Otfrid's verse. 1 evangeliorum theotisce conscriptus was similar to that which called forth the Heliand-namely, a desire to combat the love of heathen poetry in the laity, by winning their interest for stories from the Bible written in their own tongue. But Otfrid was far from being as successful as his Saxon predecessor. He had nothing of the spontaneity of the born singer; he made no attempt to imitate the popular epic. Above all, he was a monk, and a monk learned in the exegetical literature of his time. He set about his work with the conscious intention of the scholar who wished to give his countrymen an epic similar to those which Juvencus, Sedulius, and Arator had written for readers of Latin. The High German Soundshifting had hastened the end of alliterative verse in South Germany. With regard to the form of his poem, Otfrid had no choice; he was compelled to abandon alliteration, and to adopt in its place rhyme, with which the Church hymns had already made him familiar. He virtually retained, however, the alliterative verse form, namely, the long line broken in the middle, but, instead of using alliterative syllables, he made the half verses rhyme Iwith each other. Two long lines form a strophe. The whole poem is divided into five books, and each book into a number of smaller divisions which correspond with the pericopes or lessons of the Church service. While it is mainly to his adaptation of rhyme to German verse that Otfrid owes his position in German literature, it would be unjust to deny him altogether the possession of higher poetic powers. Overladen as his work is with theological learning, and hampered, especially in the earlier part of the poem, by technical difficulties, there are here and there in his verse flashes of genuine lyric feeling which deserve to be lifted out of the dry religious didacticism in which they are imbedded. In lines like the following, the note of the German national lyric is not to be mistaken: "Uuolaga elilenti, harto bistu herti, thu bist harto filu suâr, Mit arabeitin uuerbent, thaz sagen ih thir in alauuâr. thie heiminges tharbênt; ih habên iz funtan in mir, ni fand ih liebes uuiht in thir; 1 Ed. O. Erdmann, Halle, 1882; selections in P. Piper, D.N.L., 1, 186 ff. On Otfrid see especially A. E. Schönbach's papers in the Zeitschrift f. deutsch, Altertum, 38-40 (1894-96), and in Cosmopolis, 1, 605 ff. Otfrid had no small share of the characteristic Germanic Otfrid's love for mysticism; he delighted in that quest for hidden mysticism. meanings in Scripture which the Alexandrine Jews of the third century had introduced into Biblical exegesis; he dwelt not only upon the moral application of the Gospel story, but upon its spiritual and mystic sides. This mysticism might have added to the poetic beauties of Otfrid's poem, had the work not been conceived in such a sordidly didactic spirit. The Evangelienbuch lacks entirely that intimate sympathy with old German life which is to be found in the Heliand. Otfrid's Christ, however, is no less a German king than the Saxon Christ; the Jewish towns are "burgen," and John the Baptist fasts "in waldes einote" -an expression that foreshadows Tieck's "Waldeinsamkeit.” But the fire of the Germanic epic is gone, and the mild peace and also the prosaic homeliness of the cloister have taken its place. As an epic, the Gospel Book of Otfrid cannot be compared with the Heliand, but it is, nevertheless, a literary monument of the first importance; its influence upon both the language and the metrical forms of German poetry may be traced through at least two centuries; from it some of the chief streams in the national literature take their beginning. With Otfrid, Old High German poetry reaches, we might say, its culminating-point, and the scanty religious fragments of the latter half of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth century stand completely in the shadow of the Evangelienbuch. Generally speaking, the literary tendency of Ludwig Later the German's reign was in the direction of a freer, more religious imaginative treatment of religious themes. This is apparent, not only in the Muspilli, but in such post-Otfridian poems 1"Ach (du) Fremdland! sehr hart bist du, du bist gar sehr schwer, das sage ich dir fürwahr. Unter Mühsalen leben dahin (die), die (der) Heimat entbehren. Ich habe es an mir erfahren (lit., gefunden), nicht fand ich etwas Liebes an dir. Nicht fand ich an dir anderes Gutes, ausser traurigen Sinn, weherfülltes Herz und mannigfaltigen Schmerz. Wenn uns in den Sinn kommt, dass uns heim verlangt, (wenn uns) auch Sehnsucht nach dem Lande plötzlich ergreift, (so) fahren wir, wie die Genossen, [auch] eine andere Strasse, den Weg, der uns zu (unserem) eignen Lande führe" (1, 18, 11. 25-34). poetry. The Lud wigslied, 881. as the Bittgesang an den heiligen Petrus, Christus und die Samariterin, the Lied vom heiligen Georg, and a Bavarian version of the 138th Psalm.1 After the death of Ludwig the German in 876, the kingdom of the Eastern Franks was again at the mercy of dissension within and foes without, and German literature, which has suffered perhaps more than other literatures from the nation's checkered political history, lost completely the small vantageground it had gained. As regards poetry under the last Carlovingians, there is little to say. The victory of young Ludwig III. over the Normans at Saucourt, in 881, elicited a German song in his honour, the so-called Ludwigslied, in which the king is celebrated as the champion of heaven; 2 the author was evidently a Rhine-Frankish monk. The decay of the Carlovingian empire is to be seen in the readiness with which men's thoughts reverted to the great Charles. A Saxon singer, the "Poeta Saxo," celebrated, between 888 and 891, the deeds of Charles (De gestis Caroli) in Latin verses, and a "Monk of St Gall," whose name is unknown, wrote, between 884 and 887, a Latin life of the great king which often throws a more vivid light on his personality than Einhard's biography. But German king although he was, Charles the Great never became in Germany what he was among his Latin subjects, an epic hero and the central figure of a poetic literature; the only German poems in which he plays a leading part are adaptations from the French. 1 Müllenhoff and Scherer, l.c., 1, 21 f., 22 ff., 31 ff., 35 ff.; also P. Piper 1.c., 261 ff. 2 Müllenhoff and Scherer, l.c., 1, 24 ff.; P. Piper, .c., 257 ff. 27 CHAPTER IV. LATIN LITERATURE UNDER THE SAXON EMPERORS. 919-1024 WITH the accession of Heinrich I. German literature received a check which undid the slow achievement of generations. The High German tongue, and especially that Frankish dialect of it which Otfrid wrote, was just beginning to be recognised as the literary language of the East Frankish kingdom when the light of courtly favour was suddenly withdrawn from it. The new dynasty was a Saxon The Saxon race of kings who held their Court amidst a Low German emperors, people, to the north of the Harz Mountains. This, however, is not in itself sufficient to explain the disadvantage at which literature was placed in the tenth century. Under the feeble rule of the later Carlovingians, the struggle of the German peoples for existence had begun anew. First, Normans had made victorious inroads into the kingdom, then came Slavs and Danes, and then, like a second Hunnish invasion, the Hungarians swept down upon the eastern frontiers. The conflicts of the Migrations seemed about to repeat themselves when the strong hand of the Saxon kings saved the empire. It was manifestly no age for literature, but the literary undercurrent was strong, and only awaited a favourable opportunity to make itself felt. In the Carlovingian age the Saxons, as we have seen, possessed in the Hildebrandslied and the Heliand a vigorous national poetry, and it was undoubtedly the Saxon race that kept the national epic alive. But the struggles of the tenth century filled the popular imagination with new poetry and gave it new heroes, and these were by degrees ingrafted upon the older traditions, The "Spielleute." just as, centuries before, the heroic poetry of the Migrations had blended with the prehistoric sagas. Otto the In spite of the stormy times, we might have possessed actual proofs of this Saxon epic tradition, had the conditions for literature been as favourable at the Saxon Court as they had been at that of the Carlovingians. But the early Saxon kings cared little for literature-the first Heinrich could neither read nor write, Otto I. not until late in life,—and when the "Saxon Renaissance" did set in, it was restricted to a literature in Latin, inspired by Greek and Byzantine ideas. Great had other things to do than to foster literature: it was he who laid the real foundations of the "Holy Roman Empire" and gave Germany the leading voice in European politics for the remaining centuries of the middle ages; he first inspired the German people with a sense of unity and of national greatness. But of a national literature the Saxon emperors knew practically nothing, and not a single poem in the German tongue has been preserved from a period of more than a century and a half. The only healthy sign in this, the darkest age of German poetry, was the growing importance of the "Spielleute " or "Gleemen." These "wandering folk" (diu varnde diet), as they were called at a later period, were the virtual descendants of the old Roman histriones and mimi; they were the jesters and mountebanks to whom the people looked for their entertainment. But they were more than jesters, more even than the gossips and news-bearers of their age; they also took the place of the scops or rhapsodists who, centuries before, had sung at the Courts of Gothic kings. Now, under the Saxon emperors, these wandering singers began to recover something of the prestige which their preChristian forerunners had enjoyed. In the dark centuries the "Spielleute" were the real bearers of epic traditions, the true preservers of the national poetry. But of this poetry we possess nothing that is older than the twelfth century; our knowledge of it comes only from indirect sources, and from Latin versions made by monks in the seclusion of monasteries. For the monasteries remained, now as under the Carlovingians, the only abiding-places for intellectual life here alone could a written literature find refuge. After the death |