LUDWIGSLIED («Song of Ludwig»). — It is a laudatory song in glory of King Ludwig III of Franconia, grandson of Charles the Bald, composed in the Rhenish-Franconian dialect toward the end of the 9th century and certainly, as is evident from the context, before the king’s death in 882; it may be said to represent the only poetic monument of historical content in Old High German. The event that occasioned the song is the very battle of Saucourt in Picardy (3 Aug. 881), won by the seventeen-year-old sovereign over the Normans, which developed in France into an heroic legend, providing material for the poem of Gormond and Isembart.
The brief composition, preserved in a single manuscript, originally from the abbey of St Amand in northern France, first discovered by Mabillon in 1696, subsequently lost, rediscovered in 1837 by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, and now in the municipal library of Valenciennes, consists of 27 uneven strophes, of two or three lines, composed of two hemistichs bound together, following the example of Orfido, by rhyme or simple assonance. It presents, within a framework essentially mystical, Ludwig still a boy, orphaned of his father, whose education is taken in hand by God Himself, who then tests his virtue by provoking the invasion of the Normans, calls him to the defense of His beloved people of the Franks, assists him in battle, and guides him to victory. The song, whose author may reasonably be supposed to have been an ecclesiastic, is warm with religious feeling and vibrant with national pride, has a compact rhythm, vigorous and dense expression, and at times evokes the robust simplicity of popular epic.
J. G. Herder composed an almost literal version in modern German, inserting it in Book V of his Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Leipzig 1778–79).