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Heroic Lay
The heroic lay (German ''Heldenlied'') is a genre of Germanic epic poetry characteristic of the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages. A lay is a short narrative poem of between 80 and 200 lines concerning a single heroic episode in the life of a warrior from Germanic legend. It is distinct from the heroic epic (Beowulf, Nibelungenlied) which combines a sequence of episodes into a longer narrative. Examples *Old High German **The Hildebrandslied *Old Norse **Atlakviða **Hamðismál *Old English **The Finnesburg Fragment The "Finnesburg Fragment" (also "Finnsburh Fragment") is a portion of an Old English heroic poem about a fight in which Hnæf and his 60 retainers are besieged at "Finn's fort" and attempt to hold off their attackers. The surviving text is tantali ... Notes References * * * Further reading * * Medieval poetry Genres Old High German literature Germanic heroic legends {{Poetry-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germanic Culture
Germanic culture is a term referring to the culture of Germanic peoples, and can be used to refer to a range of time periods and nationalities, but is most commonly used in either a historical or contemporary context to denote groups that derive from the Proto-Germanic language, which is generally thought to have emerged as a distinct language after 500 BC. Germanic culture is characterized as having significant roots from Scandinavian and Teutonic cultures, and has notable influences from other societies at the time, namely the Roman Empire, who gave the tribe its Latin name, Germani. Over time the various different local and regional dialects of the language have diverged and each has adopted several distinct geographical and national properties, with an estimated 37 Germanic languages and 550 million speakers worldwide. Origins There is much debate over the exact period that Germanic culture became a distinct cultural group within Europe. With the first recorded annotations writ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their Viking expansion, overseas settlements and chronologically coincides with the Viking Age, the Christianization of Scandinavia and the consolidation of Scandinavian kingdoms from about the 7th to the 15th centuries. The Proto-Norse language developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid-to-late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century. Old Norse was divided into three dialects: Old West Norse, ''Old West Norse'' or ''Old West Nordic'' (often referred to as ''Old Norse''), Old East Norse, ''Old East Norse'' or ''Old East Nordic'', and ''Ol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Genres
Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Genres form by conventions that change over time as cultures invent new genres and discontinue the use of old ones. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility. Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medieval Poetry
Poetry took numerous forms in medieval Europe, for example, lyric and epic poetry. The troubadours and the minnesänger are known for their lyric poetry about courtly love. Among the most famous of secular poetry is ''Carmina Burana'', a manuscript collection of 254 poems. Twenty-four poems of ''Carmina Burana'' were later set to music by German composer Carl Orff in 1936. Examples of medieval poetry Old English religious poetry includes the poem ''Christ'' by Cynewulf and the poem ''The Dream of the Rood'', preserved in both manuscript form and on the Ruthwell Cross. We do have some secular poetry; in fact a great deal of medieval literature was written in verse, including the Old English epic '' Beowulf''. Scholars are fairly sure, based on a few fragments and on references in historic texts, that much lost secular poetry was set to music, and was spread by traveling minstrels, or bards, across Europe. Thus, the few poems written eventually became ballads or lays, and never ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Finnesburg Fragment
The "Finnesburg Fragment" (also "Finnsburh Fragment") is a portion of an Old English heroic poem about a fight in which Hnæf and his 60 retainers are besieged at "Finn's fort" and attempt to hold off their attackers. The surviving text is tantalisingly brief and allusive, but comparison with other references in Old English poetry, notably ''Beowulf'' (''c.'' 1000 AD), suggests that it deals with a conflict between Danes and Frisians in Migration-Age Frisia (400 to 800 AD). Transmission The extant text is a transcript of a loose manuscript folio that was once kept at Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury. This manuscript was almost certainly Lambeth Library MS 487. A British scholar, George Hickes, made the transcript some time in the late 17th century, and published it in an anthology of Anglo-Saxon and other antiquities in 1705. (This anthology also contains the first reference to the sole manuscript of ''Beowulf''.) Since the time when the cop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literature, Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman language, Anglo-Norman (a langues d'oïl, relative of French) as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian languages, Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic dialects originally spoken by Germanic peoples, Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hamðismál
The Hamðismál is a poem which ends the heroic poetry of the ''Poetic Edda'', and thereby the whole collection. Gudrun had been the wife of the hero Sigurd, whom her brothers had killed. With Sigurd she had had the daughter Svanhild, who had married to the Goth king Ermanaric (Jörmunrekkr). Ermanaric had Svanhild trampled to death by horses, due to which Gudrun wants vengeance, and she agitates her sons (see Jonakr's sons) from a later marriage to kill Ermanaric, cf. ''Guðrúnarhvöt''. The poem is considered to belong to the oldest of the heroic poems, probably from the 9th century. It makes an archaic impression with its bitter and laconic language. Howling with wrath, the brothers Hamdir and Sörli ride over a misty mountain. The last lines are like carved on a runestone: Sources and historic basis The legend of Jörmunrek appears in the ''Poetic Edda'' as ''Hamðismál'' and ''Guðrúnarhvöt''. It also appears in Bragi Boddason's ''Ragnarsdrápa'', in the ''Völsunga sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atlakviða
''Atlakviða'' (''The Lay of Atli'') is one of the heroic poems of the ''Poetic Edda''. One of the main characters is Atli who originates from Attila the Hun. It is one of the most archaic Eddic poems, possibly dating to as early as the 9th century. Owing to its stylistic similarity to ''Hrafnsmál'' it has been suggested that the poem might have been composed by Þorbjörn Hornklofi.Genzmer, Felix. 1926. ‘Der Dichter der Atlakviða’. ANF 42, 97-134. It is preserved in the Codex Regius and the same story is related in the ''Völsunga saga''. In the manuscript the poem is identified as Greenlandic but most scholars believe that this results from a confusion with ''Atlamál''. The metre of the poem alternates irregularly between ''málaháttr'' and ''fornyrðislag''. This may be an indication that two or more original poems have been merged or that the short and long lines were not felt as constituting two different metres at the time the poem was composed. Historical background ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hildebrandslied
The ''Hildebrandslied'' (; ''Lay'' or ''Song of Hildebrand'') is a heroic lay written in Old High German alliterative verse. It is the earliest poetic text in German, and it tells of the tragic encounter in battle between a father (Hildebrand) and a son (Hadubrand) who does not recognize him. It is the only surviving example in German of a genre which must have been important in the oral literature of the Germanic tribes. The text was written in the 830s on two spare leaves on the outside of a religious codex in the monastery of Fulda. The two scribes were copying from an unknown older original, which itself must ultimately have derived from oral tradition. The story of Hildebrand and Hadubrand almost certainly goes back to 7th- or 8th-century Lombardy and is set against the background of the historical conflict between Theodoric and Odoacer in 5th-century Italy, which became a major subject for Germanic heroic legend. The fundamental story of the father and son who fail to recog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epic Poetry
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants. Etymology The English word ''epic'' comes from Latin ''epicus'', which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective (''epikos''), from (''epos''), "word, story, poem." In ancient Greek, 'epic' could refer to all poetry in dactylic hexameter (''epea''), which included not only Homer but also the wisdom poetry of Hesiod, the utterances of the Delphic oracle, and the strange theological verses attributed to Orpheus. Later tradition, however, has restricted the term 'epic' to ''heroic epic'', as described in this article. Overview Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics, such as those of Homer, were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old High German
Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old High German is an umbrella term for the group of continental West Germanic dialects which underwent the set of consonantal changes called the Second Sound Shift. At the start of this period, the main dialect areas belonged to largely independent tribal kingdoms, but by 788 the conquests of Charlemagne had brought all OHG dialect areas into a single polity. The period also saw the development of a stable linguistic border between German and Gallo-Romance, later French. The surviving OHG texts were all written in monastic scriptoria and, as a result, the overwhelming majority of them are religious in nature or, when secular, belong to the Latinate literary culture of Christianity. The earliest written texts in Old High German, glosses and i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nibelungenlied
The ( gmh, Der Nibelunge liet or ), translated as ''The Song of the Nibelungs'', is an epic poetry, epic poem written around 1200 in Middle High German. Its anonymous poet was likely from the region of Passau. The is based on an oral tradition of Germanic heroic legend that has some of its origin in historic events and individuals of the 5th and 6th centuries and that spread throughout almost all of Germanic languages, Germanic-speaking Europe. Scandinavian parallels to the German poem are found especially in the heroic lays of the ''Poetic Edda'' and in the ''Völsunga saga''. The poem is split into two parts. In the first part, the prince Sigurd, Siegfried comes to Worms, Germany, Worms to acquire the hand of the Burgundians, Burgundian princess Kriemhild from her brother King Gunther. Gunther agrees to let Siegfried marry Kriemhild if Siegfried helps Gunther acquire the warrior-queen Brünhild as his wife. Siegfried does this and marries Kriemhild; however, Brünhild and Krie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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