Lay of Hildebrand
Encyclopedia
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
, written in Old High German
Old High German
The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...
alliterative verse
Alliterative verse
In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal structuring device to unify lines of poetry, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of many Germanic...
. It is one of the earliest literary works in German, and it tells of the tragic encounter in battle between a son and his unrecognized father. It is the only surviving example in German of a genre which must have been important in the oral literature
Oral literature
Oral literature corresponds in the sphere of the spoken word to literature as literature operates in the domain of the written word. It thus forms a generally more fundamental component of culture, but operates in many ways as one might expect literature to do...
of the Germanic tribes.
Synopsis
The opening lines of the poem set the scene: two warriors meet on a battlefield, probably as the champions of their two armies.As the older man, Hildebrand opens by asking the identity and genealogy of his opponent. Hadubrand reveals that he did not know his father but the elders told him his father was Hildebrand, who fled eastwards in the service of Dietrich
Legends about Theodoric the Great
The Gothic King Theodoric the Great was remembered in Germanic legend as Dietrich von Bern . Dietrich figures in a number of surviving works, and it must be assumed that these draw on long-standing oral tradition...
to escape the wrath of Otacher (Odoacer
Odoacer
Flavius Odoacer , also known as Flavius Odovacer, was the first King of Italy. His reign is commonly seen as marking the end of the Western Roman Empire. Though the real power in Italy was in his hands, he represented himself as the client of Julius Nepos and, after Nepos' death in 480, of the...
), leaving behind a wife and small child. He believes his father to be dead.
Hildebrand responds by saying that Hadubrand will never fight such a close kinsman (an indirect way of asserting his paternity) and offers gold arm-rings he had received as a gift from the Lord of the Huns (the audience would have recognized this as a reference to Attila, whom according to legend Theodoric served).
Hadubrand takes this as a ruse to get him off guard and belligerently refuses the offer, accusing Hildebrand of deception, and perhaps implying cowardice. Hildebrand accepts his fate and sees that he cannot honourably refuse battle: he has no choice but to kill his own son or be killed by him.
They start to fight, and the text concludes with their shields smashed. But the poem breaks off, not revealing the outcome.
The Text
The text consists of 68 lines of alliterative verse, though written continuously with no indication the verse form. It breaks off in mid-line, leaving the poem unfinished at the end of the second page. However, it does not seem likely that much more than a dozen lines are missing.The poem starts:
Ik gihorta ðat seggen ðat sih urhettun ænon muotin Hiltibrant enti Haðubrant untar heriun tuem sunufatarungo iro saro rihtun garutun se iro guðhamun gurtun sih iro suert ana helidos ubar hringa do sie to dero hiltiu ritun | I heard tell That warriors met in single combat Hildebrand and Hadubrand between two armies son and father prepared their armour made ready their battle garments girded on their swords the warriors, over their ring mail when they rode to battle. |
The text is highly problematic, both because of the circumstances of its transmission and because of the uniqueness of the work. Although the written text presents no gaps, a number of places have been identified where the text appears not to follow or there are incomplete lines of verse, suggesting missing text. Other apparent illogicalities suggest misattributed direct speech and lines out of order, though these remain matters of debate.
While it has always been accepted that the text derives ultimately from an oral original, it is unlikely that the surviving text was transcribed directly from oral performance, or indeed written down by someone competent in the oral tradition. The transpositions, apparent lacuna
Lacuna (manuscripts)
A lacunaPlural lacunae. From Latin lacūna , diminutive form of lacus . is a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or a musical work...
e, and unwarranted insertions all indicate a text copied from an earlier manuscript by scribes with only a partial understanding of the poetic form. The mixture of dialects and other linguistic oddities found in the text could also indicate that the poem was intentionally written to appear to be older than it was.
The Manuscript
The manuscript of the Hildebrandslied is now in the Murhardsche BibliothekUniversitätsbibliothek Kassel
The Universitätsbibliothek Kassel is a library located in the city of Kassel, Germany. Composed of the collections of the former Landesbibliothek and Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel as well as that of the Kassel University library, amongst the library's holdings is the...
in Kassel
Kassel
Kassel is a town located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Kassel Regierungsbezirk and the Kreis of the same name and has approximately 195,000 inhabitants.- History :...
and was discovered around 1715 by Johan Georg von Eckert. It is assumed to derive, like much else in the library's collection, from the monastery of Fulda
Fulda
Fulda is a city in Hesse, Germany; it is located on the river Fulda and is the administrative seat of the Fulda district .- Early Middle Ages :...
.
It is written on two leaves of parchment
Parchment
Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...
, the first and last in a theological codex
Codex
A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with multiple quires or gatherings typically bound together and given a cover.Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement...
. The codex itself was written in the first quarter of the 9th century, with the text of the Hildebrandslied added in the 830s on the two remaining blank leaves. There is no evidence to support the suggestion of a missing third leaf which would have contained the end of the poem.
Carolingian minuscule
Carolingian or Caroline minuscule is a script developed as a writing standard in Europe so that the Roman alphabet could be easily recognized by the literate class from one region to another. It was used in Charlemagne's empire between approximately 800 and 1200...
. A number of features, including the wynn-rune
Wynn
Wynn is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound ....
used for w suggest Old English influence, not surprising in a house founded by Anglo-Saxon missionaries
Missionary
A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...
.
The manuscript pages now show a number of patches of discoloration. These are the results of attempts by earlier scholars to improve the legibility of the text with chemical agents.
At the end of the Second World War the codex went missing, looted by a US army officer and sold into the rare book trade. It was eventually discovered in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and returned to Kassel in 1955. However, the first sheet had been cut out by ignorant antiquars, and it was only in 1972 that this was rediscovered in Philadelphia and returned. Further damage had been done to this leaf in order to help disguise its origin.
The Dialect
One of the most puzzling features of the Hildebrandslied is its dialectDialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
, which is a mixture of Old Bavarian and Old Saxon
Old Saxon
Old Saxon, also known as Old Low German, is the earliest recorded form of Low German, documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it evolved into Middle Low German. It was spoken on the north-west coast of Germany and in the Netherlands by Saxon peoples...
. For example, the first person pronoun appears both in the Old Saxon form ik and the Old High German ih. The reason for the dialect mixture is unknown, but it seems certain it cannot have been the work of the last scribes and was already present in the original which they copied.
The Old Saxon features predominate in the opening part of the poem and show a number of errors, which argue against an Old Saxon original. The alliteration
Alliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
of riche and reccheo in line 48 is often regarded as conclusive: the equivalent Old Saxon forms, rīke and wrekkio, do not alliterate and would have given a malformed line. Earlier scholars envisaged an Old Saxon original, but an Old High German original is now universally accepted.
The errors in the Old Saxon features suggest that the scribe responsible for the dialect mixture was not thoroughly familiar with the dialect. Forms such as heittu (l.17) and huitte (l.66) (Modern German heißen and weiß) are mistakes for Old Saxon spellings with a single
High German consonant shift
In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological development that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases, probably beginning between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, and was almost...
, corresponds to /t/ in Old Saxon in these words, not /tt/.
The origin of the Dietrich legend in Northern Italy also suggests a southern origin is more likely.
The East Franconian dialect of Fulda was High German
High German languages
The High German languages or the High German dialects are any of the varieties of standard German, Luxembourgish and Yiddish, as well as the local German dialects spoken in central and southern Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Luxembourg and in neighboring portions of Belgium and the...
, but the monastery was a centre of missionary activity to Northern Germany. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume there was some knowledge of Old Saxon there, and perhaps even some Old Saxon speakers. However, the motivation for attempting a translation into Old Saxon remains inscrutable, and attempts to link it with Fulda's missionary activity among the Saxons remain speculative.
An alternative explanation treats the dialect as homogeneous, interpreting it as representative of an archaic poetic idiom.
Analogues & The Ending
Although the ending is missing, later works which draw on the same legendary material offer evidence about the original conclusion:- In the 13th century Old NorseOld NorseOld Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
Thiðrekssaga, Hildibrand defeats his son, Alibrand. Alibrand offers his sword in surrender but attempts to strike Hildibrand as he reaches for it. Hildibrand taunts him for having been taught to fight by a woman, but then asks if he is Alibrand and they are reconciled. - The Early Modern German Jüngeres Hildebrandslied (first attested in the fifteenth century) tells a similar story of the treacherous blow, the taunt that the son was taught to fight by a woman, and the final reconciliation.
- In the 14th century Old NorseOld NorseOld Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
Ásmundar saga kappabana, Hildebrand's shield bears paintings of the warriors he has killed, which include his own son. - In the Faroese balladKvæðiKvæði are the old ballads of the Faroe Islands, accompanied by the Faroese dance....
Snjólvskvæði, Hildebrand is tricked into killing his son. - In Book VII of the Gesta DanorumGesta DanorumGesta Danorum is a patriotic work of Danish history, by the 12th century author Saxo Grammaticus . It is the most ambitious literary undertaking of medieval Denmark and is an essential source for the nation's early history...
(early 13th century), Hildiger reveals as he is dying that he has killed his own son.
Even though some of these versions end in reconciliation, this can be seen as a concession to the courtly tastes of a later period. The heroic ethos of an earlier period would leave Hildebrand no choice but to kill his son after the treacherous stroke, and this is preserved in the other analogues
Analogue (literature)
The term analogue is used in literary history in two related senses:* a work which resembles another in terms of one or more motifs, characters, scenes, phrases or events....
.
A more distant analogue is the Persian tale of Rostam
Rostam
Rostam is the national hero of Greater Iran from Zabulistan in Persian mythology and son of Zal and Rudaba. In some ways, the position of Rostam in the historical tradition is parallel to that of Surena, the hero of the Carrhae. His figure was endowed with many features of the historical...
in the Shahnameh
Shahnameh
The Shahnameh or Shah-nama is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c.977 and 1010 AD and is the national epic of Iran and related societies...
(The Epic of Kings), who kills his son Sohrab
Sohrab
Sohrāb or Suhrāb is a character from the Shahnameh, or the Tales of Kings by Ferdowsi in the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab. He was the son of Rostam, who was an Iranian warrior, and Tahmineh, the daughter of the king of Samangam, a neighboring country. He was slain at a young age by his father...
in single combat between two armies. They do not recognize each other until, after Sohrab has been fatally wounded, Rostam sees the arm-ring he had given his son at his birth. The similarities with the Hildebrandslied suggest the story may derive from a Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European society
Proto-Indo-European refers to the single ancestor language common to all Indo-European languages. It is therefore a linguistic concept, not an ethnic, social or cultural one, so there is no direct evidence of the nature of Proto-Indo-European 'society'. Much depends on the unsettled Indo-European...
folk tale.
The Historical Background
Although there is no evidence that Hildebrand himself was a historical character, the background to the poem is formed by historical events in 6th century Italy, where the Ostrogothic King Theodoric fought for mastery of ItalyItaly
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
against Odoacer
Odoacer
Flavius Odoacer , also known as Flavius Odovacer, was the first King of Italy. His reign is commonly seen as marking the end of the Western Roman Empire. Though the real power in Italy was in his hands, he represented himself as the client of Julius Nepos and, after Nepos' death in 480, of the...
, the Germanic general who had deposed the emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Theodoric appears widely in Germanic legend as Dietrich von Bern (Verona
Verona
Verona ; German Bern, Dietrichsbern or Welschbern) is a city in the Veneto, northern Italy, with approx. 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven chef-lieus of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third of North-Eastern Italy. The metropolitan area of Verona...
).
Theodoric's Gothic Kingdom of Italy
Ostrogothic Kingdom
The Kingdom established by the Ostrogoths in Italy and neighbouring areas lasted from 493 to 553. In Italy the Ostrogoths replaced Odoacer, the de facto ruler of Italy who had deposed the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The Gothic kingdom reached its zenith under the rule of its...
was subsequently seized by the Lombards
Lombards
The Lombards , also referred to as Longobards, were a Germanic tribe of Scandinavian origin, who from 568 to 774 ruled a Kingdom in Italy...
, who had close connections with the Bavarians in South Germany, both speaking closely related Upper German
Upper German
Upper German is a family of High German dialects spoken primarily in southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Northern Italy.-Family tree:Upper German can be generally classified as Alemannic or Austro-Bavarian...
dialects. This accounts for the transmission of legendary material relating to Theodoric northwards. Even if the Scandinavian analogues did not suggest wider dissemination, the close links between Bavaria
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
and Fulda - the first abbot Sturmi
Saint Sturm
Saint Sturm was a disciple of Saint Boniface and founder and first abbot of the Benedictine monastery and abbey of Fulda in 742 or 744...
was a member of the Bavarian nobility - would in any case be sufficient to account for knowledge of this material in the monastery.
The Hildebrandslied hints at Theodoric's legendary (and historically incorrect) connection with Attila, which is also seen in the Nibelungenlied
Nibelungenlied
The Nibelungenlied, translated as The Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic poem in Middle High German. The story tells of dragon-slayer Siegfried at the court of the Burgundians, how he was murdered, and of his wife Kriemhild's revenge....
.
External links
- Wikisource Hildebrandslied
- Text from the Althochdeutsches Lesebuch
- Manuscript and transcription (Bibliotheca Augustana)
- Text with modern German translation
- Text with English translation and explanation of individual words
- Downloadable recording of the Hildebrandslied
- Free translation into English
- Summary of Popa's book on the recovery of the MS from the USA
Sources
- Althochdeutches Lesebuch, ed. W.Braune, K.Helm, E.A.Ebbinghaus, 17th edn, Tübingen 1994. ISBN 3-484-10707-3. Provides an edited text of the poem which is widely used and quoted.
- J. Knight Bostock, A Handbook on Old High German Literature, 2nd edn, revised by K.C.King and D.R.McLintock, (Oxford 1976) ISBN 0-19-815392-9. Includes a translation of the Hildebrandslied into English.
- K. Düwel, "Hildebrandslied" in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon (de Gruyter, 1981), Vol 3. ISBN 3-11-008778-2. With bibliography.
- Cyril Edwards, "Unucky Zeal: The Hildebrandslied and the Muspilli under the Acid" in The Beginnings of German Literature (Camden House, 2002) ISBN 1-57113-235-X
- Opritsa D. Popa: Bibliophiles and bibliothieves : the search for the Hildebrandslied and the Willehalm Codex. Berlin 2003. ISBN 3-11-017730-7