Siegfried's Dragon and Fossil Footprints: Weighing an Old Hypothesis

Could the dragon that Siegfried killed owe something to giant footprints left in stone? The question has a real scholarly origin, a German geologist writing in 1941, and it has been repeated often enough since then that it can sound like a finding. It is not. It is a hypothesis about one late medieval poem and two small Franconian legends, and the surviving evidence lets us test parts of it. Some parts hold up as plausible; others do not.

Where the idea comes from

The proposal belongs to Heinrich Kirchner, who had already published on fossil animal tracks in the Upper Buntsandstein, the reddish Triassic sandstone of Franconia in northern Bavaria.¹ In 1941 he set out his case in the journal of the German Geological Society. His opening summary begins from a point he treated as familiar among geologists: many local legends of dragons and giants can be traced to fossil bones of large animals, and he cites Othenio Abel’s 1939 book on prehistoric animal remains in German myth for examples.²

Kirchner then went further. He wrote that he could show that the dragon fight told in strophes 7,3 to 11,2 of the Lied vom hürnen Seyfrid was, in his words, “auf dem Umweg über zwei Ortssagen durch Funde versteinerter Reptil-Fährten veranlaßt”: prompted, by a detour through two local legends, by finds of fossilized reptile tracks.² The legends came from around Seifriedsburg, a village about 5 kilometers northeast of Gemünden am Main that appears in a charter of 1158 as “Sigefridesburg.” They were published in 1835 and 1838, and Kirchner quoted them in a version by the folklorist Ludwig Bechstein.²

Kirchner’s full argument runs six pages, and only his summary could be read for this article. What follows does not try to reconstruct the parts that could not be checked. The proposal has stayed in circulation. Adrienne Mayor and William Sarjeant’s 2001 survey of footprint folklore in the journal Ichnos lists Kirchner’s paper among its references,³ and popular retellings have sometimes carried it under the more eye-catching label of “dinosaur footprints.”

Tracks in the dragon stories

Footprints do appear in the dragon tradition, though not where Kirchner pointed. The clearest case is Norse. The Völsunga saga, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century from older material, has Sigurd and the smith Regin ride up the heath along the route the dragon Fafnir used on his way to drink.⁴ In the translation by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, Sigurd says to Regin: “methinks the track of him is marvellous great?”⁴ Sigurd then digs pits along that path, waits in one of them, and stabs the dragon from below as it crawls over. After the kill he “rode along the trail of the worm Fafnir” back to its lair and its gold.⁴

So a large dragon track, read by a hero as evidence of the animal’s size, is part of the story in a thirteenth-century Icelandic text. That is the motif people have in mind when they connect Siegfried with fossil footprints.

The German poem Kirchner named is different. The Lied vom hürnen Seyfrid survives in twelve closely related printed editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the earliest preserved being a Nuremberg print by Kunegund Hergotin dated between 1527 and 1538.⁵ In the strophes Kirchner cited, a smith who wants to be rid of the troublesome young Seyfrid sends him to a dragon that lies by a linden tree. Seyfrid kills it and then comes upon a wild place full of dragons, lindworms, toads and adders lying “Zwischen bergen in eym thal” (between mountains in a valley). He tears up trees, piles them on the creatures, and sets them alight. Their horn melts into a little stream; he dips a finger in, finds it turned to horn, and coats his body, all except a spot between his shoulders.⁵ The episode has a valley, a fire and a horny skin. It has no footprints at all.

That does not refute Kirchner, since his claim was that fossil tracks shaped the poem indirectly, through the local legends. But it means the passage itself gives no textual hook for footprints, and a reader should not assume that the German poem contains the tracking scene found in the saga.

The lindworm of Seifriedsburg

Bechstein’s Deutsches Sagenbuch, with a preface dated November 1852, contains a short entry on Seifriedsburg.⁶ In it a swineherd named Fritz, nicknamed “Sau-Fritz,” finds a stone in the Franconian Saale that makes him proof against cut and thrust. He wins rank and wealth in war and builds a castle, which takes its name from his nickname and later becomes Seifriedsburg. Bechstein adds that between Seifriedsburg and Schönau an der Saale lies a small wood called the Lindwurm, and that local tradition tells of a lindworm in the area killed by the knight of the castle.⁶

Bechstein himself saw the obvious parallel. He called the tale a very late echo of the Siegfried saga, listing the humble origin, the dragon killing, the invulnerability, the fame and the treasure. Then he asked: “Sollte der Name Seifried – soviel als Siegfried – allein sie hervorgerufen haben?” Roughly: could the name Seifried, which amounts to Siegfried, by itself have called the legend into being?⁶

Two cautions apply. Kirchner cited a Bechstein text of 1842, and the 1853 Sagenbuch entry read for this article may not be identical to it.²⁶ And the Sagenbuch entry, at least, says nothing about footprints, marked rocks or fossils. Whatever evidence Kirchner had for a link to tracks in the ground, it is not visible in this version of the legend.

What the rocks around the Main can offer

The geology of Lower Franconia does make the hypothesis worth asking. The region’s Buntsandstein was laid down roughly 250 to 240 million years ago, when the area lay just north of the equator in a large continental basin crossed by rivers and occasional sheet floods.⁷ Reptiles walking on the soft mud of floodplains and lake shores left prints that were filled with sand and preserved. Many of them resemble a human hand, which is why they were named Chirotherium, “hand beast.”⁷ The first known find was made near Hildburghausen in Thuringia in 1833 and published in 1834 and 1835, and similar tracks have since been found at Franconian sites such as a quarry at Aura and a slab near Euerdorf exposed in 2011.⁸⁷

These are not dinosaur footprints. The Bavarian geological survey describes the trackmakers as dinosaur forerunners among the archosaurs, the reptile group that also includes dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds, and it dates the first dinosaurs to the Middle Triassic, about 235 million years ago, after the Buntsandstein.⁷ Paleontologist Hartmut Haubold’s study of the German Buntsandstein assigns its footprints to several lines of early archosaurs, noting that early twentieth-century writers had once suggested primitive dinosaurs as the makers.⁸ If Kirchner’s fossil “reptile tracks” were Franconian Buntsandstein prints, which his earlier work on Franconian tracks makes likely but which could not be confirmed from his summary, the “dinosaur” label is inaccurate.²¹

True dinosaur trackways do exist in Germany, but far to the north. At Münchehagen in Lower Saxony, Early Cretaceous sandstone has yielded sauropod trackways (found in 1980) and long trails left by theropods and ornithopods; one theropod trackway runs 47 prints over more than 55 meters. Tracks have been noticed in that sandstone since the nineteenth century.⁹ Such sites show that large three-toed prints could be seen in German stone. They have no documented connection to any Siegfried legend, and none of the sources consulted for this article claims one. (Fossil curiosity in the past was real enough: see the evidence that people at Qau el-Kebir in Egypt gathered heavy fossil bones and buried them in old tomb shafts.)

Reasons for doubt

Several difficulties stand between “possible” and “demonstrated.”

The chronology runs the wrong way for easy proof. The Siegfried material probably goes back to the early Middle Ages, and the dragon fight was already known around 1200, when the Nibelungenlied mentions it in a single retrospective strophe.¹⁰ The Hürnen Seyfrid was in print by about 1530, Hans Sachs turned it into a play in 1557, and a prose chapbook of the “horned Siegfried” was printed in Hamburg from 1657.⁵¹⁰ The Seifriedsburg legends, by contrast, were published in 1835 and 1838, and Kirchner’s summary cites no earlier record of them.² A story printed in the nineteenth century could preserve something older, but it could just as easily have borrowed from a poem and chapbook that had circulated for three centuries. Bechstein’s own phrase for it, a very late echo, points in the second direction.⁶

A simpler explanation is on the table. The place name was recorded as “Sigefridesburg” in 1158.² A village called Siegfried’s castle, with a wood called Lindwurm nearby, hardly needs fossils to attract a dragon story. Bechstein raised the naming explanation in the 1850s, nearly ninety years before Kirchner wrote.⁶

The dragon episode has older literary relatives. The most vivid tracking scene is in a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga, not in the Franconian poem.⁴ Modern editors place the Hürnen Seyfrid closer to that Norse strand of the tradition, in which the dragon fight is central, than to the Nibelungenlied.¹⁰ If the poem’s dragon fight was inherited from that older storytelling tradition, a local fossil source is not needed to explain it, though it is not ruled out either.

The likely trackmakers were not dinosaurs. As above, Franconian Buntsandstein tracks, the most likely candidates for Kirchner’s “reptile tracks,” predate dinosaurs, and Germany’s well-known dinosaur trackways lie in a different region with no legend attached.⁷⁹

No published rebuttal of Kirchner’s paper turned up in research for this article, and these points are the research desk’s assessment rather than the settled verdict of a scholarly debate. Editors of the poem do warn, in a related context, that attempts to pin the Siegfried figure to a single historical model belong to the realm of speculation.¹⁰ Something similar applies to pinning his dragon to a single outcrop.

What can fairly be said

That fossil finds could give rise to local legends was, by Kirchner’s own account, already familiar to geologists of his day, and Othenio Abel had collected examples of dragon and giant stories traced to fossil bones.² Lower Franconia has a rich record of Triassic reptile tracks, Kirchner had studied that record, and he made a specific, checkable claim about one poem.²¹⁷ That much is solid.

What remains unproven is the chain he proposed: tracks seen in Franconian stone, then local dragon legends, then the dragon episode of the Hürnen Seyfrid. The version of the Seifriedsburg legend that can be read today mentions no tracks, the poem’s dragon passage mentions none, and the legends, as far as Kirchner’s summary shows, were first published centuries after the poem. Calling the prints “dinosaur footprints” adds a further error. Fossil tracks may have fed somebody’s dragon story somewhere along the Main, but on present evidence the Siegfried link remains an intriguing hypothesis from 1941, not an established origin.

Footnotes

1. Kirchner 1927, Paläontologische Zeitschrift 9 (Crossref record). ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Kirchner 1941, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft 93, opening summary (Kurzfassung). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. Mayor and Sarjeant 2001, Ichnos 8(2) (Crossref record and reference list). ↩

4. Völsunga saga, trans. Magnússon and Morris, ch. XVIII; Project Gutenberg edition header on date. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Lied vom hürnen Seyfrid, ed. King 1958, strophes 6-11; Bibliotheca Augustana introduction. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Bechstein, Deutsches Sagenbuch, no. 785 “Seifriedsburg”; preface dated 1852. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

7. LfU Bayern, Geotop Nr. 98, “Saurierfährten Euerdorf.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

8. Haubold 1983, Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 28, abstract and introduction. ↩ ↩²

9. Lallensack, van Heteren and Wings 2016, PeerJ 4:e2059, “Locality.” ↩ ↩²

10. Claußnitzer and Sperl 2019, Einleitung, section 1 and notes 1, 2, 14, 16. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴