The Skittle Game in the Wall of Ratzeburg Cathedral

The town lay sheltered in the water. Two bridges joined the island to the mainland, later replaced by causeways, and as long as the guns were still heavy and inaccurate and the lake was broad, Ratzeburg counted as a fortress of some weight. Piles stood in the water all around the town, and ramparts lay before the gates, and behind those walls lived a town of fishermen, craftsmen and canons who had watched their cathedral rise above the roofs for five hundred years. Whoever wished to take the town had first to cross the water and then to face the fire of the walls.

In 1693 that trial came. In the struggle over the Duchy of Lauenburg, claimed by more than one party after the old ruling house had died out, the army of the Danish king Christian the Fifth drew up before the town and shelled it for days. The houses burned, the town sank into rubble and ash, and only the cathedral on its height remained standing, damaged but upright. In that masonry the cannonballs stuck fast that have sat there ever since. So far reaches the history, and it is set down in the chronicles. What the people of Ratzeburg add to it reaches further.

Before the town, so the legend tells, there lay among the Danes a gunner famous as a marksman. No target was too small for him, no distance too great, and it was said he could place a ball wherever he pleased. The Hanoverians, who held the town, struck a strange bargain with the besiegers, for they too were weary of the long siege. If that marksman could shoot a whole game of skittles into the wall of the cathedral, nine balls in the order in which the pins stand on the alley, then the town would surrender. Should he miss even one pin, the whole army would withdraw and leave Ratzeburg in peace.

It was a wager into which the whole town laid its fate. On the one side a wall and a distant marksman, on the other thousands of lives and a town already half in flames. The gunner took his place on an earthwork raised in the suburb, by the popinjay pole where marksmen otherwise shot at a wooden bird, and trained his barrel on the flank of the church. The townsfolk watched from behind their windows, some of them praying, and counted along at every shot.

Ball after ball struck home, each time at the spot the marksman had marked out. The pattern grew, pin by pin, until a whole game of skittles stood in the wall of the cathedral. Only one shot was still wanting, the middle pin, the king. Were that to go in as well, the town was lost and the wager settled. The people of Ratzeburg held their breath.

Then a Hanoverian gunner on the rampart loaded his own barrel, took calm aim at the Dane and, just before the final shot, took his head from his body. The king never entered the wall. The army, which had lost its wager, kept its word and drew off, and the town that had seemed already lost was saved.

That is why, the people of Ratzeburg say, one sees to this very day the game of skittles in the wall of the cathedral, only the king is missing. It sits on the gable of the southern transept, where the eight balls still trace the pattern of the skittle alley. In the nineteenth century the collectors Karl Müllenhoff and Karl Bartsch wrote the story down from the mouth of the region. Bartsch added that by then one of the eight balls had fallen out. Whoever walks along the south side of the cathedral today and looks up can still search out the pins in the old brick, and wonder where the king has gone.