Before the Germans came, the Livs held this hill. Their wooden defensive works on Livukalns guarded the Daugava, the river highway that for a thousand years carried trade between the Baltic and the interior of Rus'. In 1201 Albert of Buxthoeven granted the Lennewarden district to a knight named Daniel von Banerow, and the Crusaders soon burned the Liv stronghold. In 1213 Lithuanian raiders captured the Liv elder of Lielvārde and held him until the Order of the Sword Brothers paid his ransom. By around 1229 the bishop's vassal Daniels had built a stone castle on the site, modeled on the downstream fortress of Uexküll, the standard small-vassal type. The cross had replaced the sacred grove, but the river kept its old role.

Power on the Daugava changed hands violently and often. In 1262 Samogitian Lithuanians defeated the Order's army, and the survivors fell back to Lielvārde. In 1361 Lithuanians took the castle and looted it. Through the 14th and 15th centuries Lielvārde became the seat of the bailiffs of the Riga archbishopric, with status as both fortress and bread barn for the diocese. The archbishop pledged it to the Order until 1435 when funds ran short. The Bernardine monastery of the Antonija Brothers occupied the castle from 1514 to 1534 and built a stone church in the courtyard. During the Livonian War the castle was pledged to the King of Poland under the pacta protectionis of 1559 and handed to Polish-Lithuanian troops, but in 1577 Russian forces destroyed both castle and church. Sweden's governor partially restored the building in 1633; later centuries let it crumble.

When Andrejs Pumpurs published Lāčplēsis in 1888, Latvia had no independent state, no recognized national literature, and a Baltic German aristocracy still owning most of the land. Pumpurs set out to give Latvians an epic of their own, weaving folk songs, fragments of pre-Christian myth, and the romance of national awakening into a story of a hero strong enough to tear apart bears with his hands. The hero loses his strength when his ears, the secret seat of his power, are cut off; he dies grappling with the Black Knight at Lielvārde, and the two plunge together into the Daugava. The poem became central to Latvian identity: Bear-Slayer Day, November 11, commemorates the 1919 victory in the war of independence, and the highest Latvian military decoration was the Order of Lāčplēsis.

J. C. Brotze drew the castle in 1792. His sketch shows two stories. Today only one and a half remain, the second-story windows long gone. At the start of the 19th century a classicist manor house went up beside the ruins, and Wilhelm Bockslaff, the same architect who restored Lielstraupe, rebuilt it for the local baron in the early 20th century. Then the front line of World War I settled along the Daugava for years, and artillery fire from both sides leveled the manor entirely. What stands today is what survives: the stone shell of the medieval bishop's castle, conserved at the level reached when the gunners finally moved on. The Daugava still flows past. The myth still runs through Latvian schoolchildren. The Bear-Slayer is still down there, somewhere under the river.