PERSPECTIVES ON THE OLD SAXON HELIAND: INTRODUCTORY AND CRITICAL ESSAYS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE LEIPZIG FRAGMENT

Preface

vii Preface T his anthology is the first of its kind since Jürgen Eichhoff and Irmengard Rauch’s excellent Der Heliand (Wege der Forschung 321), which appeared in 1973, and it is the first collection of Heliand scholarship ever to be assembled entirely in English. Some have said that it would be pointless to translate articles from German on such a topic, since anyone interested in Old Saxon literature will necessarily be able to read German scholarship, but my experience has suggested otherwise. e Heliand appeals to a wide audience – historians, biblical scholars, linguists, and scholars of medieval literature, for instance, have all had much to say about it – and many of its readers lack the skill or patience to wade through difficult German prose. I have found this to be true, in particular, of many students and scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, whose interest in the Heliand is strong for reasons that do not need to be outlined here. e popularity of the Heliand in the English-speaking world has grown considerably over the past two decades, and a few scholars are largely responsible for this. To mention some major works: In 1989, G. Ronald Murphy’s e Saxon Savior: e Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand reopened the discussion over the synthesis of Germanic and Christian worldviews in the poem, and in 1992 his English translation – e Heliand: e Saxon Gospel – was published by the Oxford University Press. In this year, too, Irmengard Rauch’s e Old Saxon Language: Grammar, Epic Narrative, Linguistic Interference appeared, which is the first grammar of Old Saxon to have been written in English and also the first to viii Preface shi the focus of Old Saxon linguistics from the phonology of the language to its syntax and semantics. James E. Cathey’s Hêliand: Text and Commentary, published in 2002, represents the first attempt to make the Old Saxon original more accessible to English speaking students, and should become the standard classroom edition in America and elsewhere. A number of relevant shorter writings on the Heliand have also been printed in English, on the wave of the books named above. ese English articles, together with the recent stream of studies in German by Harald Haferland and the discovery of a new manuscript fragment of the Heliand, inspired the composition of the present volume. My goal in collecting articles was not to fill in every gap between now and the last collection, but rather to bring together recent scholarship that both addresses new turns in the field and, where possible, engages with the relevant arguments of the past three decades. With the exception of the study by Tjitze Baarda, originally published in 1992, each of the articles postdates the year 2000. Baarda’s work was included because of the freshness of its perspective; seldom does a medieval Germanic poem capture the philological attention of a Semiticist with expertise in New Testament textual criticism. e introductory essays by James E. Cathey and G. Ronald Murphy complement one another and will be especially useful for beginning students. Whereas Cathey focuses on the historical background, meter, and manuscripts of the Heliand, Murphy outlines the chief literary themes of the poem. Marc Pierce’s survey of work in Old Saxon linguistics, an original contribution to this volume, will bring the reader up to date in the many aspects of this growing field. My own contribution, like Baarda’s, is concerned with the relationship between the Heliand, Tatian’s Diatessaron, and the Coptic Gospel of omas. My purpose here is not, however, to debate philological details but rather to examine the ideological motivations that have propelled such debates in the past. A section of this book ix Preface contains two representative essays by Harald Haferland that present unconventional approaches to the way in which the poem was composed. ese studies are especially captivating for those who believe, as I do, that oral-formulaic theory has been too rashly cast aside. e representation of Jews in the Heliand is the theme of the fourth section of the anthology. Recent scholarship on this topic in Anglo-Saxon England – see the titles by Andrew Scheil and Renate Bauer, for example – demonstrate the liveliness of this issue and also the need to bring together the evidence from Old Saxon, which should be incorporated into larger studies in the future. In this section, Murphy’s...