I would like some German speakers to take a look at this fragment from the early medieval German epic poem, Das Hildebrandslied, the earliest versions of which were written between 830-840. If you’re a Dutch speaker or a speaker of another Germanic language besides English (ie Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Frisian), you’re more than welcome to take a look, too. I would prefer native or fluent speakers, please, and no cheating by looking it up on Google.
Das Hildebrandslied is interesting to me because it was composed in about the same period as the classic Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. Beowulf is, however, almost completely incomprehensible to any modern-day English-speaker who is not armed with an Anglo-Saxon dictionary and a reader’s guide; the language has simply changed too much for us to comfortably read Beowulf in the original. What I’d like to know is if our Germanic cousins can puzzle out Das Hildebrandslied’s basic story.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but English changed radically after 1066 because of the Norman conquest in 1066: it added vocabulary from Norman French while losing some Germanic vocabulary, and lost some grammatical features of Anglo-Saxon such as gender in nouns and adjectives. I’m not a native speaker of German – I just learned a bit of it in high school, and learned a bit of Anglo-Saxon at university – but that quotation does look a lot more like modern standard German than Beowulf looks like modern standard English because of that radical change between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.
Equally as big an impact, and nearly always neglected in these discussions, is the change wrought by “Old Norse” (actually Old Danish for the most part) on Anglo-Saxon throughout most of England, and in particular on the areas whose dialects gave rise to Middle English. Even pronouns were influenced and changed – a much more radical modification than the vocabulary shift from the Conquest and the ensuing use of Norman French alongside early Middle English. The Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf and Caedmon is significantly different from that of the A-S Chronicle and writings of the 11th Century – even more so than a couple of centuries would normally shift the language. The strongly Nordicized Anglo-Saxon of the Danelaw is the cause of most of this.
I speak Dutch and german.
I can easily get the first line: “I’ve heard it say”
The rest is much harder. The second line is meaningless to me, the third line talks about Hildibrand and Hadubrant being possibly under two of something, for example. The last line is "That Hiltibrant was/is my fathers name, and my name is Hadubrant "
Native German speaker here.
It’s not really comprehensible. I can identify the first and third-to-last lines (“Our people told me this”) and some individual words. No idea what the story itself is about.
Not native, but I do some Dutch and German, too, and read middle Dutch just fine, but like Isosleepy says it’s pretty much gibberish. Are those 'f’s really f’s or are some of them the old typographical 's’s? Bits of it give the sense to me of being about a discussion of Hadubrant’s parentage/lineage-- who was married to who or something (I really want ‘muotin’ to be cognate with mutt, heh).
NOW I go google to see how off I was. . .
Ah,
Was on the right track for part of it, but completely missed the other narrative aspect
I’m a German major, and we went over this in a German literature review class. The teacher was an exert on all things German from the middle ages (seriously…she could translate this stuff with ease) and she walked us through the Hildebrandslied. When we’d stumble over a word she’d half-pronounce it, and we’d say “oh! baum (tree)!”. Keep in mind this was group of about fifteen American students who had been studying German with varying degrees of success. But in the end we got it.
If you can get pronunciation down, it’s not insanely difficult to work out.
That sounds a lot like the way it is for English speakers trying to make sense out of Middle English – At first glance, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales looks like gibberish, but once you’re familiar with the pronunciations of the archaic spellings, or someone who is reads it aloud, you can get the sense of it.
Old English (like Beowulf), which is more contemporary with the Hildebrandslied passage, is distinctly harder for modern English speakers. It largely sounds closer to German than English.
I am Dutch and could read about as much as Isosleepy (didn’t try to long though). For the Dutch who want to cheat, look here. That site lists it as German and I can read the old Dutch samples there more easily (they are about 400 years later though).