RUOTHILDE AND THE TOWER

Anno domini 852, by the grace of His Holiness the Father in Heaven, the Abbot of St. Martin requested that I, the humblest servant of the Lord, write the account of a story from Saxony so that the great evils of the province can be revealed. The reckoning of the years is based on the beginning, when Christos, Our Holy Father in Heaven, was crucified by the wrongs of Jewry. What has been told to me happened fifty years prior, when many more things were lamentable and yet, the Northern heathens still threaten the humble Franks and Lotharingians. I refrain from using the coarse language of the common people, for they are illiterate, and will tell this story in the language of the King of Western Francia. It begins with the ills of the savages of Saxony during the campaigns of Emperor Charles, who was pious and much loved by all people, and though the witch was the worst of all, the maiden called Ruothilde, and later called Rapunzel, was a heathen as well. Through intercourse, Ruothilde’s mother conceived of her and yearned to eat foul things from a wicked woman’s garden. To punish the thievery of the woman, the witch killed her and took her child to be locked in a tower, waiting for the maid’s seventeenth birthday. In Christ’s name, forgive me for writing of this paganism…

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*Emperor Charles would be known as Charlemagne today

*Saxony was heavily pagan, even after Charlemagne’s efforts to convert them during his lifelong campaign against them