Mythen, Mountain range in Schwyz, Switzerland

The Mythen is a mountain massif of the Schwyz Alps made of two grey limestone pyramids: the Grosser Mythen at 1,898 m and the Kleiner Mythen at 1,811 m, with the Haggenspitz at 1,761 m as a subsidiary summit. A saddle called Zwüschetmythen lies at 1,437 m between the two main peaks. Snow fills the gullies and ledges of both summits, and dark evergreen forest covers the lower slopes above the village and fields.

The Grosser Mythen was probably first climbed around 1790. On 26 December 1863 the Mythen-Gesellschaft was founded as a joint-stock company to build a comfortable path and a guesthouse; in 1864 it paid the Gersau contractor Domenico Taddei 3,500 francs for a path built by Italian muratori in four and a half months, opened on 17 September 1864. A first summit hut of about 1865 burned down after a lightning strike in 1885; the SAC section Mythen built a new hut with overnight rooms in 1886.

The name comes from Latin meta, 'something protruding', according to researcher Viktor Weibel. Until about 1870 the peaks were feminine and singular, 'die grosse Mythe', as a 1552 council protocol shows; many in Schwyz still say 'die Mythen' in dialect. Goethe sketched the mountains in pencil on 17 June 1775, and Schiller put them in the opening of Wilhelm Tell under the name Haken.

The marked route to the Grosser Mythen starts at Holzegg, reached by cable car from Brunni in the Alptal or on foot from Rickenbach. It climbs 500 metres in 47 bends on the south flank, graded T3, and is walkable from May to November. The Kleiner Mythen and Haggenspitz have no marked trails and are left to climbers.

The Mythen are Penninic klippen: rock that formed in a part of the ancient Mediterranean and was pushed almost 150 km north during the building of the Alps. During the last cold period the Reuss-Muota glacier covered the Schwyz basin to a thickness of about 800 metres, so the two peaks stood out as a rock island. Moraine remnants can still be seen on the mountains, though post-glacial landslides from the Mythen area largely bury them.