common with the Anglo-Saxons, distinct qualities appear in the one and the other from the moment of our nearer acquaintance with their separate history and literature. So scanty, however, are the literary remains of German heathendom that recourse must be had to Christian productions to discover, for example, that with the Germans the sentiment of home and its dear relationships[1] is as marked as the Anglo-Saxon's elegiac meditative mood. Language bears its witness to the spiritual endowment of both peoples. The German dialects along the Rhine were rich in abstract nouns ending in ung and keit and schaft and tum.[2]
There remains one piece of untouched German heathenism, the Hildebrandslied, which dates from the end of the eighth century, and may possibly be the sole survivor of a collection of German poems made at Charlemagne's command.[3] It is a tale of single combat between a father and son, the counterpart of which is found in the Persian, Irish, and Norse literatures. Such an incident might be diversely rendered; armies might watch their champions engage, or the combat might occur unwitnessed in some mountain gorge; it might be described pathetically or in warrior mood, and the heroes might fight in ignorance, or one of them know well, who was the man confronting him. In German, this story is a part of that huge mass of legend which grew up around the memory of the terrible Hun Attila, and transformed him to the Atli of Norse literature, and to the worthy King Etzel of the Nibelungenlied, at whose Court the flower of Burgundian chivalry went down in that fierce feud in which Etzel had ittle part. Among his vassal kings appears the mighty exile Dietrich of Bern, who in the Nibelungen reluctantly overcomes the last of the Burgundian heroes. This Dietrich is none other than Theodoric the Ostrogoth, transformed in legend and represented as driven from his kingdom of Italy by Odoacer, and for the time forced to take refuge with
- ↑ See e.g. in Otfried's Evangelienbuch, post, Chapter IX.
- ↑ For example: skidunga (Scheidung), saligheit (Seligkeit), fiantscaft (Feindschaft), heidantuom (Heidentum). By the eighth century the High German of the Bavarians and Alemanni began to separate from the Low German of the lower Rhine, spoken by Saxons and certain of the Franks. The greater part of the Frankish tribes, and the Thuringians, occupied intermediate sections of country and spoke dialects midway between Low German and High.
- ↑ Text in Piper's Die älteste Literatur (Deutsche National Lit.).
