Several more charges might be brought against this otherwise enlightened ruler. He was no friend of the rising liberty of the German cities. He went astray in his treatment of the question of serfage, and in his action against the Waldenses. Nevertheless, the people at large only remembered his persistent struggle against the arrogance of the Bishop of Rome, who twice raised Imperial Pretenders against Frederick the Second with the aid of spiritual princes in Germany, and placed him under his theocratic anathema. In an access of contemptuous wrath the Kaiser exclaimed on such an occasion: How? The Pope has such outrageous boldness? Where comes this boldness from? Where are my crowns? Let them be brought hither!' And they were fetched from his treasury: the Imperial Roman crown; the German kingly crown; the crown of the Two Sicilies; the crown of Burgundy; the crown of Arelat; and eke the crown of Jerusalem!

Enough has been said to show that the dazzling figure of this ruler easily struck the popular imagination, whilst his struggle against the theocratic Pretender to universal dominion enlisted the sympathy of all patriots on his side. In the years of confusion which followed, the tale about his coming return was gradually evolved. At first, his whereabouts was held to be uncertain, his very death being doubted. Then the ever active fancy of the popular mind mythically located him in a splendid palace under the earth.

The Gods, the heroes, and the illustrious rulers of a bygone creed and history had been similarly disposed of in folk-lore. Wodan and his divine associates, though no longer known by their old names ; Siegfried, Theodorich, Karl the Great, Henry the Fowler, Otto the Great, and others, were said to have never died, or to sleep in underground palaces in a hill. Many mountains, in northern and southern Germany, were indicated as enchanted abodes of these supposed Immortals. Thus local tales placed the famed Frankish Kaiser Karl in the Desenberg near Warburg; again, near the river Weser; also in the Spessart, in the Donnersberg (so called after Donar, Thunar, or Thor), in the Untersberg, and so forth; and of him, too, it was said that one day he would come forth with a great army.

In the early part of the fourteenth century, the Kyffhäuser mountain, in Thuringia, is first mentioned as the retreat of the 'Emperor Frederick.' Nothing is said yet about the Redbeard. His name was only introduced towards the end of the seventeenth century.

6

Since the decay of the heathen German religion, an Old Man with a flowing beard' had been fabled to dwell in the Kyffhäuser. Perchance, the All-father of the disestablished Teutonic creed, or his son, the red-bearded God of Thunder, had originally been thus enmountained by secret adherents of theirs, who unwillingly yielded to the New Faith which had been forced upon the Saxons by fire and sword.

The ravens which fly around the Kyffhäuser seem indeed to point to the sacred birds of Odin or Wodan. The knights and the whole retinue of the hill-entombed Emperor would represent the blessed heroes of Walhalla.

As the remembrance of that old creed gradually vanished, the heroic figure of a Kaiser and his warriors would be placed in the stead of the earlier divine circle. In the case of the Kyffhäuser, such substitution is the more comprehensible because the Emperors of the Suabian House had possessed a palace in the neighbourhood and often resided there.

Finally, the remembrance of Frederick the Second as an expected Reformer of the Church also became blurred and extinct. It was, however, still strong enough in the beginning of the sixteenth century. In 1521 Luther said that this prophecy about Kaiser Frederick had been practically fulfilled through Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who had supported Holy Scripture, who had been Vicar of the Empire, and who might have been Kaiser himself, had he wished to accept the offer of the crown made to him. A quarter of a century afterwards, when a strange man, who pretended to be the Emperor Frederick, was discovered in the ruins of the Kyffhäuser Castle, there were still superstitious people enough to believe in the truth of such immortality. This belated Pretender was, however, found to be merely a tailor out of his mind.

It appears that the folk-tale-perhaps by way of mixing up the Teutonic All-father with the God of Thunder-had attributed to the mythic hero in the Kyffhäuser a red beard. This detail made the transition from the person of Frederick the Second to that of his grimmer, less cultivated ancestor and namesake, an easy one. So the two figures became gradually blended. The transition was all the easier because the death of Frederick Barbarossa, who was said to have been drowned in the Far East, during a crusade, in the river Seleph, had occurred under somewhat uncertain circumstances, and was therefore also long disbelieved by the masses.

However, it is only as late as 1680 that the name of Barbarossa is given by Prätorius, from folk-lore, as that of the spell-bound dweller in the magic underground castle of the Thuringian hill. Soon afterwards another collector of popular legends reports, in the first years of the eighteenth century, that the enchanted Emperor's beard is red. It was alleged that many a shepherd had seen him come out of the mountain, attracted by the pastoral flute, and that some had been allowed even to take a glance at the sunken imperial splendour in the subterranean vault. In these tales, Barbarossa generally figured as a benevolent friend of the poor-a trait not exactly recorded of him in history; whilst Regenbogen, who evidently meant Frederick the Second, described the latter as both the sublime and the mild.'

Thus the tale, in its altered shape, henceforth continued-no longer, however, as a truly national, but rather as a local Thuringian oneuntil it was given national prominence once more, in our century, by Rückert. This was in 1816, after the overthrow of Napoleon's dominion, which had destroyed the old German Empire. Since then it has generally been believed that the mythic Man in the Kyffhäuser Mountain had always been identified, in the legend, with Barbarossa. But this is now shown to be an error.

If we wanted to dig deeper in fabulous lore, some curious additional points might be given. One of the German folk-tales had it that some day a great battle would be fought on the Walser Field, where the famed withered tree- a pear tree-stands. On that tree the Kaiser was to hang his shield, and this battle was to herald in the World's End. A Twilight of the Gods, so to say, in heathen Teutonic prophecy. The bad are to be annihilated by the good; Truth and Right will be victorious. The political meaning of the tale here quite disappears. The great massacre, which is to take place, has only a religious significance. Though clothed in Christian garb, the original pagan kernel of the legend is, however, fully discernibleeven as in the christianised Nibelungenlied the Germanic heathens are recognisable, who in the corresponding Nibelung lays of the Norse Edda have no alloy yet at all from the later religion.

An Asiatic tradition has been quoted from the fourteenth century, to this effect, that the Dominion of the World would some day fall to a prince who would succeed in hanging his shield on a certain withered tree. The Tatars related that this tree stood in Tauris, that is, the Crimea. Other Oriental races spoke of it as standing in the grove of Mamre. It has been pointed out that this myth has some contact with the Hellenic one of the golden fleece which hangs in a sacred grove on a tree, and the acquisition of which was to confer glory, riches, and power.

However, it must not be forgotten that the tale about the withered tree, on which the coming Emperor's shield is to be hung, is an earlier one in Germany itself. Moreover, in the Crimea, which until the eighteenth century was still called Gothia in the official documents of the Greek Church, a population of Gothic descent had remained from olden times. Specimens of its Teutonic speech are traceable down to 1750. The ransomed prisoner from the Turkish galleys, a native of the Crimea, who in the middle of last century furnished these samples of Teutonic language to a learned Jesuit, declared that he knew nothing about Christianity, his countrymen worshipping an ancient tree. Can this have been a longforgotten symbol of the World Ash, the Teutonic Tree of Existence? And have we here, perhaps, the origin of the tale about the withered

2 See The Goths, by Henry Bradley (London, 1888).

tree which is to grow green and to bear fruit once more,' when the Restorer of German power hangs his shield on it?

As Regenbogen has it, who mixes up this myth with the peaceful recovery of the Holy Sepulchre :

So wirt daz urliug alsô groz, niemant kan es gestillen;

Sô kumt sich keiser Vriderich, der hêr und ouch der milt . .

Er vert dort hin zem dürren boum ân allez widerhap,

Dar an so henkt er sinen schilt; er gruonet unde birt.

So wirt gewunnen daz heilic grap,

Daz nimmer swert dar umb gezogen wirt.

Actually, on the famous Walserfeld where the great battle was to take place, there stood, until quite recent days, a withered pear tree which in the folk-tale was connected with the old prophecy. After the re-establishment of the German Empire under William the First of Prussia, the tree was felled overnight-owing, it is said, to a suggestion made to the peasant proprietor by Ultramontanes. The cutting down of the old tree was considered almost a sacrilegious act at the time by those who cherish folk-lore traditions. But some observed that the withered trunk might well have gone, seeing that the prophecy had been fulfilled. There are, however, others who do not see such fulfilment in the foundation of an Empire shorn of its Austrian provinces, which had been an integral part of Germany from olden times down to 1866.

6

Taking all in all, it is manifest that the Barbarossa' myth is quite a late graft upon the stem of the original tale about Kaiser Friedrich the Second, the enlightened adversary of priestcraft, the antagonist of the Papacy, the expected Reformer of the Church, and Disestablisher of Monkhood. Many of the sayings attributed to him, which show him in the light of a man who would readily have assented. had he lived in our days, to the doctrines of Darwin, Huxley, and Häckel, would find little countenance, at present, in high quarters at Berlin. It remains a fact, nevertheless, that 600 years ago an elected ruler stood at the head of the German Empire, who held such advanced views, and that his cherished memory had for centuries sunk deep into the people's mind. Considering this earlier and long-sustained conception of the folk-tale, the recent Imperial celebration on the Kyffhäuser may be said to rest on an historical error.

KARL BLIND,

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake
to return unaccepted MSS.

ABDUL-HAMID, character of, by a Balfour's Foundations of Belief' and

the question of his deposition, 673- | Barbarossa, legend of, 1010–1011

1