The old saxon Heliand

Abstract

The Heliand is over a thousand years old, and is the oldest epic work of German literature, antedating the Nibelungenlied by four centuries. It consists of approximately 6,000 lines of alliterative verse, twice the length of Beowulf, which shares just enough imagery and poetic phraseology with the Heliand that it might possibly be contemporary. The Heliand was written in Old Saxon, 2 possibly at the behest of the emperor Louis the Pious (Ludwig der Fromme), in the first half of the ninth century, around the year ad 830, near the beginning of the era of the Viking raids. That it is in continental Low German has probably been the reason for its neglect within the context of German literary history, but such neglect is hard to justify. The author has never been identified. His purpose seems to have been to make the Gospel story completely accessible and appealing to the Saxons through a depiction of Christ's life in the poetry of the North, recasting Jesus himself and his followers as Saxons, and thus to overcome Saxon ambivalence toward Christ caused by forced conversion to Christianity. That forced conversion was effected through thirty-three years of well-chronicled violence on the part of the Franks under Charlemagne, and counter-violence by the Saxons under Widukind, and ended with the final but protracted defeat of the Saxons.3 There must have still been resentment among the Saxons at the time of the composition of the Heliand since there was a revolt of the Saxon stellinga, what we might call the lower social castes, during this period. Whoever the poet of the Heliand was, he had his task cut out for him. His masterpiece shows that he was astonishingly gifted at intercultural communication in the religious realm. By the power of his imagination the poet-monk (perhaps also ex-warrior) created a unique cultural synthesis between Christianity and Germanic warrior society - a synthesis that would plant the seed that would one day blossom in the full-blown culture of knighthood and become the foundation of medieval Europe.4 The Heliand has come down to us in two almost complete manuscript versions, one housed now in Munich at the Bavarian State Library, designated M, and the other in London at the British Library, designated C. Neither is held to be the author's original of circa 830, which was most likely composed by a monk in Fulda acting under the ecumenical aegis of the abbot (H)Rabanus Maurus. 5 It is now lost. M is the older of the two extant manuscripts and believed to have been written in the second half of the ninth century, circa 850, in Corvey.6 C is believed to have been written about a hundred years later, circa 950-1000, at an East Anglian monastery in England. Though later than M, C seems to have kept more to the original division of the Heliand into fitts or songs. The manuscript in Munich is in such excellent condition that one could almost believe it is a modern reproduction; its excellent condition seems to stem from the high quality calfskin on which it was written. In several places neumes have been inserted above the text, giving sure evidence that the Heliand was chanted, as is also implied in the Praefatio. Unfortunately, the last two fitts are missing from M. In addition to the two manuscripts, there are also four fragments, named after their place of finding: P from Prague, V at the Vatican, S from the binding of a book held in the Jesuit high school in Straubing, and the recently discovered Leipzig fragment, L. 7 The existence of four separate fragments as well as the two manuscripts, the one copied at Corvey (M) and the other at a monastery in East Anglia (C), as well as the presence of neumes in the texts, give evidence of widespread readership and use both in Germany and England in the ninth and tenth centuries and possibly beyond. We know that Martin Luther had a copy, and that it was used as a justification for the existence of a tradition of translating the Gospels into the vernacular. It even seems that Luther admired the Heliand's version of the angel's greeting to Mary as "full of grace." In the Heliand this becomes thu bist thinon herron liof (literally: you are dear to your lord, or your lord is fond of you). He uses this example to ridicule the idea of anyone being literally full of grace, as if he or she were a beer vat, and as if grace were something that could be poured into them. He insists instead on his preference for the German du bist deinem Herren lieb taken - perhaps - from the Heliand, but unfortunately without attribution. Where was the Heliand used? The audience of the Heliand was probably to be found in mead hall and monastery. The epic poem seems not to have been designed for use in the church as part of official worship, but seems intended to bring the Gospel home to the Saxons in a poetic milieu, in a more familiar environment like the mead hall, in order to help the Saxons cease their vacillation between their loyalty to the sagas of Wodan and Thor, and loyalty to the epic of the mighty Christ. Some internal evidence, as well as liturgical tradition, would thus indicate that the Heliand epic was designed for after-dinner singing - in the poetic tradition of the scop, who sang in the mead hall of the nobility, and in Benedictine tradition in the monastic refectory of the monks. The Heliand was first published by printing press in 1830, by Johann Andreas Schmeller, a millennium after its composition, and immediately had an influence on among others, the work of the Brothers Grimm. The first edition was dedicated by Schmeller to Jacob Grimm, and was read by Wilhelm Grimm when he was working on the editing and composition of the fairy tales. The Heliand has also been used by German nationalists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for their own pan-Germanic purposes, completely ignoring the great poem's historical context and Christian-Saxon origin. The poetic technique of the author is centered on the use of analogy. In order to Saxonize the Gospel story, the author needed to find appropriate parallels for places and events of the evangelists' narrative. With regard to Bethlehem and Nazareth, for example, he is not interested in asking pilgrims what these places actually looked like. Instead, he attaches the Saxon word burg to each one. A burg at that time was a hill-fort, a local hilltop fortified with earthen embankments crowned with a palisade, a heavy wooden wall of sharpened pilings. Inside the fort was the hall of the chieftain. Outside the fort, often at the foot of the hill, were the smaller thatched-roof houses of those who were not of the warrior class. The warrior-nobility prided themselves, if we go by the account in the Heliand's version of the nativity, on being born within the walls of the hill-fort. Some easier geographic analogies are readily provided by the location of Jesus's activities by the Sea of Galilee and the presence of the North Sea. Fishing scenes are frequent enough in the Gospel itself; the Heliand strengthens them by adding details of the apostles working on the nets and of implying that they are using the seine technique that must have been popular in the river regions of the north. Finally the author finds not only cultural equivalencies for the events of the Gospel story, but often he sets them in parallel to a literal translation which he gives in the following line. "Your lord is fond of you" is followed by "woman full of grace." The poetic power of the Heliand lies in the unexpected parallel imagery and in the charm created by hearing northern equivalents for the Mediterranean concepts of the Bible in such close proximity to each other. The technique itself is biblical, and can be found in the Psalms. For example, in ancient Hebrew poetry, mountain can be "rhymed" with hill not on the similarity of sound, but of similarity of image. Likewise, snow can be rhymed with hail, fish with whales, and more familiarly, "he leads me beside the still waters" can be rhymed with "he gave me repose." I call this technique concept alliteration. The Saxons did not know or practice Roman crucifixion, but they did punish criminals and make an offering to Wodan by hanging criminals and animals from the branches of sacred trees.8 In the Heliand, therefore, crucifixion is "rhymed" in the following line with hanging. The arrogant thief crucified alongside Christ is made in the Heliand to say "get down from the cross, slip out of the rope." The poet worked in a number of categories in order to create a Saxon poetic equivalent to the Gospel. Since he was using the Diatessaron, a synthesis of the four Gospel narratives compiled originally in Greek by Tatian, a second-century Syrian Christian, and subsequently translated into Latin and most of the European vernaculars, including Old High German, he had all the known pericopes ("readings," biblical narrative units) of the story at hand, and he chose to leave out very few, notably those that had to do with examples that seemed to justify the taking of interest on loans. First, warrior equivalencies will be examined; second, mythological incorporations; third, magic; fourth, epic structure; and, fifth, the enormous role of light in the Heliand. © 2010 by the West Virginia University Press. All rights reserved.