20 results in Early Germanic Literature and Culture
Germanic Religion and the Conversion to Christianity
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- By Rudolf Simek
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Summary
Of All The Fields of early Germanic culture and literature, none has been as badly marred by ideological controversies as the study of the pre-Christian heathen Germanic religion. The great interest taken by the political and cultural leaders of the Third Reich in this field was unfortunately shared by many university teachers at the time. They saw this interest as a unique chance to promote their fields and themselves. This led to a nearly total lapse of interest after 1945. For almost thirty years after the Second World War, work in this field restricted itself either to minor studies or to the reprinting of the old handbooks with only cosmetic changes to hide the political flaws. There were, of course, exceptions too: the studies by Walter Baetke in the former GDR, by several Scandinavian scholars, or the excellent, if now outdated handbook by Derolez. But both among the public and the academic world, early Germanic religion was not a popular topic of study.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, this situation changed dramatically, and for the better. One reason for the renewed interest in this neglected area of research is the general fascination with non-Christian mythologies, whether of living religions or dead ones, particularly in the western world, and another may be the distinct upsurge in socalled new pagan religions. A more important factor may be that many aspects of the predominant religion of northwestern Europe for at least the whole first millennium A.D. are still unknown to a wider public or as yet unsolved altogether. Such aspects include the resistance of the old religion toward advancing Christianity, the role of heathendom for the early Germanic literatures, or even the question of continuity versus change within the pre-Christian Germanic society.
It is impossible in a single essay to provide a full picture of the research on a religion which, at least in northern Europe, had a longer history than Christianity and which, during the period of folk migrations extended into most areas of the European continent with the sole exception of the Peloponnese, and even there Viking travelers left their traces.
Frontmatter
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Origo gentis: The Literature of German Origins
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Summary
The Origo Gentis Theme — the literary examination of the origins of a given people, which in the Germanic context is the theme of this chapter — does not constitute a literary genre in its own right, but is found in connection with various different genres to produce what is in fact a genus mixtum, which conveys details of the origins of a particular people by using various narrative patterns. Examples of the origo gentis may be found in heroic epics, may introduce or form part of ethnographic works, chronicles, biographies and legends, or may even be used in official writings either as justificatory support or as a learned excursus or digression. An origo gentis will often introduce the historia, a genre developed in particular by the Christian historian Paulus Orosius in the early fifth century, and characterized as “an exemplary Christian history of kings and institutions.” The models are the Old Testament and classical ethnographical writings.5 The story of Noah and his three sons, who represent the three continents, and their seventy-two descendants is particularly popular, as are Caesar’s ethnographical discussions, the Germania and the Agricola of Tacitus, and indeed also Virgil’s Aeneid, whose hero is the son-in-law of Priam, who had fifty sons and fifty daughters. The few members of the family who survived the capture of Troy were forced to travel the world and found new cities and peoples everywhere. Why should there not be a Franco, the father of the Franks, among them, if there was certainly an Aeneas, the founder of Rome.
The Germania of Tacitus follows a tripartite pattern that became a model for other writings. It contains first the origin of a people, an origo (as a pars prototo in the Getica 9 and 315). In contrast with the notion of a beginning sprung from the word, the logos of John’s Gospel, the “mythical” beginning of an origo gentis is subordinated to the concept of eternal return, and always takes as read any earlier beginnings. Thus the origo Amalorum, the origins of the Gothic Amal dynasty in the Getica begins in the middle of the genealogy of the A(n)ses. The Lombards have a Scandinavian prehistory (Paul the Deacon, I, 7–9). The Bohemian House of Premysl are the inheritors of Libussa, who had two elder sisters and a father named Crocco (Cosmas, I, 3).
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The Old Saxon Heliand
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Summary
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, possibly at the behest of the emperor Louis the Pious (Ludwig der Fromme), in the first half of the ninth century, around the year A.D. 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.
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.
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 Museum, designated C.
The Concept of Germanic Antiquity
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Summary
The Study of Germanic Antiquity (Germanische Altertumskunde), both as a concept and as a problem, is a peculiarly German affair. This is demonstrated by the fact that there is no entirely appropriate English translation of the term. It is worth considering why, and to what extent, the founders and subsequent representatives of this discipline saddled themselves with a conceptual term that exercises critical attention, today more than ever. Such critical considerations are concerned with both aspects of the term: “Germanic” on the one hand, and “antiquity” on the other. The Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, which began to appear in its second edition in 1973 under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen and which is scheduled to be completed in 2005, may serve as an immediate point of reference.
The Concept “Germanic”
The term “Germanic” in classical historiography represents an initial problem. Historians in the ancient world, from Poseidonios, to Caesar and Tacitus follow the tradition of a Germanic ethnonym. Alongside the scholarly discussion that continues to this day, there has been, since the humanist reception of Tacitus’s Germania, a national adoption of the terms Germani and Germanic, which increasingly became more exclusively German. There were two main reasons for this: Tacitus’s Germania covered a geographical area that allowed the German humanists to identify themselves within these boundaries. The then contemporary views of the geographical location of Scandinavia and the eastern areas in 1500 further promoted this identification of Germania with Germany. Scandinavia, by contrast, was linked with the sixth-century historian Jordanes and his ethno-geographical perspective, within which the Goths played a leading role.
Renaissance humanism led to a conscious nationalism in which the Germani rose to become a unique source of popular Germanic thought and culminated in the formula: Germanic equals German. The continued existence of this equation in subsequent centuries, down to the present, represents an important and much debated topic of recent German intellectual history. The ethnic and nationalistic view of antiquity was significantly consolidated by a new academic discipline that was beginning to establish itself at the start of the nineteenth century and, based on the name of the Germanen, termed itself Germanistik.
Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), one of the founding fathers of Germanistik, not only helped to give this discipline its name, but also ascribed to it a patriotic mission.
Germania Romana
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Summary
In A.D. 15 the Roman general Germanicus, adopted son of the emperor Tiberius, crossed the Rhine at the head of eight infantry divisions of the Roman army. His mission was to avenge Rome’s most humiliating defeat, a battle that had taken place six years previously that wiped out three of Rome’s elite legions, possibly as many as twenty thousand men. The effects of that massacre are in some respect still being felt today. What had happened? Over a period of three days the new governor of Germania, three legions, and three cavalry units were massacred in the Teutoburg Forest. The battle is known today as the Varusschlacht, named after the hapless governor and commander of the legions. Publius Quintilius Varus was, nominally at least, a comparatively experienced governor, if not much of a military man. The first-century Roman historian Velleius Paterculus, in his compendium of Roman history, dismisses Varus as “more accustomed to ease in a camp than to action in the field.” Long groomed for high office, he had already held positions in Syria. His rule, however, was characterized by tactlessness and stupidity, and according to another historian, Cassius Dio, “he not only gave orders to the Germans as if they were actual slaves of the Romans, but also levied money from them as if they were subject nations. These were demands they would not tolerate.”
The opposing Germanic leader was a barbarian only in name. Trained in the Roman army, Arminius, the son of Segimer, had not only received Roman citizenship, but had risen to the middle classes with the rank of eques or knight. He knew how the Romans thought, and Varus’s oppression was the catalyst for his revolt. The headquarters of that revolt were naturally around the tribe of which Arminius was head, the Cherusci, who occupied the land around the modern town of Hanover, and they were soon joined by two other tribes, the Chaucii and the Marsii.
Their plan was always to ambush the Roman army, to trick them out from behind their walls and ramparts. Their plan was to send a false report of a revolt north of the Rhine, then a stepping stone rather than the watery barrier it was to become.
Old English
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Summary
During The Fifth Century A.D. Germanic tribes from around the north German littoral and the modern-day Land of Schleswig-Holstein migrated across the North Sea to the island of Britain. The occupants of Britain at that time were Romanized Celts, who were finding it difficult to defend themselves against invaders, the protecting Roman legions having been withdrawn early in the fifth century. The Germanic invaders — Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and probably some Frisians — conquered and peopled the island of Britain, which thereafter bore the name Engla land (land of the Angles), England. The Celts fled in large numbers into Wales, Cornwall, or across the English Channel into western Gaul.
The Germanic settlers or Anglo-Saxons (as they are usually called) spoke a language which we now call Old English. Between the time of their arrival in Britain and the end of the Old English period around A.D.1100 they produced in that language a rich and varied literary corpus (and an even larger Latin corpus). Natural disasters and human folly both during and after the Old English period took a heavy toll on the vernacular corpus, but a substantial remnant totaling 3,895,061 words survives today in parchment manuscripts, Roman-letter inscriptions, and runic inscriptions.
Runes are the Germanic epigraphic alphabet — designed, that is, for inscriptions — that the Anglo-Saxons brought with them to Britain, and inscriptions carved in runes date from the invaders’ earliest years on the island. With the conversion of England to Christianity, which got underway near the beginning of the seventh century, the Anglo-Saxons were introduced by missionaries to the custom of writing in Roman letters on parchment with pen and ink, a writing system better suited than runes to recording extensive texts. Runes continued in epigraphic use throughout the Old English period, and scribes even developed a tradition of writing runes in manuscripts, but this is relatively rare and sporadic, as is the use of Roman letters for inscriptions. The vast bulk of Old English literature is preserved in parchment manuscripts.
Contents
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Preface
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Summary
This volume was planned initially by Professor William Whobrey, who drew up the original outline and commissioned individual chapters from a wide range of scholars, and we wish first of all to acknowledge his work. He was, however, unable to continue with the editorship, and at a relatively late stage we agreed to take this over. Although some threequarters of the chapters had by then been sent in, several of them some long time previously, there were still gaps for which new contributors had to be found. Our debt of gratitude to the contributors, therefore, is twofold. To those who submitted chapters within the original time-scale goes our gratitude for their patience; and to the second wave of contributors go our thanks for their willingness to produce the material to give the book, we hope, as useful a range as possible. Apart from the editing of the contributions and the re-commissioning of missing chapters, there were a number of technical problems regarding unusual characters, such as those comprising the runic alphabet, as might be expected in a work concerned with the very earliest stages of Germanic literature. We hope that the outcome has been a satisfactory one, and the editors are grateful to James Hardin and Jim Walker for all their assistance in the completion of the project.
Brian Murdoch and Malcolm Read
Stirling, 2003
Gothic
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Summary
Gothic is the Earliest Germanic Launage to be written down in full form in manuscript — other than isolated Germanic words recorded by Roman writers. Written Gothic dates from the fourth century, several centuries before the ancestor of modern German was committed to writing for the first time. Nevertheless, titles like Gotische Literaturdenkmäler found in the secondary literature are at best optimistic, since most of what we have in the written Gothic language (for the most part Visigothic) are translations of parts of the Greek Bible. Such nonbiblical fragments as survive are small indeed: a fragment of a biblical commentary, which may or may not be a translation; a calendar fragment; a few isolated words (some in a Latin epigram); two subscriptions in legal documents, and, as the last flicker of the Gothic language, a list of words recorded in the Crimea in the seventeenth century.
Allusions in Latin writings about the Goths, and references to Gothic historical figures in works which have survived in other languages lead us to suppose that, as with other early languages, there was an oral tradition of poetry in the vernacular. These may well have been heroic epics associated with the aristocratic warrior classes, but these works have not survived in written form. Elfriede Stutz points out on the first page of her bibliographical handbook that we do not have a single line of Gothic poetry. The fact that what we refer to as Gothic literature means, effectively, an incomplete Bible translation, determines the approach to Gothic. The antiquity of the language and thus the relative closeness to the primitive Germanic ancestor which it, as an East Germanic language, shared with the West Germanic languages (represented now by English and German), and with the Northern group of early and modern Scandinavian languages, make it of great interest to philology. Gothic is associated with other so-called East Germanic languages spoken by tribes such as the Burgundians, the Vandals and the Gepids (classical historians group them with the Goths), the Herulians, and the Rugians. For other languages in that group, such as Burgundian or Rugian, we must rely on place names and personal names for philological evidence, but with Gothic, sufficient material has survived to provide for a solid corpus, even if not every paradigm can be completed from the written material, so that the precise form and gender of some words remain unclear and, of course, much vocabulary is wanting.
Introduction
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Summary
Why should a History of early medieval German literature contain a collection of apparently disparate essays, only a few of which — and those toward the end of the volume — have anything directly to do with literature at all? Indeed, even in the later chapters, some of the literature described either is not literary (at least in the sense that the modern world might understand it), or not German (but rather from England or from Scandinavia). The aim of this volume is to provide some insights into aspects of the culture of the Germanic world from which German literature in the modern sense originated. However, several preliminary caveats are necessary in the pursuit of what onstitutes Germanic culture, and these derive partly from lessons that have been taught by the history of the last couple of centuries in particular.
It is, of course, simple enough to define German in terms of the modern language. However, what we now recognize as the German language is part of a far wider Germanic language family, sharing a common ancestry with other modern languages, such as Dutch, English, or Swedish, and also with earlier ones, either ancestors of those still spoken, such as Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse, or now extinct, such as Gothic. German is closer to all of these, however, than it is to other more distantly related languages throughout Europe. And thus, if we go back in philological history, we can, at least in theory, find some kind of common Germanic origin, get closer perhaps to the origins of that branch of the Indo-European language family whose speakers are known by the useful Roman name of Germani. The Germanic branch separated from the Indo-European parent language between the fifth and second century B.C. (it is datable with reference to borrowings from other languages) and demonstrates various features not shared by, say, the Romance, Slavic, or Celtic language groups. These features include — and this is, of course, a great simplification — the effects of what is known as the First or Germanic Sound Shift.
Orality
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Summary
Oral Traditions
In The Context Of Literary History, “orality” refers to traditions of oral performance of works which may also be literary works, or which may resemble literature. The widely used tag “oral literature” is a contradiction in terms, and is in several respects too problematic to be helpful. It is better to speak of oral verse, oral narrative traditions, oral epic and so forth. However, in a literary history which looks back to the beginnings one must take into consideration the production of literature before it took on written form. Long before the advent of writing, the careful assembly of words into sophisticated verbal productions was an art form that shaped and reflected the cultures in which it emerged, and in these oral poetic and narrative traditions we seek the origins of our literatures. And even in a highly literate society such as that in which we live today, many forms we might bracket as literature are written for oral performance, or indeed need not be written at all: obvious examples are public speaking, drama, storytelling, and various forms of poetry and song. Thanks to its permanence, the written word lends itself readily to analysis, and in literary studies we tend therefore to think of it as the norm, oral forms being a sub-category, variant or even a poor imitation. In reality the opposite is true. Human language evolved solely to meet the needs of oral communication, and writing, even formal and highly stylized writing, imitates speech. The poetic muse arose in the earliest cultures as a result of the fascination with the possibilities of the spoken word, and the modern reader processes literature using cerebral faculties developed for the reception of speech. Oral performance and literature are the two sides of linguistic art, but orality has both a historical and a logical priority.
It follows that an appreciation of oral dynamics is necessary for an understanding of both the origins and the functionality of literature. In the medieval context we are interested here in three main areas of investigation. First, in the nature of pre-literature, of ancient oral verse, narrative and performance, and the way in which it shaped the character also of the earliest vernacular writings. Second, in the polarization between written and spoken art in a partially literate medieval society, with the concomitant implications for social groupings and power structures.
Old Norse-Icelandic Literature
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Summary
The Body of Old Norse-Icelandic Literature is larger, more varied, and of longer duration than the partially overlapping literatures of early medieval England and Germany. Old English literature disappeared from view for several centuries because of the linguistic transition after the Norman Conquest, and Old High German and Old Saxon literature were not recovered until the early nineteenth century. Old Icelandic literature, by contrast, was protected by a substantial linguistic continuity in Iceland and never disappeared from circulation altogether, although, like Old English, it received a notable stimulus from the antiquarian and national impulses of the Renaissance. In particular, the great manuscript collector Árni Magnússon (died 1730) was able to salvage a great deal of widely dispersed material that might otherwise have been lost. Most of it was recovered in Iceland, and although we routinely refer to “Old Norse-Icelandic” literature in order to account for a number of texts in Old Norwegian, it should be borne in mind that the great preponderance of texts are Icelandic. For all practical purposes, therefore, this chapter deals with Old Icelandic literature.
More than the other Old Germanic literatures, Old Icelandic has been bedeviled by genre boundaries. We do not write histories of the literature as a whole but of distinct literary types, skaldic poetry, Eddic poetry, kings’ sagas, sagas about early Icelanders, sagas about twelfth- and thirteenth-century Icelanders, romances, legendary sagas, and so forth. The approach by genre is partly dictated by the difficulties that beset the dating of our texts. Some sagas can be dated, others only quite approximately. The problems attendant on the dating of Eddic poetry are much greater, to the point that we seem to have entered a period of agnostic resignation. Skaldic poetry, on the other hand, constitutes the exception to the dating impasse because the skalds, unlike the usually anonymous saga writers and always anonymous Eddic poets, are named and associated with kings who can be located in time. Skaldic verse also has the advantage of envisaging the whole period of our concern from ca. 800 to ca.1300.
Skaldic Verse
If skaldic verse is known at all, it is known for being “hard” or even “incomprehensible.” By now there are enough aids and commentaries to make most of the material accessible with patient study, although, as in all archaic languages, many cruxes remain.
Illustrations
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Bibliography
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Contributors
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Index
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Runic
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- By Klaus Düwel
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Summary
Runes Are The Name given to the earliest Germanic written characters, characters that differ from any modern alphabet. Their precise origin remains unknown, though it is assumed that they were based on a Mediterranean alphabet (Greek, Latin, or Northern Italic), Latin because of the great impact of Roman culture on Northern Europe being the most probable. In any case, the several related Northern Italic alphabets used in inscriptions found in the Alps from the fourth to the first century B.C. demonstrate the most obvious parallels to runic shapes. The earliest extant runes can be dated archeologically to the second century A.D., but it is assumed that the use of runes predates this period.
The term rune is documented in various individual Germanic languages (for example Gothic rūna Old High German rūna(stab), Old English rūn, Old Norse rún) and means primarily “secret.” According to epigraphic and literary evidence they are considered to be “descended from the gods” (as recorded on the sixth-century Noleby stone in southern Sweden). Other sources suggest the god Odin invented or discovered them (thus the Norse poem known as “The Words of the High One,” Hávamál stanza 138–39). The myth that a god created the script is widespread and is the basis of the idea of the “power of writing in belief and superstition.” Runic writing is, like any other script, a means of communication that can be used for profane and sacred as well as magical purposes.
The usual arrangement of the twenty-four runes does not follow a formal alphabet, but represents an independent and characteristic sequence that, taken from the sound value of its first six characters, is called the futhark:
A futhark that corresponds essentially to these letters is present, alone or together with other runic inscriptions, on a total of nine monuments from the fifth and sixth centuries, among them the Kylver stone and the bracteates (thin, round, uniface gold medallions which were worn as amulets), from Vadstena and Grumpan in Sweden. The bracteate tradition shows the futhark divided into three groups (each of eight runes) or genders (ON ætt, pl. ættir). This makes it possible to use them as a secret script, in a variety of graphic ways, by indicating firstly the group and then the position within the group. But the cryptographic use is for the older runes only uncertainly attested.
Old High German and Continental Old Low German
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Summary
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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