Old High German and Continental Old Low German

Abstract

There are Two Ways of approaching the relatively limited amount of literature (a term usually extended to cover everything written down in the vernacular) that has survived from the earliest stages of High or Low German in continental Germania, from the Low Countries to Lombardy, between about 750 and around 1200. One approach places the greatest emphasis on the Germanic content and what those survivals can confirm or tell us about pre-Christian Germanic tribal culture. Since there is little directly relevant material for this approach beyond a few legal works, a couple of charms and one single short Old High German heroic poem, evidence has to be sought elsewhere, taking us beyond even that simple definition of “everything written down,” and sometimes using methods which are, in the strictest sense of the word, speculative. The approach necessarily examines existing Christian texts; oaths forswearing pagan deities can provide clues to earlier beliefs, for example. Less concrete still is the (doubtless correct) assumption that literary works existed in oral form on the continent in German which matched texts that we have in Anglo-Saxon, Norse or Latin, or indeed later in Middle High German versions, dealing with the heroes of Germanic myth and legend. A case in point is the tale of Walther or Waltharius, a heroic story with Visigoth origins involving the hero Hagen, which was certainly known to the writer of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied (itself linked with early Germanic tribal history), but which survives in Latin, with analogues in several other languages, but not German. There may have been an oral Old High German Walther-poem, but — and this is crucial — we do not have it. Finally, a major collection of Old High German texts actually prints a piece of non-existent Old High German, even though it is a fairly convincing recreation of a little verse, based on a Latin text which has survived, and which might have been German in origin. In recent years there has been interesting and important work on the interaction of orality and literacy, and there is much still to be done; the ultimate outcome is still inevitable, however — we cannot easily (and convincingly) examine what we do not have.

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