The first two pages of the Ludwigslied
The Ludwigslied (in English, Lay or Song of Ludwig) is
an Old High German poem of 59 rhyming couplets, celebrating the victory of the Frankish
army, led by Louis III of France, over Danish (Viking) raiders at the Battle of Saucourt-en-Vimeu on
3 August 881.
The poem is thoroughly Christian in ethos. It presents the Viking raids as a punishment
from God: He caused the Northmen to come across the see to remind the Frankish people of their sins, and inspired Louis to
ride to the aid of his people. Louis praises God both before and after the battle.
Although the poem is Christian in content, and the use of rhyme reflects Christian rather than Germanic poetic tradition, it is not without Germanic elements. It
belongs to the genre of Preislied, a song in praise of a warrior, of a type which must have been common in Germanic
oral tradition.
The poem is preserved in over four pages in a single 9th century manuscript formerly in the monastery of Saint-Amand, now in the Bibliothèque municipale, Valenciennes (Codex
150, f. 141v-143r). In the same manuscript, and written by the same scribe, is the Old French
Sequence of Saint Eulalia.
The poem speaks of Louis in the present tense: it opens, "I know a king called Ludwig who willingly serves God. I know he will
reward him for it". Since Louis died in August the next year, the poem must have been written within a year of the battle.
However, in the manuscript, the poem is headed Ritmus teutonicus de piae memoriae Hluduice rege (German song to the
beloved memory of King Louis), which means it must be a copy of an earlier text.
The dialect of the poem generally regarded as Rhine Franconian, though there are
some peculiarities which have received a variety of explanations. It is assumed that the manuscript was written by a bilingual
scribe in Saint-Amand and we have no other example of an OHG text from this area. Some regard it as the sole textual example of
the otherwise little known West Franconian dialect, which is assumed to have been
the language of the Carolingian court.
External links
Further reading
- Althochdeutches Lesebuch, ed. W.Braune, K.Helm, E.A.Ebbinghaus, 17th edn, Tübingen 1994. ISBN 3-484-10707-3. Includes
the standard edition of the text.
- Bostock, J. K. A Handbook on Old High German Literature Second Edition. Revised by K. C. King and D. R. McLintock.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Contains an English translation.
- Wolf, Alois. "Medieval Heroic Traditions and Their Transitions from Orality to Literacy". In Vox Intexta: Orality and
Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A. N. Doane and C. B. Pasternack, 67-88. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1991.
- Schwarz, W. "The "Ludwigslied", a Ninth-Century Poem." The Modern Language Review, Vol. 42, No. 4.
(Oct., 1947), pp 467-473.
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