Sir Eppo and the Castle Maiden

The Vordertaunus is a land of slate, and at Eppstein the greenish stone lies open to the day. On a narrow spur of rock, cut off from the ridge by a neck-ditch, the castle sits like an eagle’s eyrie above the valley. Builders date its founding to the tenth century; it was raised as an imperial castle to guard the frontier and is first recorded in the year 1122. Visible from afar is the round keep, which in the Middle Ages stood thirty-three metres, of which twenty-four remain upright today.

Far below, where the Daisbach and the Dattenbach join to form the Schwarzbach, the old town nestles against the slope, a tangle of narrow lanes and leaning timber-framed houses. The pearl of Nassau Switzerland the place was once called. Such a spot, where the rock divides the sky and the echo throws back from the walls, calls for a story that seems as old as the stone itself. Eppstein found it in its knight Eppo.

In the grey of ancient days, so the tale runs, a giant of monstrous strength dwelt in the forests of the Taunus. He had carried off the fair castle maiden Bertha von Bremthal and held her in his power, and no one in the land dared approach the monster. Then a knight came riding by, Eppo by name, whom some also call Ebbo, a man of courage and a firm arm. He resolved to free the maiden, whatever it might cost him, and climbed up into the rocks where the giant dwelt.

It came to a fight, and Eppo carried the day. He hurled the giant into a deep ravine, where it lay shattered, and led Bertha back to freedom. Upon the rock from which he now commanded the whole region, he built himself a strong castle, and it was named after him the Eppstein. As witness to the deed a rib of the slain giant was hung above the castle gate, where it was shown to visitors until as late as the year 1854.

That rib truly exists, yet it comes from no giant. When the bone was later examined, it proved to be that of a whale from the seventh or eighth century. Today it lies in the Collection of Nassau Antiquities at Wiesbaden, while a replica on the castle recalls the old story.

The knight Eppo, too, cannot be traced in any charter. He is first named by the Darmstadt historian Helfrich Bernhard Wenck, and the version with the giant and the castle maiden appeared in print only in 1828. Earlier still the Eppsteins liked to trace their line to an ancient Roman family, and from 1843 some even derived it from a Frankish duke; the real house, however, sprang from the lords of Hainhausen in the Rodgau, who between 1183 and 1190 came into possession of the castle and thenceforth called themselves lords of Eppstein.

Their history had no need of a giant to be great. Between 1200 and 1305 the Eppsteins gave the church, in Siegfried II, Siegfried III, Werner and Gerhard II, no fewer than four archbishops of Mainz, and rose to become one of the mightiest families of the High Middle Ages. At the foot of their ancestral castle grew the settlement that received town rights in 1318. But the legend gave Eppstein what no charter can give: a founder as bold and upright as the castle on its rock.