XII.—The Dialect of the Hildebrandslied

Extract

As Holtzmann has shown the Hildebrandslied as we now have it is a copy from an older manuscript. That it was not written in its present form from memory is seen in the fact that the mistakes are those of sight. For example, Hiltibraht occurs six times for Hiltibrant, man for inan, unti for miti, etc. The errors show that the writer or writers did not fully understand what they were writing, and that their copying was mechanical. It follows that the manuscript from which they wrote did not differ materially from their copy, or in other words, that the linguistic confusion was already present. This confusion, however, cannot be entirely explained unless with Kögel we assume that at an earlier time there was a copy from memory.