WESSOBRUNNER GEBET. – The so-called “Wessobrunn Prayer” is contained in a codex of the library of the monastery of Wessobrunn in Upper Bavaria (founded in 753), now preserved in Munich.
The codex dates from the year 814; the prayer bears the Latin title De Poeta and is written in the Old Bavarian dialect, but with traces of Anglo-Saxon or Old Saxon in the verse section, explicable by its Frankish origin and the influences of the Fulda literary milieu. It consists of an initial section containing nine verses, the first five of which, dealing with the cosmological problem, develop, in the style and rhythms of ancient pagan Germanic poetry (the analogies between this song and a stanza of the Old Norse Volaspit, the first song of the Edda, are in fact noteworthy), the theme of Gen. 1:2 and Ps. 89:2. The remaining four verses, fragmentary, probably allude to the episode of the fall of the Angels, as a prelude to the narration of the origin of the world and of man, which presumably would have constituted the subject matter of the song. The second section contains a prose prayer (from which, however, some metrically certain verses can be extracted), which is a glorification of God as Creator: a typical and common theme of this earliest Christian poetry in Germanic lands, Caedmon (v.).