Siegfried and the road built in one night

More than nine hundred years ago Count Siegfried lived at Koerich in his castle. Once he lost his way while hunting and came into the valley of the Alzette, at the spot where the Luxembourg suburbs of Grund, Clausen and Pfaffenthal now curve round the Bock rock.

In those days that rocky valley looked very wild, and rarely did a traveller’s foot stray there. Siegfried saw above him on the Bock the ruins of a Roman fort rising up, and the place seemed to him very well suited for the building of a castle.

In the year 963 he obtained the bare rock with the surrounding wood by exchange from the abbot of St Maximin near Trier, giving up his fine lordship of Feulen near Ettelbruck. But for a long time Siegfried had to give up the idea of building on the Bock, for he lacked the money.

So he sat one day, sad, on the eve of the Assumption, in his castle at Koerich; he almost regretted the senseless exchange, and in his ill humour he called the devil.

He appeared at once and showed himself ready to furnish the count amply with money, to clear away the ruins of the old Roman fort, to build in their place a castle to the count’s wish, and to make a highway from Koerich to the new castle, all in that same night, but on condition that the count sign over his soul, which he would come to fetch after thirty years on the same day and at the same hour.

Siegfried accepted the condition. The next morning the count drove to Luxembourg along a broad road. There, on the old Bock, the new castle rose before his astonished eyes, the Lutzelburg, built and furnished in the most splendid fashion as he had wished.

But the bond he had entered into with the devil soon began to frighten the count greatly. So he used the wealth he owed to hell for charitable ends. He had churches and chapels built and endowed them richly, and had masses said daily to free himself from the devil’s power.

When the thirtieth eve of the Assumption drew near, the fourteenth of August, Siegfried invited all the knights of the neighbourhood to a banquet that evening. He had the castle guarded most strictly and ordered that no one be let in by night, whoever it might be.

But at the very hour at which the Evil One had appeared to the count thirty years before, the devil suddenly stood in the midst of the terrified guests in the shape of a gigantic knight, and beckoned Siegfried to follow him. The count took his leave of his guests and went into another room, where the devil seized him and vanished with him through a window, leaving a pestilential stench behind.

A monk who entered that room just afterwards maintained that he had seen the devil keep not the count’s soul but only his body, and that the soul had been carried heavenward by angels.