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

The Old Saxon Heliand

34 The Old Saxon Heliand G. Ronald Murphy Introduction T he 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. e Heliand was written in Old Saxon, 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. at 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. e author has never been identified. His purpose seems to have been to make the Gospel story completely accessible  Originally published in Early Germanic Literature and Culture, ed. Brian Murdoch and Malcolm Read, e Camden House History of German Literature  (Rochester: Camden House, ), –.  For selections from the Old Saxon text with annotations and commentary, see James E. Cathey, ed., Hêliand: Text and Commentary, Medieval European Studies  (Morgantown: University of West Virginia Press, ). e standard edition of the entire Old Saxon text is given in note . ere is a collection of essays on the text edited by Jürgen Eichhoff and Irmengard Rauch, Der Heliand, Wege der Forschung  (Darmstadt: Wissenschaliche Buchgesellscha, ). 35 e Old Saxon Heliand 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. at 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. ere 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 gied 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. e 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.! It is now  For further detail see G. Ronald Murphy, e Saxon Savior: e Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (New York: Oxford UP, ), –.  For a description of the mutual influence of Germanic culture and Christianity from a socio-historical point of view, see James C. Russell, e Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (New York: Oxford UP, ). ! Some further circumstantial evidence for the association of the Heliand with Fulda and with the patronage of Rabanus Maurus is the provenance of the very early Heliand fragment V (at the Vatican), which is believed to predate 36 G. Ronald Murphy 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. C is believed to have been written about a hundred years later, circa 950–1000, at an East Anglian monastery in England. ough later than M, C seems to have kept more to the original division of the Heliand into fitts or songs. e 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...