Note 16 — Chapter III · CAVE DEITIES: SUBTERRANEAN TRANSLATION

Henry the Fowler in Sudemerberg: Kuhn and Schwartz, Nordd. Sag., p. 185. The other examples in Grimm, ch. xxxii.—G. Voigt in Sybel’s hist. Zeits. xxvi (1871), pp. 131–87, shows in his most lucid account that it was not originally Frederick Barbarossa but Frederick II whom the legend represented as not dead but “lost” and to whom the expectation referred that he would come again some day. From the fifteenth century the story begins to appear that he was dwelling in Kyffhäuser (or in a cave in the rocks near Kaiserslautern); the name of Barbarossa does not appear till the sixteenth century, and then gradually predominates. But how it came about that from a definite moment onwards the translated emperor was thought of as living on in a hollow mountain is by no means clear from the written documents alone or from the critical study of the evolution of the legend. Suddenly and without intermediate steps the story assumes this shape, and it can hardly be accounted for except on the view that it arose from the combination of the Frederick legend with already existing Saga-stories of translated Heroes or gods (as Voigt also suggests, p. 160).