The Rhinegold of the Nibelungs

The great German treasure legend, in a real UNESCO river gorge

The Drachenfels, the Dragon's Rock, is a 321-metre hill in the Siebengebirge between Königswinter and Bad Honnef, the first real height a traveller meets coming up the Rhine from the Netherlands and the hill closest to the river. Its most famous legend gives it its name: here, the story goes, Siegfried, hero of the Nibelungenlied, killed the dragon Fafnir that lived in a cave in the hill, and bathed in its blood to make himself invulnerable. Another tale has the dragon fed on prisoners until a Christian girl held up a little cross, at which it leapt into the Rhine and was never heard from again.

The Nibelungenlied is the most famous heroic poem in Middle High German, written down about or shortly after 1200, probably at the court of Wolfger von Erla, Bishop of Passau, from older oral tradition. In it the dragon is no more than a stanza, recalled by Hagen as the Burgundians watch Siegfried arrive at Worms: he had slain a dragon, won a great hoard of gold and bathed in its blood to give himself an impenetrable skin. That hoard of the Nibelungs, named for the land of dwarfs and giants where Siegfried won it, is the treasure at the heart of the tale. Siegfried marries Kriemhild, sister of King Gunther, and when the queens quarrel Hagen learns from Kriemhild the one place between his shoulder blades where a leaf had kept the blood from touching him. On a hunt, as Siegfried bends to drink at a spring, Hagen spears him there. Then he has the hoard taken from the widow. Years later Kriemhild, by then the wife of Etzel, king of the Huns, lures her brothers and Hagen east, and the Burgundians die at Etzel's court. At the end Hagen refuses to say where the gold is until Gunther is dead, knowing the hoard lies at the bottom of the Rhine, where no one will ever bring it up.

The Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine was real, and Gunther echoes Gundahar, a Burgundian king who died in 437. In the 19th century the poem became Germany's national epic, and Richard Wagner built his Ring cycle on its world. A third of the way up the Drachenfels, the Nibelungenhalle of 1913 holds Hermann Hendrich's paintings of scenes from Wagner's operas, and the rack railway of the Drachenfelsbahn climbs past it toward Schloss Drachenburg and the ruined castle on the summit, built between 1138 and 1167 by Archbishop Arnold I of Cologne. Three of the poem's main manuscripts were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2009.