Externsteine

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Externsteine, Germany

The Externsteine are a distinctive rock formation located in the Teutoburger Wald region of northwestern Germany, not far from the city of Detmold at Horn-Bad Meinberg. The formation consists of several tall, narrow columns of rock which rise abruptly from the surrounding wooded hills. The name probably means "stones of the Egge".

The columns are up to 40 meters tall and form a wall of several hundred meters length, in a region that is otherwise largely devoid of rocks. The geological formation consists of a hard, erosion-resistant sandstone, laid down during the early Cretaceous era about 120 million years ago, near the edge of a large shallow sea that covered large parts of Northern Europe at the time.

The Externsteine relief of the Descent from the Cross. The bent tree below the cross has been suggested to represent the Irminsul, humiliated by the triumph of Christianity.

It is generally assumed that Externsteine was a center of religious activity for the Teutonic peoples and their predecessors prior to the arrival of Christianity in northern Europe. This notion can be traced back to Hermann Hamelmann (1564).

However, archaeological excavations did not produce any findings earlier than the 11th century other than some Paleolithic and Mesolithic stone tools from before about 10,000 BC.

Whatever its early history, in 1093 the land surrounding the stones was supposedly bought by the Abdinghof monastery of Paderborn, as a questionable inscription inside the Stones indicate. Another dating suggests an early monastery, which might have been founded as early as 815, after the destruction of the Irminsul by Charlemagne. The findings, however, are not yet conclusive, though the dating of 1093 has been proven as false by art historians, dating the relief as early 9th century.

The last pagan inhabitants of the region were Saxons until their defeat and conversion by Charlemagne. Charlemagne is reported to have destroyed the Saxon Irminsul in 772; and Wilhelm Teudt in the 1920s suggested that the location of the Irminsul had been at the Externsteine. In 1933 Teudt joined the Nazi Party and proposed to turn the Externsteine into a "sacred grove" for the commemoration of the ancestors.

Heinrich Himmler was open to the idea, and in 1933 initiated and then presided over the "Externstein Foundation". Interest in the location was furthered by the Nazi Ahnenerbe division within the SS, who studied the stones for their value to Germanic folklore and history.

Some Neo-Pagans continue to believe that the Irminsul was located at the Externsteine and identify a bent tree depicted beneath the cross in a 12th-century Christian carving with it. The site has also been of interest to various German nationalist movements over the years, and continues to be a frequently visited point of interest.