OTFRIDO di WEISSENBURG. - Benedictine monk, b. in Alsace about 790, d. 870. A disciple of Rabano Mauro, later head of the cloister school of Weissenburg, he was the author of a Gospel Harmony in the Frankish language of the Upper Rhine, which he entitled Liber evangeliorum D. g. theodisce conscriptus, also known by the name Krist, given to it by E. G. Graff.
The work consists of five books, corresponding to the five senses which in man are the channel of sin, and draws upon the source of the Gospels, with the customary adaptations to the local environment and customs, and with frequent moral reflections and considerations. The historical importance of the work, which reveals the theologian and scholar more than the poet, lies in its form, O. being the creator of a verse which remained for two or three centuries the dominant type in German poetics: it consists of two hemistichs, each with four stresses and an indefinite number of unstressed syllables, bound together by rhyme, which here for the first time replaces the characteristic Germanic alliteration. O.
of languages is, after the remote Visigothic Ulfila, the first German writer whose name is known. BBL.: Manitius, I, pp. 574-77; J. Körner, Bibliographisches Handbuch des deutschen Schrifttums, Berns 1949, p. 87. Bruno Vignola