Rodenstein Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Nestled at an altitude of 322 m in a side valley of the Gersprenz, between Fränkisch-Crumbach and Reichelsheim, the ruin of Rodenstein Castle is one of the most legendary in the Odenwald. Built around 1240 by the lords of Crumbach and Rodenstein, with the support of the counts of Katzenelnbogen, as a counter-castle facing Reichenberg, it became in the late Middle Ages a jointly owned castle shared with the Katzenelnbogen and then with Hesse. Its rectangular core with rounded corners, built of granite with red Odenwald sandstone dressings, is reinforced to the southwest as if by a shield wall; it combines an old residential building and the 14th-century "Steinerner Stock", without a keep, behind a towered curtain wall supplemented in the 16th century by an outer ward and a mill tower with a half-timbered upper storey. Abandoned after Adam von Rodenstein and his family died of plague in 1635, it served as a quarry after the line died out in 1671. The legend of the "Rodensteiner", a phantom huntsman emerging from Schnellerts to herald war, inspired Scheffel and Bergengruen. Consolidated in the 20th century, the ruin has belonged to the municipality since 2020.