LUDWIGSLIED («Song of Ludwig»). - It is a song of praise in glory of King Louis III of Franconia, nephew of Charles the Bald, composed in the Franco-Rhenish dialect toward the end of the 12th century and certainly, as is evident from the context, before the King's death, which occurred in 882; it represents, one might say, the only poetic monument of historical content in Old High German. The event that gave occasion for the song is that same battle of Saucourt in Picardy (3 Aug. 881) won by the seventeen-year-old sovereign over the Normans, which developed in France into heroic legend, providing material for the poem of Gormond and Jaembart.
The brief composition, preserved in a single manuscript, originating from the abbey of St Amand in northern France, discovered a first time 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 linked to each other, after the example of Otfrid, by rhyme or by simple assonance. It presents, within an essentially mystical frame, Ludwig still a child, left orphaned by his father, and whose education God himself takes charge of, 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 it is permissible to suppose was an ecclesiastic, is warm with religious feeling and quivering with national pride, has a tight pace, a vigorous and dense expression, and at times resembles the robust simplicity of popular epic.
J. G. Herder composed an almost literal version of it in modern German, inserting it in book V of his Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Leipzig 1778-79).
Bibliography2 works
Bruno Vignola