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The Beginnings of German Literature - Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Old High German (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,823
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The Beginnings of German Literature - Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Old High German (Hardcover)
Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture
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Total price: R2,843
Discovery Miles: 28 430
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A study of the breakthrough of the Germanic vernacular dialects
into the realm of written language between the eighth and tenth
centuries. For the German-speaking peoples under the Carolingians
(c. AD 750-950), the dominant literary tongue was Latin, the lingua
franca of the Christian West. Before the eighth century only
isolated words, legal terms, and proper namesfrom the vernacular
dialects had found their way into manuscripts. Cyril Edwards's
collection of essays examines the breakthrough into literacy of the
dialects known collectively as Old High German in the south and Old
Saxon in the north. In an introductory essay, Edwards surveys the
recording and survival of the earliest continuous German texts.
This leads into seven essays, each inspired by a fresh look at the
manuscripts. Two are concerned with the Wessobrunn Prayer, the
earliest religious poem in German. A third looks at the destructive
application of acids to medieval manuscripts in an attempt to read
barely legible letters; it concentrates upon the Hildebrandslied,
theonly surviving Old High German heroic lay, and the ninth-century
eschatalogical poem, the Muspilli. Two studies are devoted to the
Merseburg Charms, pagan survivals in a Christian manuscript,
invoking gods familiar from the Old Norse pantheon. A study of the
earliest traces of the love-lyric follows, poems that slipped
through the net of censorship imposed by the Christian church. A
final essay is concerned with the Ossian of the period, an
ingenious forgery that was a cause celebre in the nineteenth
century, the Old High German Lullaby. Cyril Edwards is a Lecturer
in German at St. Peter's College, Oxford, and an Honorary Research
Fellow of University College London. He has published numerous
articles on medieval German literature and co-edited a book on the
medieval German lyric. He is currecntly preparing a new translation
of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel.
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