Poetry
Muspilli
Anonymous · 870
Opening lines
... sîn tac piqueme daz er touuan scal.
sâr sô diu sêla in den sind sih arhevit
enti si den lîhhamun likkan lâzzit,
sô quimit ein heri fona himilzungalon,
daz andar fona pehhe: dâr pâgant siu umpi.
… his day comes when he must die.
As soon as the soul sets out on its way
and leaves the body lying,
there comes one host from the stars of heaven,
the other from the pitch: there they fight over it.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Immediately after death, the army of angels and that of demons dispute over the soul, which goes off either to the joys of heaven or to the fire and darkness of hell. Then comes the announcement of the judgement, from which no one can escape: the prophet Elijah confronts the Antichrist, and when his blood flows on the earth, the mountains catch fire, the waters dry up, the moon falls. The poet urges us to judge uprightly here below, before showing the Judge who advances, the dead who rise and the cross carried before Christ.
Context
The poem was written down around 870, in an unpractised hand, on the blank pages, the margins and even the dedication page of a Latin manuscript given to the young Louis the German by Bishop Adalram of Salzburg; the beginning and the end, written on outer leaves, are lost. Its language is Old Bavarian, in alliterative verse with a few rhymes. Discovered in 1817, it was published in 1832 by Johann Andreas Schmeller. The word muspilli, which appears in it only once, is of disputed meaning; it is compared with the fire at the end of the world in Norse tales. Reagents used by the first editors left permanent stains on the parchment.
Who it is for
One hundred and three incomplete lines, to be read in an annotated edition. It is worth knowing that the text, deprived of its beginning and its end, opens and stops in the middle of a sentence.
Prizes and reception
Together with the Hildebrandslied, one of the longest poems preserved in the oldest German language; manuscript in the Bavarian State Library, in Munich.