King in the mountain

For other uses, see Mountain King.

hero. The stories almost always mention the detail that

the hero has grown a long beard, indicative of the long
time he has slept beneath the mountain.

A king in the mountain, king under the mountain,

or sleeping hero is a prominent motif in folklore and
mythology that is found in many folktales and legends.
The Aarne-Thompson classication system for folktale
motifs classies these stories as number 766, relating
them to the tale of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.

In the Brothers Grimm version, the hero speaks with the

herdsman. Their conversation typically involves the hero
asking, Do the eagles (or ravens) still circle the mountaintop?" The herdsman, or a mysterious voice, replies,
Yes, they still circle the mountaintop. Then begone!
My time has not yet come.
The herdsman is usually supernaturally harmed by the experience: he ages rapidly, he emerges with his hair turned
white, and often he dies after repeating the tale. The story
goes on to say that the king sleeps in the mountain, awaiting a summons to arise with his knights and defend the
nation in a time of deadly peril. The omen that presages
his rising will be the extinction of the birds that trigger
his awakening.[1][2]

General features

2 Examples
A number of kings, rulers, ctional characters and religious gures have become attached to this story. They
include the following:
Typhon and Enceladus in Mount Etna
Emperor Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor.
Emperor Constantine I, said to have been turned into
a stone statue, although not resting within a mountain.
Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last emperor of
the Eastern Roman Empire, said to have been
turned into marble and thus was known as Marmaromenos, the Marble King. He was said to
be hidden somewhere underground until his glorious return as the Immortal Emperor.

Frederick sends out the boy to see whether the ravens still y.

King in the mountain stories involve legendary heroes, often accompanied by armed retainers, sleeping in remote
dwellings, including caves on high mountaintops, remote
islands, or supernatural worlds. The hero is frequently a
historical gure of some military consequence in the history of the nation where the mountain is located.

Emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes (also known as

Kaloyannis III'") of the Eastern Roman Empire,
due to his kindness and ability, also known as Marmaromenos although this title might also be due
to the post-mortem discovery of his intact body, the
peculiar appearance of which was caused by a lifetime of medical treatment for epilepsy. (Greece,
Cyprus)

The stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm concerning

Frederick Barbarossa and Charlemagne are typical of the
stories told, and have been inuential on many told variants and subsequent adaptations. The presence of the
hero is unsuspected, until some herdsman wanders into
the cave, typically looking for a lost animal, and sees the

Merlin of the Arthurian legend, who is imprisoned

in an oak tree by Nimue.
1

2 EXAMPLES
Bran the Blessed (Wales)
St. John the Evangelist (Ephesus, Turkey) who some
said was only sleeping in his grave until the coming of Antichrist, when he would be needed as a
witness.[3][4]
Csaba, the son of Attila the Hun (Hungary) who
is supposed to ride down the Milky Way when the
Szkelys are threatened.
King St. Stephen, King St. Ladislaus, King Matthias
Corvinus (Hungary)
Kralj Matja (Slovenia)
Emperor Charlemagne (Germany, France) rests in
the Untersberg near Salzburg.
Fionn mac Cumhaill (Ireland), is said to sleep in a
cave/mountain surrounded by the Fianna (he is differentiated from them because of his large stature).
It is told that the day will come when the Dord Fiann
is sounded three times and Fionn and the Fianna will
rise up again, as strong and well as they ever were.
In other accounts he will return to glory as a great
hero of Ireland.[5]

King Rodrigo (Spain). Said to escape from the

Moorish invasion and await for the time of maximum need to save his people.
Vytautas the Great (Lithuania) He is believed to rise
from its grave when the worst danger will threaten
Lithuania to defend the motherland at the last battle.
Owain Lawgoch
Owain Glyndr (Wales) The Last native born
Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales"; he
disappeared after a long but ultimately unsuccessful
rebellion against the English. He was never captured
or betrayed and refused all Royal pardons.
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (Germany) sleeps in
the Kyhuser mountain and will rise to save the
Empire
King Henry the Fowler (Germany)
King Pelayo (Spain)
Key-Khosrow legendary shah of Persia
The legendary Moravian king Jemnek will, according to a prophecy, return to save his country
from enemies.[7]
An unnamed giant is supposed to sleep in Plynlimon
in Wales.
Giewont massif which is said to be a sleeping knight
(Poland)
The remains of the Golem of Prague are said to be
in the attic of the Old New Synagogue in Prague,
and that it can be brought back to defend the Jewish
people. (Jewish mysticism)
Gearid Iarla, who dozes under Lough Gur with his
silver-shod horse (Ireland)
Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, who is
at temporary rest under the Curragh of Kildare
(Ireland)
The Pueblo hero-god Montezuma believed to
have been a divine king in prehistoric times, and suspended in an Arizona mountain that bears his image.
Bernardo Carpio the King of the Tagalogs said to
reside in the mountains of Montalban, Philippines.
Muhammad al-Mahdi (Islamic mysticism, especially Shi'a)

Statue of Ogier the Dane, Kronborg Castle

Ogier the Dane (Danish: Holger Danske, Denmark)

King Harold (England). Said to have not been slain
at Senlac by Anglo-Saxon legends, to come one day
to liberate the English from the Norman yoke[6]

Marko Kraljevi (Serbia)

King Olaf I (Norway)
Vinminen, the protagonist of the Finnish national
epic Kalevala. At the end of Kalevala, he leaves on
a boat, promising to return when he is most needed.

3
their slumber. Another border variant concerns a
party of huntsmen who chase a roebuck into the
Cheviots when they heard the sweetest music playing from the Henhole, however when they entered
they became lost and are trapped to this day.[10]
St. Wenceslas (Vclav) of Bohemia (Czech Republic). He sleeps in the Blank mountain (with a huge
army of Czech knights) and will emerge to protect
his country at its worst time, riding on his white
horse and wielding the legendary hero Bruncvk's
sword.[7]
Boabdil, last Islamic prince of Granada.
Lplsis, the eponymous hero of the Latvian epic
poem. It is said that he will rise out of the Daugava
River when his country needs him to again take on
her attackers and invaders. Alternatively, he will rise
out of the Daugava at the end of the world.
Matija Gubec (Croatia)
Sebastian I, with whose death the house of Aviz lost its throne.
Sebastianists hold that he will return to rule Portugals Fifth Empire.

Sebastian I, (Portugal) (it is said by Sebastianists that

the king will return in a hazy morning in time of
need)
The Sleeping Ute mountain in Colorado is said to
have been a Great Warrior God who fell asleep
while recovering from wounds received in a great
battle with the Evil Ones (there are many other
variants of this legend)
Vlad III the Impaler (Romania)
Alexander Suvorov (Russia), Russian generalissimo,
sleeps in a deep cave where prayer is heard and icon
lamp burns. The legend says Suvorov will come
back to save his country from a mortal danger.[8]

Napoleon Bonaparte was considered to be also not

dead but in Irkutsk and to come back by a Slavonic
sect[11]
Emperor Norton is claimed by several defunct civil
rights groups to have been destined to return to
the USA when the unity of the Republic is at its
nadir.[12]
King David is depicted in Haim Nachman Bialik's
tale King David in the Cave as sleeping along with
his warriors deep inside a cave, waiting for the blast
of the rams horn that will awaken them from their
millennia of slumber and arouse them to redeem
Israel.[13][14] This role was not attributed to King
David in earlier Jewish tradition.
Theseus (Athens)

William Tell (Switzerland, in some legends accompanied by two other Tells[9] )

King Arthur (Great Britain) perhaps most famous

of the king under the mountain examples. Arthur
according to legend was taken away to the Isle of
Avalon to sleep until he was needed by the people of
Britain, but several legends talk of a herdsman who
stumbles across a cave on mainland Britain in which
he nds Arthur sleeping, often with his knights
and Excalibur by his side. In a variation on this,
sometimes the exploring herdsman nds instead just
Arthurs knights, or Sir Lancelot, Guinevere and the
knights sleeping in wait on the return of the Once
and Future King.

Thomas the Rhymer is found under a hill with a retinue of knights in a tale from Anglo-Scottish border. Likewise, Harry Hotspur was said to have been
hunting in the Cheviots when he and his hounds got
holed-up in the Hen Hole (or Hell-hole) awaiting
the sound of a hunting horn to awaken them from

Sir Francis Drake (Great Britain) In this legend,

it is stated that when England is in deadly peril, if
Drakes Drum is beaten, then Sir Francis Drake will
arise to defend England from the sea. According to
legend, it can be heard to beat at times when England
is at war or signicant national events take place.

The poet and painter Taras Shevchenko (Ukraine),

believed to be a supernatural hero (charakternik), is
said to sleep under his grave mound in Kanev or even
in the Kiev Pechersk Lavra.
Tecumseh of the Shawnee

4
Knights of Sitno in Slovak mythology are a legion
of knights supposedly sleeping inside the mountain
Sitno in Central Slovakia, waiting to be called upon
in times when the Slovaks are in danger. It is said
that every seven years, the oldest of them climbs up
the hill and shouts the question: Is it time yet?" in
every world direction. If nobody answers, he climbs
back inside.[15]
Kb-Daishi (Japan), founder of the Shingon sect
of Buddhism. He is said to be in deep meditation
in a temple on Mount Koya, Wakayama Prefecture,
awaiting the coming of the next Buddha.

Sleeping anti-hero and villain

Sometimes this type of story or archetype is also attached

to not-so-heroic gures, who are either simple anti-heroes
or fully villains, whose return would mean the end of
the world, or whose sleep represents something positive.
This kind of archetype is known as the Chained Satan
archetype.[16] Among examples of this are:

American comic book icon Captain America fell

into suspended animation at the end of World War
II, only to be awakened later.
American comic book super hero Captain Marvel
from Fawcett Comics, after having been cancelled
in 1953, was given a story where he (and most of his
friends and his arch foes) was trapped in suspended
animation for 20 years to explain his revival in 1973
by DC Comics.
In the Final Crisis: Superman Beyond comic series, a mysterious statue, resembling Superman, is
left behind by the original Monitor, to activate only
when the DC Multiverse is endangered.
British author Susan Cooper makes use of the return
of King Arthur and the awakening of sleeping heroes
as plot elements in The Dark Is Rising Sequence.
At the end of the video game Halo 3 the protagonist, the Master Chief, is placed into suspended animation with the words Wake me, when you need
me.

The Sleeping Giant mountain in Connecticut,

United States was said by the local Quinnipiac Indians to be the demon Hobbomock, sealed by the
Great Spirit. One day he would supposedly awaken
and destroy the world

In a similar way, protagonist Gordon Freeman is put

in stasis by G-Man after oering him a job by his
employers in the end of Half-Life, the series rst
title. He is then set free from the stasis in the beginning of Half-Life 2

Mher (Armenia)[17]
Artavasdes II of Armenia, who according to Moses
of Chorene was chained and cursed to stay eternally
chained by his father Artaxias II.[16]

In music, a single by Kate Bush released on 24 October 2005 is named "King of the Mountain". This
song connects popular beliefs about Elvis Presley's
death, with references to Citizen Kane also, to the
King in the Mountain motif.

Loki in Norse mythology was bound by the gods after he engineered the death of Baldr. With the onset
of Ragnark, Loki is foretold to slip free and ght
alongside the forces of the jtnar against the gods.

In The Books of Magic, Timothy Hunter sees the

mystical King in the mountain and talks to a minstrel
who is guarding his grave.

Dukljan

THE SLEEPING HERO IN POPULAR CULTURE

The sleeping hero in popular culture

A version of the sleeping hero legend is included in
several entries in the Nintendo game franchise 'The
Legend of Zelda', most explicitly in the Gamecube
game The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and
the most iconic of the series The Legend of Zelda:
The Ocarina of Time.
A version of the sleeping hero legend is also present
in the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time.
Finn and Jake stumble upon an aged hero named
Billy who has been resting for many years inside a
cave surrounded by his treasure waiting for when he
will be needed once again.

In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, heroes from

ages past reside in the world of dreams until they are
called forth to ght the Dark One.
In the Transformers Marvel Comics series, the Last
Autobot, a nal repository of some of the power of
the Transformers god Primus, waits at the center of
Cybertron.
The plot of the book The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
by Alan Garner revolves around a Cheshire variant
of the legend.
The main character in the 2006 science ction series
The Lost Fleet by John G. Hemry (writing as Jack
Campbell) is a mythical hero to his people. He is
rediscovered on the eve of a large calamity and must
return the remnants of his nations military from being trapped deep behind enemy lines. The author
was inspired by the King Arthur myth.

5
In That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, which was
the third book in a trilogy preceded by Out of the
Silent Planet and Perelandra, the main character in
the series (a philologist named Elwin Ransom) summons Merlin.
J. R. R. Tolkien uses the king in the mountain in
various places in his legendarium: the form of the
Dead Men of Dunharrow, the armies and king of
Nmenor who are trapped by the Valar when Nmenor is destroyed, and in the Second Prophecy of
Mandos which states that the dead heroes Trin and
Beren would return to help to defeat Morgoth at the
end of times. The Dwarf-lords of Erebor are formally known as the Kings under the Mountain.

6 References
[1] Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsche Sagen (1816/1818),
no. 23.
[2] Kaiser Karl im Untersberg (German)
[3] Isidore of Seville De ortu et obitu patrum (5th century)
[4] Jacobus de Voragine The Golden Legend
[5] Augusta, Lady Gregory Gods and Fighting Men (1904)
[6] The Science of Fairy Tales: An Enquiry Into Fairy
Mythology, Edwin Sidney Hartland, 1925 edition, p. 143
[7] Alois Jirsek, Old Bohemian Legends (1894, Star povsti
esk)

In the table-top roleplaying game GURPS Techno- [8] (Russian archistratege)

mancer, Joseph Stalin acted in similar role for the
[9] The Three Tells
Soviet Union; in this alternative history setting, he
didn't die in 1953, but rather was put in a magical [10] Henry Tegner; Ghosts of The North Country, 1991 Butler
Publishing, ISBN 0-946928-40-1. p.13
sleep under the Moscow Kremlin. In 1996, after
the fall of the USSR, he awoke and led a rebellion
[11] The Science of Fairy Tales: An Enquiry Into Fairy
against the Russian Federation.
Mythology, Edwin Sidney Hartland, 1925 edition, p. 144

Cthulhu is a famous literary example of the Sleeping [12] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/

COLMA-A-gay-court-pays-homage-to-its-queer-2697341.
Anti-Hero/Villain variant. In The Call of Cthulhu
php
and several other Cthulhu Mythos stories he is said
to wait dreaming in a sunken city until the stars [13] Canaanism:" Solutions and Problems, Boas Evron, Alare right when he will wake up and destroy human
abasters Archive
civilization.
[14] "

The video game Skyrim contains many antagonists,

called Draugr, that follow the King in the Mountain
motif, in that they wake up as the Dragonborn approaches.
The video game Undertale contains the character
Asgore, the king of monsters. Sealed away in the
underground for many years, he is called to action
by the death of his children to help his people escape, and so follows the King in The Mountain motif. Not only this, but the introduction to his battle
theme is called Bergentrckung, which is the name
of the trope in German.

See also
Seven Sleepers
Rip Van Winkle
Honi HaM'agel
Sidhe
King Arthurs messianic return

[15] http://sitnoholding.sitnobusiness.com/en/the-legend/
[16] Mher in the Carved Rock, J. A. Boyle, p. 11, at the Library of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New
Zealand
[17] Mher in the Carved Rock, J. A. Boyle, at the Library of
the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

7 External links
a list of other sleeping hero legends

8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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