WESSOBRUNNER GEBET. — The so-called “Wessobrunn Prayer” is contained in a manuscript preserved in the library of the monastery of Wessobrunn in Upper Bavaria (founded in 753), now kept in Munich.
The manuscript dates from the year 814; the prayer bears the Latin title De Poeta and is written in Old Bavarian dialect, though with traces of Old English or Old Saxon in the verse section, explainable by its Frankish origin and the influences of the literary milieu of Fulda. It consists of an initial section containing nine lines, the first five of which, dealing with the cosmological problem, follow the style and manner of ancient Germanic pagan poetry (notable indeed are the similarities of this song with a stanza of the Old Norse Völuspá, which is the first poem of the Edda) on the theme of Gen. 1:2 and Ps. 89:2. The remaining four lines, fragmentary, probably allude to the episode of the Fall of the Angels, as a premise to the narration of the origin of the world and of man, which presumably would have constituted the subject matter of the poem. The second part contains a prayer in prose (from which, however, some metrically certain lines can be drawn), which is a glorification of God as Creator: a typical and common motif of this early Christian poetry among the Germanic peoples, Caedmon (v.).