Students of comparative mythology and folklore will have no difficulty in seeing in the legend of Tannhauser one of the many tales of the association during a period of enchantment of men and elves.  Parallels between the theatre and apparatus of these tales extend back into remote antiquity.  The grotto of Venus, in which Tannhauser steeps himself with sensuality, is but a German variant of the Garden of Delight, in which the heroes of antiquity met their fair enslavers.  It is Ogygia, the Delightful Island, where Ulysses met Calypso.  It is that Avalon in which King Arthur was healed of his wounds by his fairy sister Morgain.  The crozier which bursts into green in token of Tannhauser’s forgiveness has prototypes in the lances which, when planted in the ground by Charlemagne’s warriors, were transformed overnight into a leafy forest; in the javelins of Polydore, of which Virgil tells us in the “AEneid”; in the staff of St. Christopher, which grew into a tree after he had carried the Christ Child across the river; in the staff which put on leaves in the hands of Joseph, wherefore the Virgin Mary gave him her hand in marriage; in the rod of Aaron, which, when laid up among others in the tabernacle, “brought forth buds and bloomed blossoms and yielded almonds.”

There are many parallels in classic story and folklore of the incident of Tannhauser’s sojourn with Venus.  I mention but a few.  There are the episodes of Ulysses and Calypso, Ulysses and Circe, Numa and Egeria, Rinaldo and Armida, Prince Ahmed and Peri Banou.  Less familiar are the folk-tales which Mr. Baring-Gould has collected of Helgi’s life with the troll Ingibjorg, a Norse story; of James Soideman of Serraade, “who was kept by the spirits in a mountain during the space of seven years, and at length came out, but lived afterwards in great distress and fear lest they should again take him away”; of the young Swede lured away by an elfin woman from the side of his bride into a mountain, where he abode with the siren forty years and thought it but an hour.

There are many Caves of Venus in Europe, but none around which there clusters such a wealth of legend as around the grotto in the Horselberg.  Nineteen years ago the writer of this book visited the scene and explored the cave.  He found it a decidedly commonplace hole in the ground, but was richly rewarded by the results of the literary explorations to which the visit led him.  Before Christianity came to reconstruct the folk-tales of the Thuringian peasants, the Horselberg was the home of Dame Holda, or Holle, and the horde of weird creatures which used to go tearing through the German forests on a wild rout in the Yuletide.  Dame Holle, like many another character in Teutonic mythology, was a benignant creature, whose blessing brought forth fruitfulness to fields and vineyards, before the Christian priests metamorphosed her into a thing wholly of evil.  She was the mother of all the fays and fairies that followed in