which the copyists—or more probably the writer to whom we owe the older version—imperfectly understood. The language of the poem shows a curious mixture of Low and High German forms; as the High German elements point to the dialect of Fulda, the inference is that the copyists were reproducing an originally Low German lay in the form in which it was sung in Franconia.
The fragment is mainly taken up with a dialogue between Hildebrand and his son Hadubrand. When Hildebrand followed his master, Theodoric the Great, who was fleeing eastwards before Odoacer, he left his young wife and an infant child behind him. At his return to his old home, after thirty years’ absence among the Huns, he is met by a young warrior and challenged to single combat. Before the fight begins, Hildebrand asks for the name of his opponent, and discovering his own son in him, tries to avert the fight, but in vain; Hadubrand only regards the old man’s words as the excuse of cowardice. “In sharp showers the ashen spears fall on the shields, and then the warriors seize their swords and hew vigorously at the white shields until these are beaten to pieces....” With these words the fragment breaks off abruptly, giving no clue as to the issue of the combat. There is little doubt, however, that, as in the Old Norse Asmundar saga, where the tale is alluded to, the fight must have been fatal to Hadubrand. But in the later traditions, both of the Old Norse Thidreks saga (13th century), and the so-called Jüngere Hildebrandslied—a German popular lay, preserved in several versions from the 15th to the 17th century—Hadubrand is simply represented as defeated, and obliged to recognize his father. The Old High German Hildebrandslied is dramatically conceived, and written in a terse, vigorous style; it is the only remnant that has come down from early Germanic times of an undoubtedly extensive ballad literature, dealing with the national sagas.
The MS. of the Hildebrandslied, originally in Fulda, is now preserved in the Landesbibliothek at Cassel. The literature on the poem will be found most conveniently in K. Müllenhoff and W. Scherer, Denkmäler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem VIII. bis XI. Jahrh., 3rd ed. (1892), and in W. Braune, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, 5th ed. (1902), to which authorities the reader is referred for a critical text. The poem was discovered and first printed (as prose) by J. G. von Eckhart, Commentarii de rebus Franciae orientalis (1729), i. 864 ff.; the first scholarly edition was that of the brothers Grimm (1812). Facsimile reproductions of the MS. have been published by W. Grimm (1830), E. Sievers (1872), G. Könnecke in his Bilderatlas (1887; 2nd ed., 1895) and M. Enneccerus (1897). See also K. Lachmann, Über das Hildebrandslied (1833) in Kleine Schriften, i. 407 ff.; C. W. M. Grein, Das Hildebrandslied (1858; 2nd ed., 1880); O. Schröder, Bemerkungen zum Hildebrandslied (1880); H. Möller, Zur althochdeutschen Alliterationspoesie (1888); R. Heinzel, Über die ostgotische Heldensage (1889); B. Busse, “Sagengeschichtliches zum Hildebrandslied,” in Paul und Braune’s Beiträge, xxvi. (1901), pp. 1 ff.; R. Koegel, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, i. (1894), pp. 210 ff.; and R. Koegel and W. Brückner, in Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, 2nd ed., ii. (1901), pp. 71 ff. (J. G. R.)
HILDEBRANDT, EDUARD (1818–1868), German painter,
was born in 1818, and served as apprentice to his father, a
house-painter at Danzig. He was not twenty when he came
to Berlin, where he was taken in hand by Wilhelm Krause, a
painter of sea pieces. Several early pieces exhibited after his
death—a breakwater, dated 1838, ships in a breeze off Swinemünde
(1840), and other canvases of this and the following
year—show Hildebrandt to have been a careful student of nature,
with inborn talents kept down by the conventionalisms of the
formal school to which Krause belonged. Accident made him
acquainted with masterpieces of French art displayed at the
Berlin Academy, and these awakened his curiosity and envy.
He went to Paris, where, about 1842, he entered the atelier of
Isabey and became the companion of Lepoittevin. In a short
time he sent home pictures which might have been taken for
copies from these artists. Gradually he mastered the mysteries
of touch and the secrets of effect in which the French at this
period excelled. He also acquired the necessary skill in painting
figures, and returned to Germany, skilled in the rendering of
many kinds of landscape forms. His pictures of French street
life, done about 1843, while impressed with the stamp of the
Paris school, reveal a spirit eager for novelty, quick at grasping,
equally quick at rendering, momentary changes of tone and
atmosphere. After 1843 Hildebrandt, under the influence of
Humboldt, extended his travels, and in 1864–1865 he went round
the world. Whilst his experience became enlarged his powers
of concentration broke down. He lost the taste for detail in
seeking for scenic breadth, and a fatal facility of hand diminished
the value of his works for all those who look for composition
and harmony of hue as necessary concomitants of tone and
touch. In oil he gradually produced less, in water colours
more, than at first, and his fame must rest on the sketches
which he made in the latter form, many of them represented by
chromo-lithography. Fantasies in red, yellow and opal, sunset,
sunrise and moonshine, distances of hundreds of miles like those
of the Andes and the Himalaya, narrow streets in the bazaars
of Cairo or Suez, panoramas as seen from mastheads, wide
cities like Bombay or Pekin, narrow strips of desert with measureless
expanses of sky—all alike display his quality of bravura.
Hildebrandt died at Berlin on the 25th of October 1868.
HILDEBRANDT, THEODOR (1804–1874), German painter,
was born at Stettin. He was a disciple of the painter Schadow,
and, on Schadow’s appointment to the presidency of a new
academy in the Rhenish provinces in 1828, followed that master
to Düsseldorf. Hildebrandt began by painting pictures illustrative
of Goethe and Shakespeare; but in this form he followed
the traditions of the stage rather than the laws of nature. He
produced rapidly “Faust and Mephistopheles” (1824), “Faust
and Margaret” (1825), and “Lear and Cordelia” (1828). He
visited the Netherlands with Schadow in 1829, and wandered
alone in 1830 to Italy; but travel did not alter his style, though
it led him to cultivate alternately eclecticism and realism.
At Düsseldorf, about 1830, he produced “Romeo and Juliet,”
“Tancred and Clorinda,” and other works which deserved
to be classed with earlier paintings; but during the same period
he exhibited (1829) the “Robber” and (1832) the “Captain
and his Infant Son,” examples of an affected but kindly realism
which captivated the public, and marked to a certain extent
an epoch in Prussian art. The picture which made Hildebrandt’s
fame is the “Murder of the Children of King Edward” (1836),
of which the original, afterwards frequently copied, still belongs
to the Spiegel collection at Halberstadt. Comparatively late
in life Hildebrandt tried his powers as an historical painter in
pictures representing Wolsey and Henry VIII., but he lapsed
again into the romantic in “Othello and Desdemona.” After
1847 Hildebrandt gave himself up to portrait-painting, and in
that branch succeeded in obtaining a large practice. He died
at Düsseldorf in 1874.
HILDEGARD, ST (1098–1179), German abbess and mystic,
was born of noble parents at Böckelheim, in the countship of
Sponheim, in 1098, and from her eighth year was educated at
the Benedictine cloister of Disibodenberg by Jutta, sister of
the count of Sponheim, whom she succeeded as abbess in 1136.
From earliest childhood she was accustomed to see visions,
which increased in frequency and vividness as she approached
the age of womanhood; these, however, she for many years
kept almost secret, nor was it until she had reached her forty-third
year (1141) that she felt constrained to divulge them.
Committed to writing by her intimate friend the monk Godefridus,
they now form the first and most important of her printed
works, entitled Scivias (probably an abbreviation for “sciens
vias” or “nosce vias Domini”) s. visionum et revelatianum
libri iii., and completed in 1151. In 1147 St Bernard of
Clairvaux, while at Bingen preaching the new crusade, heard
of Hildegard’s revelations, and became so convinced of their
reality that he not only wrote to her a letter cordially acknowledging
her as a prophetess of God, but also successfully advocated
her recognition as such by his friend and former pupil Pope
Eugenius III. in the synod of Trèves (1148). In the same
year Hildegard migrated along with eighteen of her nuns to
a new convent on the Rupertsberg near Bingen, over which
she presided during the remainder of her life. By means of
voluminous correspondence, as well as by extensive journeys,
