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From Away.com
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To the Castles
Neuschwanstein Castle: Brainchild of a Mad King

By Kit Carlson

The end of any quest is, of course, the Holy Grail. And here it is, bigger than life, painted on the wall of King Ludwig's living room in Neuschwanstein Castle, backlit and dazzling. It's a light Ludwig sought all his life—the magical light of legends, of a past that never was.

Ludwig grew up surrounded by garish frescoes depicting the tale of Lohengrin, the Swan Knight. The lonely prince befriended the composer Richard Wagner. Together, they played music, discussed the old legends—Tristan and Isolde, Lohengrin, the Niebelungen, the Meistersingers—and gazed from the windows to the ruins of a castle on the opposite cliff. Wagner transformed those stories into timeless operas. Ludwig tried to make them reality. The result was Neuschwanstein, the "New Swan Castle," a fantasy fortress where Ludwig himself would be the Swan Knight of the Holy Grail. (And, yes, the stories are true—this is the model the Disney folks copied when they built Cinderella's castle.)

At the crest of the hill, the castle looks like spun sugar—white and dainty, good enough to eat. Inside, Ludwig took a page from his father's book and focused on frescoes, although these are larger, more vivid, more surreal. No legends from the past, these tell the plots of Wagner's operas. Swans are everywhere: woven into the curtains, carved into the furnishings, sculpted onto the spout of the sink in the King's bedroom. There's even an artificial grotto off the living room, which Ludwig had equipped with a working waterfall.

In 17 years of construction, only a third of the castle was completed. Few people besides Ludwig ever saw the interior, and he himself spent only 102 days there. He was busy building other fanciful castles: Linderhof, a copy of France's Petit Trianon, and Herrenschiemsee, modeled after Versailles. The cost of Ludwig's elaborate citadels was bankrupting Bavaria, and he had more in the works. It couldn't go on; ministers of the Bavarian government assembled a medical commission to declare the king insane. On June 11, 1886, they confronted Ludwig and forced him to abdicate. He was rushed to retirement at a castle on Lake Berg, where two days later, the bodies of the king and his doctor were dragged from the lake. Not six weeks after Ludwig's death, the Bavarian government provided Neuschwanstein with its ultimate raison d'être, opening the castle for public tours.

There is no history in Neuschwanstein, only the story of one sad man and how he imagined the past to be. But as I drive away in the night, and the white, floodlit towers of Ludwig's castle disappear into the black shadows of the Alps, Neuschwanstein stands as much a memento mori for me as Durnstein did.

The days-of-old-when-knights-were-bold are gone, gone, gone. Not even a king could bring them back. All I can do is touch the stones they left behind, and dream.

Practically Speaking
Neuschwanstein castle is open daily from April to October.
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Kit Carlson is a freelance writer and editor, a history buff, and a romantic. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.