Hildebrandslied

Hildebrandslied, a fragment of Old High German alliterative heroic poetry. It narrates the encounter between Hildebrand and his son Hadubrand. Hildebrand, a voluntary exile with his king, Dietrich, returns in his lord's train. As the chosen champion, he faces a young man whom he recognizes as his own son. His conciliatory overtures are rejected as treacherous cunning, and battle becomes inevitable. The end of the poem, omitted in the MS. apparently for lack of space, was certainly tragic, Hadubrand falling to Hildebrand's sword. The conflict is largely portrayed through the dialogue of the two champions. The poem represents the ethical outlook of a warrior caste, for which military honour and unconditional loyalty are the highest values. Fate dominates the soldier's life, and he is its active executant.

The Hildebrandslied is the sole surviving fragment of a German heroic lay sung by a minstrel before an exalted audience. It possesses an economical and effective structure and splendid and powerful verse. Once regarded as an expression of Germanic paganism, it is now seen by some to belong to an era in which the warrior, while retaining his ancient virtues, had accepted Christianity.

The story of Hildebrand is regarded as being of Langobardic origin (see Langobards), and is supposed to have originated in the 7th c., combining a widely disseminated legend (cf. Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum) with a known personality of the recent past (Dietrich von Bern, see Dietrichsage). The Hildebrandslied is basically Bavarian but has been adapted for a northern audience whose language was Low German. Even so the text is corrupt, and the attribution of some of the lines uncertain. The MS. represents a copy made c.810 by two monks, probably in Fulda, of this adaptation. The language is philologically problematical, and has provoked various divergent hypotheses. The poem was preserved by a fortunate chance, having been copied on to two blank pages in a theological codex. Formerly in the possession of the Landesbibliothek, Kassel, the MS. disappeared in 1946, though the second of the two sheets was recovered in Los Angeles in 1950, and the first in Philadelphia in 1972. Both have been returned to Kassel, whence they had been removed for safety in 1939. A facsimile reprint with introduction by H. Broszinski appeared in 1984, and a new annotated and extended edition with translation by H. D. Schlosser in 1989 (in Althochdeutsche Literatur).