How my heart used to beat when the old nurse told how
The king’s daughter, in days now olden,
Sat all alone on the desert heath,
While glisten’d her tresses so golden.
Her business was to tend the geese
As a goosegirl, and when at nightfall
She drove the geese home again through the gate,
Her tears would in piteous plight fall.
For nail’d up on high, above the gate,
She saw a horse’s head o’er her;
The head it was of the dear old horse
Who to foreign countries bore her.
The king’s poor daughter deeply sigh’d:
“O Falada! hangest thou yonder?”
The horse’s head from above replied:
“Alas that from home thou did’st wander!”
The king’s poor daughter deeply sigh’d:
“O would that my mother knew it!”
The horse’s head from above replied:
“Full sorely she would rue it!”
With gasping breath I used to attend
When my nurse, with a voice soft and serious,
Of Barbarossa began to speak,
Our Emperor so mysterious.
She assured me that he was not dead, as to think
By learned men we were bidden,
But with his comrades in arms still lived
In a mountain’s recesses safe hidden.
Kyffhauser is the mountain’s name,
With a cave in its depths benighted;
By lamps its high and vaulted rooms
In ghostly fashion are lighted.
The first of the halls is a stable vast,
Where in glittering harness the stranger
Who enters may see many thousand steeds,
Each standing at his manger.
They all are saddled, and bridled all,
Yet amongst these thousands of creatures,
No single one neighs, no single one stamps,
Like statues of iron their features.