Erilar am I, etcher of runes, lover of language and ancient lore, singer of tales, keeper of songs, Mechthild my name, mistress of dragon's cave.

Drachenhöhle

Mechthild zur Drachenhöhle am I, and Erilar, preserver of wisdom for our clan. Drachenhöhle is the name given my family home by our simpler neighbors, for the large, highly defensible rocky hill just inside (or on the border of--there is some dispute) the kingdom of Bohemia our small fortress sits atop also holds a cave, legendary home of a dragon. We find the dragon a pleasant myth and a fitting symbol for a family of warriors and preservers of wisdom from the North, and have adopted it as our device.      It is more than twelve hundred years since the time of Christ, according to those who have been my teachers in the use of the language and learning of the Church and the history of its speakers, as I sit here in my home. This does not always agree with the history handed down in my family, but that is the way of history, after all. Our great emperor Friedrich, second of that name, has returned home from Crusade having regained access to the Holy City for pilgrims, but it seems nothing will satisfy the men who sit the throne of St. Peter and cast bans of excommunication upon him because he will not bow to their will in all things and accept secular as well as sacred rule from Rome.

      It is well that we live far from Rome ourselves, for it has always been habit in our circle of family and friends to do our own thinking, a habit which it seems we share with our emperor, the which is anathema to the man in Rome. In our case, much of the cause can be found in our family history and Viking origin. Almost a century and a half ago, my several-times grandfather Olafr Sigurdsson and some friends and family left the city of Haithabu in disgust. It had been a decade and a half since the earlier destruction of the city by Harald Hardrade, but this was even worse: a Viking city sacked by Slavs, of all peoples! Olafr, erilar and carrier of wisdom for the group, together with a band of warriors and their families, moved south in search of a new home. They fought at one point for the great Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, and later for the ruler of Bohemia, settling at last in this borderland. With the passage of time the informal clan has scattered across the Empire, but we strive to communicate when possible, and our small fortress has become a symbolic "ancestral home" despite its fairly recent origin, for wanderers as far afield as the Sicilies and Miklagarth(which you may know as Byzantium) to the south and east and the lands of the Franks and Normans to the West.
      It was during those unsettled times that the office of Erilar, reader and keeper of both oral and written records, which had been solely a male prerogative in the North, passed to my ancertress Gunnhild when her grandfather Gunnar Olafsson found no suitable grandson to take it up. Since then it has been carried on my women in our family. The runes we also read and inscribe are said to have magical properties as well, or to have had them in the past, but this knowledge, if knowledge it be, has not been passed on to us. Story, song, and poetry have we preserved faithfully, however. And in this my own lifetime it has been a great joy to me to experience the great flowering of these arts and even to see and hear many of the great Minnesinger personally, including the greatest of them all, not only in my humble opinion, but in the opinion of many others as well, Walther von der Vogelweide.