The Swan Knight and His Medieval Legacy

Explore how the Swan Knight legend influenced medieval nobility, inspiring castles, heraldry, and secret orders across Europe.

By Katarzyna Ogrodnik-Fujcik

King Ludwig II of Bavaria’s world-famous Neuschwanstein (New Swan Castle) is a reconstruction of two medieval Bavarian swan castles, Vorderhohenschwangau and Hinterhohenschwangau. The region of Bavaria itself is called “Swan Region.”

Ludwig’s father, King Maximilian II, used the twelfth-century Hohenschwangau Castle, one of the three ‘swan’ castles, as his summer residence, after it was acquired by the Bavarian royal family. Hohenschwangau Castle was a seat of the Counts of Schwangau, whose prominent member was Hiltbolt von Schwangau (1195–1254), the minnesinger known from Codex Manesse. His helm, attire, and shield carried a black swan as a heraldic emblem. Maximilian saw himself as a successor to the knights of Schwangau and adopted their coat of arms.

His son followed in his footsteps, and the swan appeared as a heraldic animal also in Neuschwanstein. Already as a young boy, Ludwig became familiar with the Swan Knight’s legend thanks to the murals in his father’s castle. On 2 February 1861, aged 16, he was introduced to Wagner’s Lohengrin in the Munich Court Opera House and instantly got hooked.

As a result, he came to see himself both as a real knight of Schwangau and the legendary Swan Knight Lohengrin. He had Neuschwanstein’s walls, furniture, curtains, rugs, seat coverings, and tableware items decorated with swan representations. There was a “Swan corner” in his living room, where he liked to sit and read. In his swan obsession, he was no different from his predecessors, representatives of the medieval German nobility.

Medieval Europe, in general, saw a swan as a courtly creature, associated mainly with wealth and riches and representing royal status. In this, medieval German (and Dutch) houses were no different. Many of them claimed descent from the Swan Knight. These were mainly Brabant, Cleves, and Brandenburg, whose members took practical measures to prove it by commissioning different works that would show and strengthen the connection.

The swan ancestry was particularly highlighted by the House of Cleves. Schwanenburg, the Swan Castle, their ancestral seat, dated back to the first half of the eleventh century.

According to family legend, the Swan Knight married Beatrice of Cleves, who moved to the Schwanenturm (Swan Tower) after he departed. She was to spend the remaining years of her life in this solitary confinement.

In the years to come, there were further displays of the family connections to the Swan Knight, such as the one by Adolph of Cleves, Lord of Ravenstein, who performed the role of the Swan Knight at the famous Feast of the Pheasant on 17 February 1454. It was held in Lille by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, Adolph’s uncle.

The Swan Knight was a principal theme of the feast, which opened with a joust the Swan Knight participated in. The main prize for the winner was a swan of gold, chained with a golden chain with a ruby at the end of it. The swan motif appeared also on the banquet table, where a ship drawn by a silver swan was placed. In the ship, there was a knight whose attire was adorned with the arms of Cleves. Philip the Good himself was a Swan Knight enthusiast. In the collection of the Wawel Royal Castle, Kraków, Poland, there is a tapestry with the tale of the Knight of the Swan commissioned by him and given to Jean Jouffroy in 1462. Philip is depicted as Oriant in it.

The House of Brandenburg also claimed descent from the Swan Knight. In 1440, to strengthen the dynastic connection, Friedrich II von Hohenzollern founded the Order of the Swan (Schwanenorden), whose members wore a collar adorned with hearts and torture devices, with pendants of the Virgin and of a swan. The order held the chapel of the Order of the Swan in Ansbach and engaged in works of mercy.

Friedrich II was not the first to found a swan order. A similar brotherhood existed before, in Savoy, where Count Amédée VI, “the Green Count,” created Compagnie du Cygne Noir (Company of the Black Swan) to celebrate his sister’s marriage in 1350.

The swan as an emblem in general was used on an international scale. Its popularity across Europe grew with Godfrey of Bouillon.

The accounts of his deeds in the Holy Land began to circulate at the same time as the Swan Knight tales, and the two became fused. A knight who is drawn in a boat by a swan appeared in such tales as the twelfth-century La Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne et de Godefroi de Bouillon. Ever since, the legends of the Swan Knight enjoyed enormous popularity, especially in medieval German literature.

In the thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach retold Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romance, incorporating the Swan Knight into it. In his version, Parcival’s son, Lohengrin, is the Swan Knight. As a result, the Swan Knight became Arthurian. He also appeared in the works of Konrad von Würzburg and Albrecht von Scharfenberg (both thirteenth century) and later in the great Arthurian saga Buch der Abenteuer by Ulrich von Füetrer (fifteenth century).

In those later retellings, Lohengrin adopted a swan as his crest and badge. The real-life German knights followed suit and made it increasingly fashionable in their circles. Heraldry, topography, and funerary art all featured swans. The swan fashion was to last and enjoy a major revival in the nineteenth century thanks to Wagner’s famous opera and Ludwig II’s obsession.

To learn more about the emergence of the Swan Knight legend, literary motifs, associations, and swan fashion in general, I recommend the excellent Medieval Swan by Natalie Jayne Goodison.

Katarzyna Ogrodnik-Fujcik specializes in British literature and history, her area of expertise being the first Plantagenets (the Angevins). She lives in Poland. She writes for different magazines and websites on Polish and European Middle Ages. She runs a blog dedicated to Henry the Young King.