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.The Vandals established kingdoms in Italy, Spain, and North Africa; the Goths, in Italy and Spain; the Burgundians, on the Rhine.ORIGINS TO ELEVENTH CENTURYTwo hundred years later, these tribes had all but disappeared, exhausted and decimated by their heroic exploits, absorbed by the cultures and people they had overrun, yet they disappeared only after leaving behind a lasting record of their remarkable feats.If history demands patterned, poetic order, it certainly demanded it here, in the face of the splendid achievements and the tragic end of the East Germanic tribes.Soon, the scop, the warrior-poet, sang in the lord’s hall of heroic courage and loyalty, of betrayal and revenge, of inscrutable fate and man’s fortitude when confronted with its cruel decrees.For centuries, this oral poetry informed and stimulated the imagination of the Germanic tribes until, several hundred years later, some accounts were finally given literary form.Though naturally influenced by the tumultuous events around them, the West Germanic tribes underwent a gradual development.The most notable migratory action was that of the Angles and some of the Saxons, who, after the Roman forces had pulled out of Britain, began to settle there in the fifth and sixth centuries.On the Continent, historical progress took place under the steady ascendancy of the Franks.Clovis I (481-511) united all major West Germanic tribes, with the exception of the Continental Saxons, under Frankish leadership.When Clovis converted to Roman Catholicism, Latin culture quickly accompanied Christianity on its missionary journeys.The ensuing political and cultural unification was underscored by a growing linguistic unity among the tribes.Starting among the Alemanni of Germany’s southern highlands, a consonant shift spread through the West Germanic tribes, differentiating their language from that of their North Germanic neighbors as well as that of the Angles and Saxons.This language, Old High German, is considered the first distinct forerunner of modern German.The unity of the West Germanic tribes reached its culmination under the rule of Charlemagne (768-814).Charlemagne was not only a brilliant political leader but also a farsighted patron of the arts; the earliest extant literary fragments in the vernacular date from his reign.Baptismal vows, creeds, and prayers give evidence of the importance that church and state placed on the vernacular in their concerted effort to convert the Germanic peoples to Christianity.Nevertheless, cultural life under Charlemagne and his Carolingian successors proceeded mostly in Latin.Of lyric poetry in Old High German, only two fragments of poems have survived.Both are religious in nature, though secular poetry did exist, as is indicated by an ecclesiastical injunction against the writing or sending of Winileodos (songs of friendship).The “Wessobrunner Gebet” (c.780; “Wessobrunn Prayer”) contains in twenty-eight lines a fragmentary account of creation, while the “Muspilli” (c.830), almost four times as long, describes the Day of Judgment.The most important poetic work of the ninth century, however, is an epic, the religious epic Der Heliand (c.840; The Heliand, 1966).In its six thousand lines of dramatic alliterative verse, Christ has been transformed into a magnanimous Germanic lord and his apostles into retainers who, moving with him from castle to castle, believe in his mission with unflinching loyalty.Unfortunately, the epic did not have its deserved impact on German literature, because it was not written in Old High German, but in Old Low German (Old Saxon), a Germanic dialect as yet unassimilated by the developing German language.Thus, it was quickly forgotten and not rediscovered until, in the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation searched high and low for a historical tradition.Charlemagne’s liberal cultural policies also encouraged a collection of heroic songs reaching back into the pre-Christian days of the Great Migrations.This collection is said to have been burned by Charlemagne’s son, the weak and bigoted Louis the Pious.A glimpse of what such a collection might have contained is provided by a brief fragment, the sixty-eight lines of the Hildebrandslied (c.800; The Song of Hildebrand, 1957) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]