Of all the Germanic races, the tribes with which we have more
particularly to deal here were the latest to attain intellectual
maturity. The Goths had, centuries earlier, under their famous bishop
Ulfilas or Wulfila, possessed the Bible in their vernacular, the
northern races could point to their _Edda_, the Germanic tribes in
England to a rich and virile Old English poetry, before a written German
literature of any consequence existed at all. At the same time, these
continental tribes, in the epoch that lay between the Migrations of the
5th century and the age of Charles the Great, were not without poetic
literature of a kind, but it was not committed to writing, or, at least,
no record of such a poetry has come down to us. Its existence is vouched
for by indirect historical evidence, and by the fact that the sagas, out
of which the German national epic was welded at a later date, originated
in the great upheaval of the 5th century. When the vernacular literature
began to emerge from an unwritten state in the 8th century, it proved to
be merely a weak reflection of the ecclesiastical writings of the
monasteries; and this, with very few exceptions, Old High German
literature remained. Translations of the liturgy, of Tatian's _Gospel
Harmony_ (c. 835), of fragments of sermons, form a large proportion of
it. Occasionally, as in the so-called _Monsee Fragments_, and at the end
of the period, in the prose of Notker Labeo (d. 1022), this
ecclesiastical literature attains a surprising maturity of style and
expression. But it had no vitality of its own; it virtually sprang into
existence at the command of Charlemagne, whose policy with regard to the
use of the vernacular in place of Latin was liberal and far-seeing; and
it docilely obeyed the tastes of the rulers that followed, becoming
severely orthodox under Louis the Pious, and consenting to immediate
extinction when the Saxon emperors withdrew their favour from it. Apart
from a few shorter poetic fragments of interest, such as the _Merseburg
Charms_ (_Zauberspruche_), an undoubted relic of pre-Christian times,
the _Wessobrunn Prayer_ (c. 780), the _Muspilli_, an imaginative
description of the Day of Judgment, and the _Ludwigslied_ (881), which
may be regarded as the starting point for the German historical ballad,
the only High German poem of importance in this early period was the
_Gospel Book_ (_Liber evangeliorum_) of Otfrid of Weissenburg (c.
800-870). Even this work is more interesting as the earliest attempt to
supersede alliteration in German poetry by rhyme, than for such poetic
life as the monk of Weissenburg was able to instil into his narrative.
In fact, for the only genuine poetry of this epoch we have to look, not
to the High German but to the Low German races. They alone seemed able
to give literary expression to the memories handed down in oral
tradition from the 5th century; to Saxon tradition we owe the earliest
extant fragment of a national saga, the _Lay of Hildebrand_
(_Hildebrandslied_, c. 800), and a Saxon poet was the author of a
vigorous alliterative version of the Gospel story, the _Heliand_ (c.
830), and also of part of the Old Testament (_Genesis_). This
alliterative epic--for epic it may be called--is the one poem of this
age in which the Christian tradition has been adapted to German poetic
needs. Of the existence of a lyric poetry we only know by hearsay; and
the drama had nowhere in Europe yet emerged from its earliest purely
liturgic condition. Such as it was, the vernacular literature of the Old
High German period enjoyed but a brief existence, and in the 10th and
11th centuries darkness again closed over it. The dominant "German"
literature in these centuries is in Latin; but that literature is not
without national interest, for it shows in what direction the German
mind was moving. The _Lay of Walter_ (_Waltharilied_, c. 930), written
in elegant hexameters by Ekkehard of St Gall, the moralizing dramas of
Hrosvitha (Roswitha) of Gandersheim, the _Ecbasis captivi_ (c. 940),
earliest of all the Beast epics, and the romantic adventures of
_Ruodlieb_ (c. 1030), form a literature which, Latin although it is,
foreshadows the future developments of German poetry.