Invisibility Cloak

The hero Siegfried and the dwarf king Alberich (Nibelungen exhibition, Aggstein Castle)

The cloak of invisibility was unknown until the Middle Ages, when one appeared in the famous Austrian poem “The Song of the Nibelungs.” In this twelfth-century epic, loosely based on several tales from Norse mythology, a powerful dwarf magician named Alberich possesses a secret cloak that can render its wearer invisible. Alberich uses the cloak to protect the underground treasure of the Nibelung until he is defeated, and his cloak taken, by the great German folk hero, Siegfried. The story of Alberich and Siegfried is also told in the celebrated nineteenth-century German opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen ” by Richard Wagner.