The Old Saxon Heliand

Summary

The Heliand Is Over A Thousand Years Old, and is the oldest epic work of German literature, antedating the Nibelungenlied by four centuries. It consists of approximately 6,000 lines of alliterative verse, twice the length of Beowulf, which shares just enough imagery and poetic phraseology with the Heliand that it might possibly be contemporary. The Heliand was written in Old Saxon, possibly at the behest of the emperor Louis the Pious (Ludwig der Fromme), in the first half of the ninth century, around the year A.D. 830, near the beginning of the era of the Viking raids. That it is in continental Low German has probably been the reason for its neglect within the context of German literary history, but such neglect is hard to justify. The author has never been identified. His purpose seems to have been to make the Gospel story completely accessible and appealing to the Saxons through a depiction of Christ’s life in the poetry of the North, recasting Jesus himself and his followers as Saxons, and thus to overcome Saxon ambivalence toward Christ caused by forced conversion to Christianity. That forced conversion was effected through thirty-three years of well-chronicled violence on the part of the Franks under Charlemagne, and counter-violence by the Saxons under Widukind, and ended with the final but protracted defeat of the Saxons.

There must have still been resentment among the Saxons at the time of the composition of the Heliand since there was a revolt of the Saxon stellinga, what we might call the lower social castes, during this period. Whoever the poet of the Heliand was, he had his task cut out for him. His masterpiece shows that he was astonishingly gifted at intercultural communication in the religious realm. By the power of his imagination the poet-monk (perhaps also ex-warrior) created a unique cultural synthesis between Christianity and Germanic warrior society — a synthesis that would plant the seed that would one day blossom in the full-blown culture of knighthood and become the foundation of medieval Europe.

The Heliand has come down to us in two almost complete manuscript versions, one housed now in Munich at the Bavarian State Library, designated M, and the other in London at the British Museum, designated C.