the instigator of the rising (so the assessment for 782; we have not verified a wording such as "author of wickedness"), it is partly a literary device: the rising of many groups acquires a face. How far Widukind really pulled the strings cannot be decided.
In 778 Charles seemed absent, once again. He led an army over the Pyrenees into Spain, at the invitation of Muslim governors, as arranged at Paderborn. The campaign failed: the hoped-for success at Zaragoza did not materialise, and on the retreat the rearguard was ambushed by Basques in the pass of Roncesvalles. The later Song of Roland turned that into a heroic epic; the annals are rather curt. While the king was still in Spain the Saxons, according to the annals, pushed as far as the Rhine, plundered and burned and, in the revised version, reached the area of Deutz opposite Cologne. Scholarship attributes this raid to the Westphalians and suspects Widukind as leader; that is a conjecture, as his name does not stand at this point in the annals.
The sources tell the following years briefly. In 779 Charles marched through Westphalia to the Weser. In 780 he reached the Elbe, where, according to the annals, Saxons were ready to submit. It looked like calm, and Charles bet on administration. At the assembly in Lippspringe in 782 Saxony was divided into counties on the Frankish pattern and counts were appointed – Saxon nobles as well as Frankish ones. For some this was a chance to save their rank; for others a humiliation. In this mixture of carrot and stick lies the material for everything that follows in 782.
In the summer of 782 what had long been simmering suddenly came together. According to the annals Widukind returned from the north – again the Frankish version, which wants him in Denmark – and the Saxons rose at the moment an army was gathering for a campaign against the Slavs in the east. The key word of the source is "treachery": whoever had been installed as count was attacked, whoever was pro-Frankish fled.
The army consisted of Franks under three high-ranking courtiers: the chamberlain Adalgis, the constable Geilo and the count palatine Worad. A contingent from Ripuaria, the Rhineland, under Count Theoderic, a relative of the king, joined them. They were meant, according to the annals, to fight the Slavs. When they heard that Saxons were gathering, they turned around and found the enemy at the Süntel, a ridge south of the Weser near Hameln. Then came what the sources present as a mistake: the Franks took the Saxons for weak and attacked without coordination. The Saxons struck. The revised version lists the losses: the two envoys, four counts and some twenty other nobles. What became of Theoderic and who carried the news to the king we have not checked in the annals' text; the names of the commanders too are given according to the literature. What happened to the common soldiers is not in the texts.
Here too: that Widukind commanded at the Süntel is not proven. The annals say the Saxons took up arms "at Widukind's instigation", but not that he stood on the field. The Süntel itself is not archaeologically confirmed as a battle site; several spots in the area have been suggested. So we tell the scene only as far as the sources carry it: an army without a plan, an opponent who seizes the moment, a setback for the king.
How the king took the news is not in the texts; that the loss of so many high-ranking men hit him is likely. The annals say only: Charles hurried "with all the Franks he could gather in haste" to Saxony. He came so fast that the Saxons had little to set against him. And they did what they had done in earlier years: they offered submission.
There are passages in the annals one has to read twice. The one for 782 is among them. The Saxons, it says, handed over to the king the men who had stirred up the rising – Widukind himself not, for he was gone. According to the annals there were no fewer than four thousand five hundred. And then: they were beheaded at the king's command at Verden on the Aller – the revised version adds: in a single day. After that, the annals continue, Charles returned to Francia.
That is what the sources say. Everything else is interpretation. The number 4500 stands in the Royal Frankish Annals; in the revised version it is phrased as a minimum. Other contemporary annals, as we learn from the literature, say only that the king had the Saxons "beheaded" or killed "many", without a number. That so large a figure appears in a medieval chronicle does not mean it is right. Medieval numbers are often orders of magnitude or symbolic values; nothing here can be checked. Some historians think the figure inflated, others take it as an order of magnitude. A nineteenth-century thesis wanted to turn "beheaded" (decollati) into "resettled" (delocati), a scribal error behind which a deportation would have stood. That thesis has not prevailed; scholarship mostly follows the wording. Where exactly it happened is also open: Verden on the Aller is the named place, but no mass grave or trace of the execution has been found. So we do not know it archaeologically. We know it because Charles's own chroniclers wrote it down, without softening it.
That is precisely what is disturbing: the annals do not defend the deed. They relate it in one sentence. Contemporary protest is rare and quiet. Alcuin, the scholar at court, criticises policy towards the Saxons in later years (more below); whether he mentions Verden explicitly we have not checked. One line of explanation in scholarship runs like this: the Saxons had sworn submission under oath, so in the Frankish view their rising was perjury and high treason, and death was the penalty. That perhaps explains how the deed seemed justified to the court; it does not justify it, and it does not explain the scale.
Verden was not an end point but an accelerant. The Saxons' answer came the following year.
The annals for 783 are short and warlike. Charles again led his army across the Rhine, and the Saxons, it says, prepared for battle at Detmold. A battle was fought there which, in the Frankish account, ended in the king's favour; great slaughter among the Saxons is reported. Then, with barely a breath, a second engagement followed on the Hase in the land of the Westphalians, which the king likewise claimed. Booty and prisoners, it says, were taken in great numbers, and Charles returned to Francia "with victory".
The course of events is judged more cautiously today. Scholars debate where exactly the fighting near Detmold took place (the Grotenburg near Detmold is mentioned, partly because finds there may suggest a Frankish presence; here we rely on the state of the literature, not on our own inspection), and some accounts see in the sequence more a struggle than a clean victory: a Frankish army that suffered losses and withdrew before reinforcements turned the situation on the Hase. That is one reading. The annals themselves are literature of the victors.
What matters for us: even after Verden, Saxons stood once more in open battle. The war was not broken. And at neither of these places do the annals name Widukind.
The year 784 is among the most striking of the whole war, and it is mostly a weather report. Charles, according to the annals, again gathered an army and went to Saxony; the details of the year's marches are thin in the texts. According to scholarship the king stayed with his army in Saxony over the winter – and that was new. Until then the Franks had gone home in autumn, and the Saxons had recovered and regrouped over the winter. We give this as the state of research and have not checked the passage in the text of the annals.
What this meant for the land can only be guessed: burned farmsteads, requisitioned cattle, men who could not work their fields, women and children in the frost. Here the word "strategy" has to be taken seriously. A war against a people without a capital can be won if one denies them the chance to recover. Whether Widukind sought help from the Frisians that winter, as one modern account has it, or from the Danes, we do not know for certain. That he remained active speaks for the fact that the sources can name him again in 785.
It is worth pausing at this winter. Almost never do we see in the annals what people on the Saxon side felt. We guess only from what happens next: negotiations. Whoever still has the strength to talk after two years of war, hunger and an occupation winter wants to know what can be saved.
In the summer of 785 Charles advanced north-east into the Bardengau, the region around today's Bardowick on the Ilmenau, close to the Elbe. That was the edge of Saxon land, where, according to the annals, Widukind and his companion Abbio (called "Albion" in some accounts) had withdrawn across the Elbe into Nordalbingia. It matters to keep this geography in mind: over time Charles had pushed the Saxons north, to the very border of their country.
What then happened reads almost soberly in the annals. Charles sent messengers to Widukind and Abbio; they were to submit and be baptised. As the accounts have it, the two demanded hostages as security, and Charles granted them. That is a remarkable detail: Charles, who three years earlier had thousands beheaded, negotiated, offered safe conduct and took hostages as pledges. He evidently wanted a peace that bound not only the defeated but their leaders. Widukind came with his retinue, the sources say, to Attigny, a Frankish palace in the Ardennes in north-eastern France, far from Saxony. There both were baptised.
The annals name Attigny as the place. A recent account points out that later sources know eleven other baptism sites (among them Paderborn, Worms and the Hohensyburg); these are legends and local traditions and change nothing about the annals' account. The date too we do not know first-hand: modern literature gives Christmas 785, and we have not read it in the annals themselves. As for sponsorship, Charles himself is said to have stood as godfather, to have given gifts and confirmed Widukind's position. That makes sense: a baptism with the king as sponsor created, by the understanding of the time, a spiritual kinship. The defeated man became a protégé who, if he kept the pact, had his place in the order of the realm. Whether Widukind saw it that way, we do not know.
The pope heard of it and, according to the sources, had a thanksgiving celebrated in Rome. The literature says it was Pope Hadrian I, in 786. That fits what the baptism meant to the Franks: a victory of the church, not of the sword alone.
Why Widukind agreed, no source says. We have only possibilities: exhaustion after the winter, the prospect of keeping property and rank, the hope of sparing his own people, insight into the superior force. Modern research discusses all this without being able to decide. The old picture of the "freedom fighter" who finally bows is also an interpretation. Just as well an aristocrat who wanted to keep his rank might have used the opportunity. There is an honest gap here, and we leave it standing.
Anyone who wants to know what the Saxons were fighting against must look at the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae. It is a list of legal provisions for conquered Saxony, probably issued in the years after 782. It is not precisely dated. The traditional view ties it to the time between the rising of 782 and 785; one historian has proposed a later date, around 795, but that dating has not found general acceptance.
The content is harsh. The death penalty stands, in the form we know, for church robbery, for killing priests, for breaking the fast, for human sacrifice to the old gods and for burning the dead in pagan fashion. And it stands for refusing baptism: whoever among the Saxons wants to remain unbaptised and evades baptism shall die. That is how the literature summarises the provisions; we have not checked individual clause numbers and the exact wording against the text itself. Added to this were payments to the church, the tithe.
One has to imagine what that meant. Anyone who wanted to bury a dead relative as his parents had done – on the pyre – risked his life. The old funeral feasts, the offerings, the gatherings at sacred places: everything old became a capital crime. That is the background against which the Saxon risings must be seen. For more on how conversion and violence went together here, and how far the old faith lived on, see our article on the Christianisation of the Germanic peoples. For the Saxons' own religion the tradition remains thin; what is known about Donar and Woden comes from late and foreign sources, and the Old Saxon baptismal vow from Carolingian times names Donar, Woden and Saxnot as the powers to be renounced – one of the very few places where Saxon god names are transmitted from a Saxon mouth (we know it only from the literature).
Before moving on, a look at what annals actually are. They were not written to answer later historians' questions. In their first version the Royal Frankish Annals arose year by year in the circle of the royal court; their purpose was to record the king's deeds, which also meant presenting them favourably. The revised version, which we attribute to Einhard (research knows it as Annales qui dicuntur Einhardi), smooths, adds and judges. Both belong to the same family of texts and are therefore not independent witnesses.
That applies to Verden too. That other annals confirm the deed, without a number, supports the core. That the number 4,500 comes from the family of the Royal Frankish Annals means that we do not have it confirmed twice. So we stay with this sentence: that in 782 a large number of Saxons were killed on the king's orders is well attested; the figure 4,500 stands in the Royal Frankish Annals and cannot be independently checked.
Einhard, who knew Charles personally, wrote the king's biography after his death. On the Saxon war he reaches a clear verdict, and this quotation belongs in any long account of the period:
"… no war ever undertaken by the Franks was waged with such persistence and bitterness, or cost so much labor."Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ch. 7 – in an older English translation (as in William Stearns Davis, Readings in Ancient History, 1912; translator not named there)
We know the quotation from a text collection, not from the original; we therefore give it only in the English wording of that translation. Einhard goes on to say the war lasted thirty-three years and ended only when the Saxons renounced the "devil-worship" of their forefathers, accepted the Christian sacraments and united with the Franks into one people. Thirty-three years: that is 772 to 804. Widukind's name does not occur in this passage.
One should not be deceived: Einhard writes as a man of the court, as an admirer of Charles. When he describes the bitterness of the war he praises the king who saw it through. And yet the sentence holds a truth we should take seriously: even the Franks felt this war to be an especially hard one.
There was doubt at Charles's court too. Alcuin of York, the Anglo-Saxon scholar who shaped the court intellectually, wrote letters in the 790s criticising the methods of the mission. According to the summary of research that we reproduce here, he argued in essence: one can press a person into baptism but not into faith; faith is a matter of free will. He also warned against demanding the tithe from the newly converted straight away, since it put them off. This is no verbatim quotation but a paraphrase; we have not read the letters in full.
For the history of the Saxons this matters because it shows that the coercion did not go unchallenged, not even in the victors' camp. And indeed, according to the literature, Charles in 797 softened some of the harshest provisions in a new law for Saxony. That is a sign that the violence of the early years could not be sustained.
Anyone searching for Widukind soon runs into "Widukind's oath". The sober answer: no attested, transmitted oath of Widukind exists. No source gives a wording, neither a vow against Charles nor a pledge to the old gods. The annals speak of oaths of the Saxons as a whole, sworn and broken (that is how they report it for 776 and 777), but not as the words of one man. What Widukind said or promised at his baptism at Attigny we do not know; the baptismal vow was a liturgical formula, not his personal statement.
"Widukinds Schwur" ("Widukind's Oath") is the title of a song by the band Asgard Cantina on the album "Die letzten Säulen" (more on our music page). It is an artistic interpretation that gives the figure a voice which history denied him; it is not a source and makes no claim to be one. We mention it because art is a legitimate way to fill gaps, as long as one knows it is art.
After Attigny Widukind vanishes from the contemporary sources. No date of death, no place. That does not mean he died at once; it means the chroniclers lost interest. The rebel was baptised, the opponent had become a protégé, and what a protégé did was no longer worth an annals entry. The war went on without him. Further risings came from 793, and until 804 Charles, according to the literature, deported parts of the population, settled Saxons in the Frankish realm and gave land to Franks. According to Einhard the war ended in 804.
Two oddities surround Widukind's end. A late tale, the twelfth-century Kaiserchronik, has him slain by Gerold of Swabia; but Gerold fell in 799 fighting the Avars, so the story is literary, not historical. A modern hypothesis by the historian Gerd Althoff links an entry "Widukind" in the confraternity book of Reichenau to the Saxon and reads it as a sign of a life in a monastery or in exile; scholars do not agree on this. We give both from the literature.
What does turn up are the family trees. The Translatio S. Alexandri, an account of the transfer of the relics of St Alexander to Wildeshausen in 851, names a Count Waltbert as Widukind's grandson – Widukind himself, so the literature, had a son Wiprecht, whose son was Waltbert, whose son in turn was Wikbert, bishop of Verden. That means that a generation or two later the family Charles had fought belonged to the Christian imperial aristocracy; a descendant became bishop at the very place where Saxons died in 782. It is a moving turn, but one stays cautious about how exactly the kinship is documented and how far the text is history and how far family propaganda.
The most famous descendant is Matilda. She lived in the tenth century, was the wife of King Henry I and the mother of Otto the Great. According to the literature, the Vita Mathildis antiquior, her biography, the Res gestae Saxonicae of Widukind of Corvey and the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg agree in tracing her back to Widukind. That had political value: the Ottonian kings came from Saxony, and the link to the old leader made Charles's enemy the forefather of a new royal house. The monk Widukind of Corvey bears the same name as the rebel but wrote 150 years later and is not the same person.
The Poeta Saxo also belongs in this row of late witnesses, an anonymous poet who around 890 told the deeds of Charles in Latin verse. As far as we know he relied on the annals and gave them poetic dress; as an independent source on Widukind he is therefore of little use, and we have not read his text ourselves. What matters is the distance: between the events and these texts lie decades to centuries, and each generation told Widukind a little differently. The Saxons' own self-image of those years, the voice of the defeated, stays silent.
In the collegiate church at Enger in East Westphalia a "Widukind grave" is shown to this day. According to the literature the grave slab dates from around 1100. Investigations presented in the Widukind Museum in Enger suggest the bones there could indeed be old; the attribution is not proven. So we say: Enger is an old, serious place of memory, not a proven grave. A legend also makes Widukind the founder of the church; that cannot be demonstrated either.
The less the sources tell of Widukind, the more legend told. Three stories have taken hold. All three are legends, not reports.
The first is about the horse. Before his baptism Widukind is said to have ridden a black horse, and after it to have received a white one from Charles; the image of the white horse, the "Sachsenross" (Saxon steed), became a heraldic animal. The arms of the district of Herford bear a leaping horse that tradition links with this legend (according to the literature). Whether a historical core exists cannot be shown; the leaping horse is a heraldic motif that appears much later.
The second is about the spring: near Bergkirchen in Bad Oeynhausen Widukind's horse is said to have struck a spring from the ground with its hoof, the "Wittekindsquelle". Scholarship suspects older spring sanctuaries at such places; that is a hypothesis. Similar Wittekind springs are named at Lübbecke and at Porta Westfalica.
The third is the tale of how the opponent became a Christian. It has Widukind slip into the Frankish camp in disguise to spy on the enemy and observe a service at Easter; what he sees moves him so deeply that he converts. The details vary with the version, and the story is attested in nineteenth-century collections, not in the period. It has a recognisable function: it turns a political peace into a story of grace, a defeat into the salvation of a soul.
In the nineteenth century, when Germans told themselves their history as a nation, Widukind became a figure of the homeland. In 1899 an equestrian statue was unveiled in Herford. It was melted down in 1942, and in 1959 a new one was set up after designs by Heinrich Wefing, executed by Walter Kruse, again showing the horse legend (according to the literature). Add Wittekind fountains, the Wittekind stone near Exter (originally a court stone, set up at the end of the 16th century), the Wittekindsweg, schools and institutions that bear his name, and a memorial plaque in the Walhalla near Regensburg. He appears in the Westfalenlied and the Niedersachsenlied. All of this shows how alive such a thinly attested figure has remained.
At the same time one has to say what Widukind was made to serve in bad times. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nationalist-racial circles interpreted him as a freedom hero against a supposedly "alien" Christianity and against Charles, whom they declared the "Saxon butcher". In the 1930s the propaganda of the National Socialists used this reading; at Verden a "Sachsenhain" with 4,500 stones was created, which put the victims of 782 in the service of that ideology. That is historically untenable. The Widukind of the sources is a nobleman who fought, fled, negotiated and had himself baptised, and no forerunner of any twentieth-century worldview. The opposite picture – Charles as a pure bringer of civilisation – distorts as well: he was a ruler who had thousands executed and whose own advisers criticised the coercion.
What remains? A story of two sides, of which we know only one in writing. Anyone who wants to understand the Saxons must read their opponents and listen for what is not there. We tell it because it belongs to our homeland: to Westphalia and Lower Saxony, to the places on the Lippe, Weser and Aller, to names and legends that remained when the gods went. For courage. For memory. For legends that live on – and for the courage to call legends legends.
Who was Widukind? A Saxon nobleman of the eighth century whom the Frankish Royal Annals name between 777 and 785 as the head of resistance against Charlemagne. His birth year, home and date of death are unknown.
Is there an oath of Widukind? No. No historical oath is transmitted. "Widukinds Schwur" is the title of a song by the band Asgard Cantina, an artistic interpretation, not a source.
Were 4,500 Saxons really executed at Verden? The Royal Frankish Annals report it for 782. The execution is well attested, but the number stands only in that family of sources and cannot be independently checked. The thesis of a mere resettlement has not prevailed.
Was Charlemagne really Widukind's godfather? The accounts name him as sponsor at the baptism at Attigny in 785. The role is plausible, but we have not checked the passage in the text of the annals itself.
Is Widukind buried in Enger? That cannot be established with certainty. The collegiate church holds a tomb slab from around 1100, and the bones may be old, but the attribution is not proven.
Widukind – the short overview · The Irminsul · The Saxons · The Christianisation of the Germanic peoples · The thing · Engern · Nordalbingia · The Externsteine · Music: Asgard Cantina
Widukind · The Irminsul · The Saxons · The Christianisation of the Germanic Peoples · The Angrians (Engern).
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