11 - Hildebrandslied

Summary

The apparent mixture of High and Low German forms in Hildebrandslied is often explained as Saxonization of an Old High German original. The provenance of the poem remains uncertain, however. Here I simply assume that the author composed in an Old German dialect of some kind. Narrower description of the author's language seems unnecessary for most of our comparative purposes. The High German consonant shift, for example, has no significant bearing on issues emphasized in previous chapters. The special advantage of Hildebrandslied for the comparative metrist is its native legendary content, which would not have interfered with traditional methods of composition. Although the text that survives to us has less than seventy lines, it provides valuable support for claims about continental Germanic metre derived from the Heliand.

In the Heliand we observed a number of metrically intractable phrases marking direct discourse boundaries. Three similar phrases appear in Hildebrandslied. All three take the same form, quad Hiltibrant ‘quoth Hildebrand’. All three stand between verses that constitute a well-formed line when quad Hiltibrant is removed. A fourth phrase, Heribrantes sunu ‘son of Heribrand’, causes severe metrical problems in the middle of the otherwise unremarkable line 7. These four phrases are bracketed in Braune–Ebbinghaus, and it seems best to exclude them from the metrical analysis. Sievers identifies a few passages as prose interpolations that may contain remnants of poetic language.