Imagine a Dragon! The Lindwurm of Klagenfurt Austria and the Place where Medieval Folklore met History and Belief

 At one time, during the epoch in European history that is known today as the High Middle Ages, perhaps sometime between the year 1000 and 1100, the city of Klagenfurt which is located in present day southern Austria, was founded in the marshy wetlands and along the muddy banks of the River Glan.  The city was established by a wealthy and high-born Duke, and was protected by a veritable army of brave and heavily armed knights.  

But, there was one problem with the founding of Klagenfurt.  The city was being threatened by a vicious, fire-breathing winged dragon.  The dragon, at least according to legend, prevented any outsiders from crossing the River Glan to enter the city and constantly ravaged the homes and properties of the townspeople with devastating floods.

Klagenfurt is definitely an historic city, whose picturesque architecture, even today, gives the town a medieval feel.  The city itself  is not far, less than fifty miles in fact, from Austria’s present day border with the neighboring country of Slovenia.  It is the capital of the Austrian province of Carinthia and is a place that seems to have fallen directly to earth from a European fairy tale of long ago.  Klagenfurt is definitely a fitting location for a dragon!  But, the origins and legends behind the early days of Klagenfurt are much more complex and sinister than they first appear.

Klagenfurt cityscape today

The very name of the town itself, Klagenfurt, can be translated into English as “Town of Lament” or as “Town of the Wailing”.  Medieval legend has always had it that the city was founded around the year 1050 under the leadership of a wealthy leader known to history as Duke Bernhard von Spanheim.  Duke Spainheim was, supposedly, wealthy beyond all imagination, but also a brave soldier who commanded many knights and served as a living embodiment of the medieval values of chivalry.

Klagenfurt’s earliest Coat of Arms, the banner under which its knights would have rode into battle, is known to date from the year 1287, and the banner depicts a seemingly mythical creature with a wolf’s head, the body of a bird and the tail of a snake.  This creature is known as the Lindwurm--the symbol of the city of Klagenfurt.

In the 11th century the low lying city was constantly ravaged by destructive floods and locals came to believe that their city was under the curse of an evil water dragon--the Lindwurm.

Lindwurm is a word from old High German, which loosely translated into English literally means dragon, but which may have come from the old German words of “lint” meaning  “snake” and “wyrm” meaning dragon, so that the word Lindwurm, or snake-dragon in English, would seem to hint at the particularly evil and fiendish nature of the creature that haunted the early residents of Klagenfurt.

People said that many farmers were killed in the fields outside town in deaths that at first glance looked like accidents, but that were in fact, caused by the vicious dragon.  The dragon was hard to find, or see either in daylight or at night, because the farmland around Klagenfurt was constantly cloaked in a layer of fog on account of the marshland and the town’s low-lying location.  Residents reported, though, that they could hear the Lindwurm roar, late at night especially when it rained.

The historical record is unclear about whether or not it was Duke Bernhard von Spanheim and his brave knights--or whether it was some other Duke and his brave knights--who eventually went forth to the fields outside the city to defeat the Lindwurm once and for all.  However, the stories that have come down in folklore do have many specifics about the dragon’s eventual defeat in common regardless of what may have been the exact date or who exactly was the responsible party for the Lindwurm’s demise.

Coin depicting Duke von Spanheim 13th century

The Duke--perhaps it was von Spanheim, perhaps it was someone else--marched out of Klagenfurt leading an army of knights in shining armor and sought to capture, or to kill, the dreaded marauding Lindwurm.  The Duke and his army, using a cow as bait, tied a bull to the end of a long immensely strong iron chain that was said to be over one-hundred yards long.  The army of knights then essentially used the chain as one enormously long fishing rod.  When the great dragon--the Lindwurm--bit down onto the cow the knights then proceeded to use a hail of arrows to bring down the winged beast.

After the legend behind the Dragon of Klagenfurt was born, sometime most likely at the start of the 13th century, the city then adopted the image of a winged fire-breathing dragon as its local  symbol; seal of government and coat of arms.  Though it is unclear how many residents of Klagenfurt, at the time actually believed in the legend of the Lindwurm, the story and image of the Klagenfurt Dragon was adopted as true fact and passed down from generation to generation.  

And there the story of the Lindwurm and his defeat rested for over a century until a most unusual discovery occurred in a rock quarry outside of Klagenfurt.  

In the year 1335 a group of peasants, searching for valuable stones in a quarry outside of town, stumbled upon a strange skull unlike any that anyone in Klagenfurt had ever seen before.  The peasants rushed the skull back to Klagenfurt where both religious and governmental authorities at once proclaimed it to be the skull of the infamous and now unequivocally proven to be dead Lindwurm!

The skull of what became known as the Klagenfurt Dragon, unwittingly stumbled upon by a group of unsuspecting medieval peasants, was put on display behind an enclosed glass case in the town’s hall like a venerated relic of saintly origin, and there it would remain, as proof of Klagenfurt’s triumph over the Lindwurm of mythology for nearly five-hundred years.

The Lindwurm story, and the supposed Lindwurm skull on display in the town’s main hall became so intertwined with Klagenfurt itself that during the 16th century in 1590 renowned sculptor Ulrich Vogelsang used the Lindwurm’s skull to design Klagenfurt’s most famous landmark, the Dragon Fountain, which majestically stands guard over the city to this very day in the town’s main square called the Neuer Platz.  Vogelsang’s imposing dragon sculpture was made from a single block of chloritic schist--a hard stone with a greenish hue that has withstood the test of time in terms of weathering and discoloration--and Vogelsang’s sculpture made Klagenfurt the first ever European city, medieval or otherwise, to put its fervent belief in dragons on display, in stone, for the entire world to see.

Dragon Skull of Klagenfurt discovered in 1355

In fact, legend has it, that the citizens of Klagenfurt so revered their creation story and the factual existence of the Lindwurm as proven by the skull then on display at their town hall, that when Vogelsang’s sculpture was completed in 1590, three-hundred hand-picked men dressed all in white, reverently carried the massive sculpture into place and put it atop a pedestal in the town square.  Over a quarter of a century later in 1624 the construction of a planned fountain next to the Lindwurm sculpture was finally completed.

Until the 19th century it seemed as if the existence of the “Lindwurm” or serpentlike dragon, which was firmly ensconced in European folklore, had been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by the residents of Klagenfurt when they discovered that most mysterious skull in the quarry outside of town that forever after became known as the dragon’s cove.

But then in the 19th century disaster struck!  With advancements in the study of prehistory, and the discovery of the existence of dinosaurs, during the Victorian Era paleontology as a science and as an academic discipline was born.  For the first time in human history it was now scientifically proven that the world had existed for much longer than six-thousand years as Biblical researchers had long since theorized.  Fossil hunting, in both Europe and the United States became all the rage, and ancient bones and fossils like the supposed “dragon’s skull” discovered in a rock quarry outside Klagenfurt in 1335 could fetch quite a lot of money, and were by 1850 greatly sought after for more detailed scientific study.

Medieval European Lindwurm

It was then, in the first half of the 19th century, that an erstwhile group of Austrian paleontologists studying the Lindwurm skull, were able to determine that the supposed medieval skull was in fact of very ancient prehistoric origin, and prove through fossil comparison that the skull was not that of a mythical “Lindwurm”, but rather that it came from a long extinct species of wooly rhinoceros that at one time roamed central and southern Europe and was not all that dissimilar to the rhinoceros which still inhabit the earth at the present time.

Scientific research in the 1800’s might have closed the book on the fact or fiction behind the legend of the “Lindwurm” skull in Klagenfurt or maybe, just maybe, the intersection of history and folklore still leaves us just enough room to imagine dragons just as our medieval ancestors once did….