Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine

Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine is a book by Lewis Spence, first published in 1915, offering a romantic and richly detailed collection of folklore and myths drawn from the Rhine River region. Spence, a Scottish folklorist and mythologist, arranges the tales geographically — from the river’s mouth to its source — evoking the atmosphere of travelers aboard steamboats listening to legends as they pass castles, abbeys, and rocky landscapes.

His treatment balances light scholarship with the “mysterious glamour” long prized in German storytelling, presenting figures such as Siegfried, the Lorelei, Brunhild, Lohengrin, crusading knights, and supernatural beings in vivid retellings. While Spence’s wider reputation includes speculative and sometimes controversial theories, this volume is valued chiefly for its evocative narrative power rather than strict academic rigor.

Today, Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine endures as both an engaging anthology of classic European legends and a cultural artifact of the romantic revival of folklore studies in the early twentieth century.