496 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1580.
first with metrical versions of the Psalms and appropriate tunes, afterwards with new Christian hymns.
The hymn in the strict sense of the term, as a popular religious lyric, or a lyric poem in praise of God or Christ to be sung by the congregation in public worship, was born in Germany and brought to maturity with the Reformation and with the idea of the general priesthood of believers. The Latin Church had prepared the way, and produced some of the grandest hymns which can never die, as the “ Dies Ire,” the « Stabat mater,” and the “ Jesu dulcis memoria.” But these and other Latin hymns and sequences of St. Hilary, St. Ambrose, Fortunatus, Notker, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas a Celano, Jacobus de Benedictis, Adam of St. Victor, etc., were sung by priests and choristers, and were no more » intelligible to the common people than the Latin Psalter and the Latin mass.! The reign of the Latin language in public worship, while it tended to preserve the unity of the church, and to facilitate literary intercourse, kept back the free development of a vernacular hymnody. Nevertheless, the native love of the Germans for poetry and song produced for private devotion a large number of sacred lyrics and versified translations of the Psalms and Latin hymns. As there were German Bibles before Luther’s version, so there were also German hymns before his time ; but they were limited in use, and superseded by the superior products of the evangelical church. Philip Wackernagel (the most learned German hymnologist, and an enthusiastic admirer of Luther) gives in the second volume of his large collection no less than fourteen hundred and forty-eight German hymns and sequences, from Otfrid to Hans Sachs (inelusive) or from A. D. 868 to 1518. Nor was vernacular hymnody confined to Germany. St. Francis of Assisi composed the “ Cantico del Sol,” and Jacopone da Todi (the author of the “Stabat Mater”) those pas-
1 On Greek and Latin hymnology and the literature, see Schaff, Church History, 111, 575 sqq., and IV. 402 sqq. and 416 sqq.
ὃ 82. BEGINNINGS OF EVANGELICAL HYMNODY. 497
sionate dithyrambic odes which “ vibrate like tongues of fire,” for private confraternities and domestic gatherings.
German Hymnody before the Reformation.
In order to form a just estimate of German βιοῦν εν hymnody, we must briefly survey the medieval German hymnody.
The first attempts of Teutonic church ἌΜῚΣ are biblical epics, and the leader of the Teutonic Christ-singers is the Anglo-Saxon monk Cedmon of Whitby (formerly a swineherd), about 680, who reproduced in alliterative verse, as by inspiration, the biblical history of creation and redemption, and brought it home to the imagination and heart of Old England.? This poem, which was probably brought to Germany by Bonifacius and other English missionaries, inspired in the ninth century a similar production of an unknown Saxon (Westphalian) monk, namely, a poetic gospel harmony or life of Christ under the title “ Heliand” (i.e., Hezland, Healer, Saviour). About the same time (6. 870), Otfrid of Weissenburg in the Alsace, a Benedictine monk, edueated at Fulda and St. Gall, versified the gospel history in the Alemannian dialect, in fifteen hundred verses, divided into stanzas, each stanza consisting of four rhymed lines.*
These three didactic epics were the first vernacular Bibles for the laity among the Western barbarians.®
1 Comp. Ozanam, Les poetes Franciscains en Italie au 13” sieele. Paris, 1852.
2 Bouterweck, Cedmon’s des Angelsachsen biblische Dichtungen, Elberfeld, 1849-54. Bosanquet, The Fall of Man, or Paradise Lost of Caedmon, translated in verse from the Anglo-Saxon, London, 1860. é
8 EK. Sievers, Der Heliand und die angelsdchsische Genesis. Halle, 1875. .
1. Flacius first edited Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch (Evangeliorum liber), Bas. 1571. Recent editions by Graff, under the title Krist, Konigsberg, 1831; and Kelle, Otfrid’s Evang.-buch, Regensb. 1856 and 1859, 2 vols. Specimens in Wackernagel’s ἢ). Kirchenlied (the large work), vol, ii. 3-21. A translation into modern German by G. Rapp, Gotha, 1858.
5 Comp. Hammerich, Aelteste christliche Epik der Angelsachsen, Deutsehen und Nordlinder. Translated from the Danish by Michelsen, 1874.