Other editions of book Otto of the Silver Hand

A rich and engrossing thread of Romance runs through this tale of the motherless son of a valiant robber baron of Medieval Germany. Young Otto, born into a warring household in an age when lawless chiefs were constantly fighting each other or despoiling the caravans of the merchant burghers, is raised in a monastery only to return to his family's domain and become painfully involved in the blood feud between his father and the rival house of Trutz-Drachen.

Born into a family that is already engaged in a blood feud with another noble house, Otto is sent to live with monks, but is reclaimed at age 12 by his militant, but loving father. The gentle-natured boy is kidnapped and mutilated by the rival family. Pauline, his captors daughter helps him escape. His father allows him to return to the monks who place him under the emperor’s protection. His silver hand is a replacement for the one Otto lost while in captivity, but his injury does not prevent him from maturing wisely and marrying Pauline.

Between the far away past history of the world, and that which lies near to us; in the time when the wisdom of the ancient times was dead and had passed away, and our own days of light had not yet come, there lay a great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition, of cruelty, and of wickedness. That time we call the dark or middle ages.

Born into a family that is already engaged in a blood feud with another noble house, Otto is sent to live with monks, but is reclaimed at age 12 by his militant, but loving father. The gentle-natured boy is kidnapped and mutilated by the rival family. Pauline, his captor's daughter helps him escape. His father allows him to return to the monks who place him under the emperor's protection. His silver hand is a replacement for the one Otto lost while in captivity, but his injury does not prevent him from maturing wisely and marrying Pauline.

The book centers around the life of Otto, the son of German warlord Baron Conrad. Otto's mother, Baroness Matilda, has died in premature labour, brought on by the sight of the Baron's battle wounds, prompting Conrad to take his newborn son to be raised in a nearby monastery. When Otto reaches the age of eleven his father returns to claim him from the gentle monks, taking him back to live in Castle Drachenhausen, ("Dragons' House", in German) the ancestral mountaintop fortress from which the Baron launches his attacks. Here Otto learns of and is horrified by his father's life as a robber baron.