THE LA Y OF HILDEBRAND: A CASE FOR A LOW GERMAN WRITTEN ORIGINAL *

by Richard d' Alquen and Hans-Georg Trevers

1. THE BASIS FOR A NEW APPROACH 1.1. The present dilemma. 1.1.1. It is in the nature of complex and intractable problems that views on them are likely to be determined by current trends in thought rather than by an objective assessment of the admittedly contradictory and hardly conc1usive data drawn on in discussion. Establishing the dialect of the original version of the Lay of Hildebrand is a case in point. For the Romantic Lachmann school the text had to be c10se to the oral folk lay, hence written down from memory or dictation and based direct• lyon a dialect spoken in the borderland between High and Low German. Hessen and Thuringia were favoured areas. 1 Although the lay displayed a most implausable natural dialect and J. Grimm had already stated his view that the puzzling tt for Low German t was obviously an imitation of HG zz2, the conc1usion that the present text is a copy was not widely drawn until A. Holtzmann made this and other telling points, conc1uding forth-

* Work on this topic began with Hans Georg Trevers, The Lay of Hildebrand as a High Gerrnanization of a Low German Text, M.A .. thesis, University of Al• berta, Edmonton, 1979, supervised by R. d'Alquen, who set the topic and, be• cause of limited time for the thesis, has summarized, refined, modified and added major aspects of the argument. Credit is due to two coileagues from the University of London, J .L.Flood and especially D.R.McLintock, as weil as to A.Quak in his function as editor, for comments which led to improvements in the argument. 1. Karl Lachmann, über das Hildebrandslied (Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1833, Hist.-Phil.Klasse) Berlin 1835. Also in: Kleinere Schriften zur deutschen Philologie, Berlin 1876, 407ff. 2. J.Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik 1,1822, p. 168 or (1893), p. 139. 12 rightly, but with questionable internal logic: "Es ist also nicht behauptet, sondern mit völliger Sicherheit erwiesen, daß entwe• der ein Hochdeutscher eine niederdeutsche Vorlage abschrieb und sich dabei mundgerecht machte, oder umgekehrt ein Niederdeut• scher eine hochdeutsche Vorlage abschreibend halb und halb in seine Mundart umsetzte ... Und ich glaube, wir können mit völ• liger Sicherheit behaupten, daß der Schreiber ein Niederdeutscher, seine Vorlage hochdeutsch war.,,3 No one could deny after Holtzmann that the reason for the strange language of the lay was copying or 'translating' from one dialect into another. Views on the direction of the dialect shift during transmission were, however, not so decisively affected by Holtzmann's argument that the original was High German, per• haps because he used only two of the three points that have proved themselves really persuasive in the abundant literature on the lay. One was Grimm's observation that tt in urhettun etc. correspondipg to LG t must be a graphic reflection of HG zz. The second was that suasat (53) would have no ending in Low German and must therefore be a superficial change from HG suasaz, which in any ca se is required by the metre to have two syllabies. Surprisingly he made no use of the already known argument that in line 48 riche apparently alliterates with reccheo, which would be wrekkio in Low German.4 This line must be of High German ongin. Over the years support for a Low Ger• man original has waried, so that arecent handbook may now roundly state: "We can therefore reject the on ce popular view that the poem was composed in Old Saxon. ,,5 The trend set by Holtzmann, strengthened through major works by Pongs,6 Saran,7 van der Kolk8 and Lühr8~ has become a conc1usion, a piece of knowledge to be handed down to posterity.

3. Adolf Holtzmann, Zum Hildebrandslied, in: Germania 9 (1864), 290f. 4. Argument used by Lachmann (note 1). 5. J.Knight Bostock, A Handbook on 01d High German Literature, 2nd ed. revised by K.C.King and D.R.McLintock, Oxford 1976, p. 79. 6. Hermann Pongs, Das Hildebrandslied, Marburg 1913. 7. Frans Saran, Das Hildebrandslied, Halle 1915. 8. Helmich van der Kolk, Das Hildebrandslied, Amsterdam 1967. 8a. Rosemarie Lühr, Studien zur Sprache des Hildebrandliedes, Frankfurt 1982.