Biography Essay

The author of Das Hildebrandslied (The Lay of Hildebrand, circa 820) is not known, nor is it known why it was written down on the blank front and back pages of a Latin manuscript from the monastery of Fulda in northern Germany in the early ninth century. Its immediate origin is also unknown, although the extant version clearly stands at the end of a long and complex process of transmission. It is incomplete; the story lacks the last few lines, although it is not difficult to reconstruct what is missing. It is written in an impossible mixture of High and Low German because someone has tried, but failed, to translate a High German original into Low German. This feature presents less of a problem for understanding the work than does its incompleteness and the misplacement of some lines toward the end. The poem, thus, requires a certain...