The Loreley
The Loreley is a steep slate cliff, about 132 meters high, rising from the right bank of the Rhine just upriver of St. Goarshausen, where Burg Katz stands. Here the river squeezes through a tight bend in the gorge, with a swift current and hidden rocks that wrecked many boats in the days of sail and oars. The name may come from an old Rhine word for a murmuring sound and the word for rock, a reference to the echo and the rushing water, or from the German word for lurking, a warning to the boatmen. A monk was already writing the name down in the 9th century.
The most famous version of the story is the one told in a poem by Heinrich Heine in 1824. A beautiful maiden sits high on the rock in the evening light, combing her long golden hair with a golden comb and singing a strange and powerful song. A boatman in his small boat hears her and, enchanted, looks up at the cliff instead of at the rocks in front of him. The waves close over him and his boat, and the poet ends with a shiver: this was the Loreley's doing, with her singing.
Burg Katz and the Rhine from the hill above the castle.
An earlier and sadder version was written by Clemens Brentano in 1801. His Lore Lay lived at Bacharach and was so beautiful that every man who saw her lost his heart and sometimes his life. Her own lover betrayed her, and she was brought before the bishop, accused of bewitching men and causing their deaths. The bishop could not bring himself to condemn her to death and sentenced her to a convent instead. On her way there, she begged to climb the great rock one last time to look at the Rhine. At the top, she saw a boat on the river below and thought her lover was on board. She leaned out to reach him and fell to her death, and the rock has echoed her name ever since.
Before Brentano, the cliff had a different story, in which dwarfs lived in caves inside the rock. The tale of the beautiful maiden is much younger than it feels. It was invented by Brentano, who was inspired by the Greek myth of Echo, and it spread when the poet Heine reworked it. Friedrich Silcher set Heine's words to music in the 1830s, and the song became so popular that today the Loreley seems to belong to the oldest legends of the Rhine.
The Rhine winding past Burg Katz.
From the top of the cliff, where the first photograph on this page was taken, you can look down on the Rhine as it bends past the rock and see the town of St. Goarshausen with Burg Katz on the hillside above it. Boats still pass beneath the Loreley today, and the Rhine cruise boats retell the legend as they go by. In 2011, a barge capsized in this same stretch of the river. On a quiet day, though, it is easy to imagine a maiden on the cliff above them.