Hildebrandslied

The Hildebrandslied is a heroic lay written in Old High German alliterative verse. It is the earliest poetic text in German, and it tells of the tragic encounter in battle between a father and a son who does not recognize him. It is the only surviving example in German of a genre which must have been important in the oral literature of the Germanic tribes.
The text was written in the 830s on two spare leaves on the outside of a religious codex in the monastery of Fulda. The two scribes were copying from an unknown older original, which itself must ultimately have derived from oral tradition. The story of Hildebrand and Hadubrand almost certainly goes back to 7th- or 8th-century Lombardy and is set against the background of the historical conflict between Theodoric and Odoacer in 5th-century Italy, which became a major subject for Germanic heroic legend. The fundamental story of the father and son who fail to recognize each other on the battlefield is much older and is found in a number of Indo-European traditions.
The manuscript itself has had an eventful history: twice looted in war but eventually returned to its rightful owner, twice moved to safety shortly before devastating air-raids, repeatedly treated with chemicals by 19th-century scholars, once almost given to Hitler, and torn apart and partly defaced by dishonest book dealers. It now resides, on public display, in a secure vault in the Murhard Library in Kassel.
The text is highly problematic: as a unique example of its genre, with many words not found in other German texts, its interpretation remains controversial. Difficulties in reading some of the individual letters and identifying errors made by the scribes mean that a definitive edition of the poem is impossible. One of the most puzzling features is the dialect, which shows a mixture of High German and Low German spellings which cannot represent any actually spoken dialect.
In spite of the many uncertainties over the text and continuing debate on the interpretation, the poem is widely regarded as the first masterpiece of German literature.

Synopsis

The opening lines of the poem set the scene: two warriors meet on a battlefield, probably as the champions of their two armies.
As the older man, Hildebrand opens by asking the identity and genealogy of his opponent. Hadubrand reveals that he did not know his father but the elders told him his father was Hildebrand, who fled eastwards in the service of Dietrich to escape the wrath of Otacher, leaving behind a wife and small child. He believes his father to be dead.
Hildebrand responds by saying that Hadubrand will never fight such a close kinsman and offers gold arm-rings he had received as a gift from the Lord of the Huns.
Hadubrand takes this as a ruse to get him off guard and belligerently refuses the offer, accusing Hildebrand of deception, and perhaps implying cowardice. Hildebrand accepts his fate and sees that he cannot honourably refuse battle: he has no choice but to kill his own son or be killed by him.
They start to fight, and the text concludes with their shields smashed. But the poem breaks off in the middle of a line, not revealing the outcome.

The text

The text consists of 68 lines of alliterative verse, though written continuously with no consistent indication of the verse form. It breaks off in mid-line, leaving the poem unfinished at the end of the second page. However, it does not seem likely that much more than a dozen lines are missing.
The poem starts:

Structure

The basic structure of the poem comprises a long passage of dialogue, framed by introductory and closing narration. A more detailed analysis is offered by McLintock:

Introductory narrative : The warriors meet and prepare for combat.
Hildebrand's 1st speech, with introductory formula and characterization : Hildebrand asks his opponent's identity.
Hadubrand's 1st speech, with introductory formula : Hadubrand names himself, tells how his father left with Dietrich, and that he believes him to be dead.
Hildebrand's 2nd Speech : Hildebrand indicates his close kinship with Hadubrand.

Narrative : Hildebrand removes an arm-ring
Hildebrand's 3rd speech : and offers it to Hadubrand.

Hadubrand's 2nd speech, with introductory formula : Hadubrand rejects the proffered arm-ring, accuses Hildebrand of trying to trick him, and reasserts his belief that his father is dead.
Hildebrand's 4th speech, with introductory formula : Hildebrand comments that Hadubrand's good armour shows he has never been an exile. Hildebrand accepts his fate, affirming that it would be cowardly to refuse battle and challenging Hadubrand to win his armour.
Closing narrative : The warriors throw spears, close for combat and fight until their shields are destroyed.

While this structure accurately represents the surviving manuscript text, many scholars have taken issue with the position of ll. 46–48. In these lines, as it stands, Hildebrand comments on Hadubrand's armour and contrasts his son's secure existence with his own exile. Such a measured observation perhaps seems out of keeping with the confrontational tone of the surrounding conversation. Many have suggested, therefore, that the lines should more correctly be given to Hadubrand — from his mouth they become a challenge to Hildebrand's story of exile — and placed elsewhere. The most widely accepted placing is after l. 57, after Hildebrand has challenged Hadubrand to take an old man's armour. This has the advantage that it seems to account for the extraneous quad Hiltibrant in ll. 49 and 58, which would normally be expected to introduce a new speaker and seem redundant in the manuscript version. Alternatively, De Boor would place the lines earlier, before l.33, where Hildebrand offers an arm-ring. However, more recently the trend has been to accept the placing of these lines and see the task as making sense of the text as it stands.

Problems

In spite of the text's use of spare space in an existing manuscript, there is evidence that it was prepared with some care: the two sheets were ruled with lines for the script, and in a number of places letters have been erased and corrected.
Nonetheless, some features of the text are hard to interpret as anything other than uncorrected errors. Some of these are self-evident copying errors, due either to misreading of the source or the scribe losing his place. An example of the latter is the repetition of darba gistuotun in l. 26b, which is hypermetrical and gives no sense – the copyist's eye must have been drawn to the Detrihhe darba gistuontun of l.23 instead of to the Deotrichhe in l.26b. Other obvious copying errors include mih for mir and fatereres for fateres.
It seems also that the scribes were not entirely familiar with the script used in their source. The inconsistencies in the use and form of the letter wynn, for example — sometimes with and sometimes without an acute stroke above the letter, once corrected from the letter p — suggest this was a feature of the source which was not a normal part of their scribal repertoire.
While these issues are almost certainly the responsibility of the Fulda scribes, in other cases an apparent error or inconsistency might already have been present in their source. The variant spellings of the names Hiltibrant/Hiltibraht, Hadubrant/Hadubraht, Theotrihhe/Detriche/Deotrichhe. were almost certainly present in the source. In several places, the absence of alliteration linking the two halves of a line suggests missing text, so ll.10a and 11b, which follow each other in the manuscript, do not make a well-formed alliterating line and in addition display an abrupt transition between third-person narrative and second-person direct speech. The phrase quad hiltibrant in lines 49 and 58 breaks the alliteration and seems to be a hypermetrical scribal addition to clarify the dialogue.
In addition to errors and inconsistencies, there are other features of the text which make it hard to interpret. Some words are hapax legomena, even if they sometimes have cognates in other Germanic languages. Examples include urhetto, billi and gudhamo. Since the Hildebrandslied is the earliest poetic text and the only heroic lay in German, and is the oldest heroic lay in any Germanic language, it is difficult to establish whether such words enjoyed broader currency in the 9th century or belonged to a poetic language.
The text's punctuation is limited: the only mark used is a sporadic punctus, and identifying clause and sentence boundaries is not always straightforward. Since the manuscript gives no indication of the verse form, line divisions are the judgments of modern editors.
Finally, the mixture of language features, mostly High German but with some highly characteristic Low German forms, means that the text could never have reflected the spoken language of an individual speaker and never been meant for performance.
Frederick Norman concludes, "The poem presents puzzles alike to palaeographers, linguists and literary historians."

The manuscript

Description

The manuscript of the Hildebrandslied is now in the Murhardsche Bibliothek in Kassel. The codex consists of 76 folios containing two books of the Vulgate Old Testament and the homilies of Origen. It was written in the 820s in Anglo-Saxon minuscule and Carolingian minuscule hands. The text of the Hildebrandslied was added in the 830s on the two blank outside leaves of the codex.
The poem breaks off in the midst of the battle and there has been speculation that the text originally continued on a third sheet or on the endpaper of the back cover. However, it is also possible that the text was being copied from an incomplete original or represented a well-known episode from a longer story.
The Hildebrandslied text is the work of two scribes, of whom the second wrote only seven and a half lines at the beginning of the second leaf. The scribes are not the same as those of the body of the codex. The hands are mainly Carolingian minuscule. However, a number of features, including the wynn-rune used for w suggest Old English influence, not surprising in a house founded by Anglo-Saxon missionaries.
The manuscript pages now show a number of patches of discoloration. These are the results of attempts by earlier scholars to improve the legibility of the text with chemical agents.