II.

Old High German Period (800-1100)

The oldest known literary work in German is the epic Hildebrandslied (Lay of Hildebrand), which survives in a fragment dating from about ad 800. This work describes, in mixed Low and High German alliterative verse, the confrontation and the beginning of a battle between the legendary hero Hildebrand and his son. Other legends deal with such heroic personalities as Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths; Attila, king of the Huns; and Siegfried, identified by some authorities as the German chief Arminius, who defeated the Romans in the Teutoburger Wald, a forest in Lower Saxony in ad 9.

This pagan tradition was disowned by the Roman Catholic Church, which remained the dominant force in German literature from the 4th to the 12th century. As early as 381 Ulfilas, bishop of the Goths, translated the Bible into the vernacular, and an anonymous priest wrote Muspilli (900; trans. 1885), an alliterative poem in Bavarian dialect depicting the destruction of the world by fire on Judgement Day. Another important work, written in the old Low German dialect, is the epic Heliand (9th century; trans. 1830), in which Christ is represented as a German prince with feudal retainers as his disciples.

Under the Frankish ruler Charles Martel and his successors, many abbeys were founded, among them the famous St Gallen (now in Switzerland) and Fulda in Germany. In these abbeys the monks preserved ancient literature as well as the history of their own time. During this period, however, the major literary works were written in Latin, with German being used primarily in translations from the older language. An example of an epic written in Latin is the Walthariuslied (c. 930; Lay of Walter, 1858) by Ekkehard I the Elder of St Gallen, which tells of the escape of the hero Walter and his bride from the court of Attila. In addition to such epics, written for the royal courts, a popular oral literature developed during the 9th and 10th centuries. It consisted largely of tales and ballads, which were not written down until about the 14th century.