Four words in Hildebrandslied, Heliand, and the Old Saxon Genesis

himil and hevan, gudia and hiltia

Note: In this article, Saxon is used to refer exclusively to the people and language of Old Saxony, not to the Anglo-Saxons.

At its core this post consists of two observations regarding the use of four words in the three most important alliterative West Germanic poems from the European continent.

The poems

The three poems discussed are all written in the alliterative Germanic meter. They form the entire corpus of continental West Germanic epic alliterative poetry.¹

The Hildebrandslied (‘Lay of Hildbrand’) is an epic poem, probably from the 8th century. In 66 lines it tells the story of the hence-named Hildbrand. Having been exiled for thirty years, he reunites with his now-grown son on the battlefield, with the two knights heading opposing armies. Upon finding out the identity of his son, Hildbrand reveals himself as his father and offers a truce, yet his son takes it for an insult—‘Dead’, he says, ‘is Hildbrand Harbrandson,’ and makes ready for battle. The poem ends abruptly in the middle of their duel, but the story is known from other sources, and would have concluded with Hildbrand slaying his son. The orthography of the poem very problematic, but although it shows substantial Saxon influence, the alliteration points toward a High German original.²

The Heliand and Saxon Genesis are quite unlike the pagan Germanic Hildebrandslied. Both are poems about Christian subjects, and both are written in consistent Old Saxon.

The Heliand is a faithful verse paraphrase of Tatian’s 2nd century Diatessaron gospel harmony. It is almost complete, consisting of 5985 lines, but the conclusion is unfortunately lost.

The Saxon Genesis consists of three fragments from a poetic retelling of Genesis, concerning the fall of Man (26 lines), Cain’s slaying of Abel (124 lines), and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (185 lines). We are very fortunate to have part of a near word-for-word translation of this poem into Old English, the so-called Genesis B³, which preserves much that would have been found in the original Saxon Genesis.

It is not impossible that these two Saxon poems were composed by the same author. They are, in any case, extremely similar in style.

Observation 1: *himil and *hebn

These two Proto-West Germanic words both mean ‘sky, heaven’. *himil is probably closely related to Old Norse himinn ‘id.’, Gothic himins ‘id.’, while *hebn has not (to my knowledge) been satisfactorily explained.

Knowers of German will recognise himil as the ancestor of Himmel, while knowers of English will hopefully recognise *hebn as the ancestor of heaven. Indeed, in Old High German the only word for ‘heaven’ is, with one notable exception we will get to shortly, himil, while in Old English the only word is heofon, the descendant of *hebn.

Things get more interesting in Old Saxon, where both himil and hevan are used. As it turns out, they are not entirely interchangable.

Heliand and Genesis

In Heliand and the Genesis, hevan and all its derivatives (compounds and adjectives like heavenly) are used 102⁴ + 14 = 116 times. Of these, 102 + 10= 112 are in an alliterative position. On the other hand, himil and all its derivatives are used 96 + 4 = 100 times, but of these 84 + 3 are used alliteratively. Further, all 4 non-alliterative occurrences of hevan in Genesis are found in the b-verse formula god hevan-ríki ‘god ruler of heaven’. If we look at only the Heliand, 102/102 occurrences of hevan are alliterative, while only 84/96 occurrences of himil are. This is a statistically significant result.

Spurred on by this curiosity, I decided to delve deeper (by which I mean, go through all occurrences of these two words), and made some other findings.

Most notably, hevan occurs only 6 + 5 = 11 times as a simplex, that is, not as part of a compound, but 96 + 9 = 105 times in compounds. On the other hand, himil occurs 58 + 4 = 62 times as a simplex noun, and 38 + 0 times as part of compounds or other derived forms. Needless to say, this is also highly significant.

If we next take a look at those 11 simplex occurrences of hevan across Heliand and Genesis, it turns out that all of them are in the genitive case, and that all are immediately followed by one of just three nouns: waldand ‘ruler’, ward ‘guardian’, and wang ‘field’⁵. What this means in practice is that OS hevan is never used as a normal word for ‘heaven’, but instead exclusively in highly formulaic poetic expressions. The normal word is himil, which is indeed used in all four cases.

The other major interesting findings:

• the adjective himilisk ‘heavenly’ is used 11 + 0 times, but no corresponding adjective derived from hevan exists

• the cpd hevan-kuning ‘heaven-king’ is used 53 + 3 = 56 times, but himil-kuning is only found in single a textual variant (which if accepted would bring the instances of hevan-kuning down to 55; see note 4)

• the cpd hevan-ríki ‘heavenly kingdom’ is used 29 + 1 = 30 times, while himil-ríki is used 20 + 0 times

For an exhaustive list of all other OS compounds formed from himil and hevan, I recommend Heinrich Tiefenbach’s (2010) A Concise Old Saxon Dictionary.

Using Tiefenbach’s dictionary we can get an overview of how himil and hevan are used throughout the Old Saxon corpus. The difference is striking; hevan is never found outside the Heliand and Genesis, while himil is also found in various prose texts. himil is also the word used to gloss Latin caelum ‘heaven’.

With all of these data points it is clear that himil was the normal heaven-word in Old Saxon, while hevan was a stereotyped, exclusively poetic synonym. Which is why it is so strange to see that…

Hildebrandslied

…hevan occurs a single time in the Hildebrandslied, namely in line 30: ƿettu irmingot (quad hiltibraht) obana ab hevane ‘“I call Great God as witness”, quoth Hildbrand, “above in heaven”’. Now, I said above that himil was the only heaven-word used in Old High German, with a single exception. This is it.

Of course, it is well known that Hildebrandslied has large Saxon influence on its orthography, but this goes further. A Saxon scribe’s changing an Old High German archetype’s *helida, *gundia to Saxon helidos, gudia is not very surprising, but his changing himile to hevane is. As we have already seen, himil is the unmarked heaven-word also in Old Saxon, and the only one in Old High German. Indeed, the dative singular hevane is the only continental Old Germanic attestation of hevan in an inflection other than the genitive singular.

I can think of four possibilities here, which I will leave for the reader to think upon.

1. Assuming that *hevane was present in the archetype,

   1. the existence of hevan as a poetic synonym in archaic Old High German. hevan is never otherwise attested in any form of High German, medieval or modern, but Hildebrandslied is after all the only text of its genre preserved in OHG, and the text itself looks old. However,

   2. the composition of Hildebrandslied in an archaic border dialect is another possibility. It is clear from the alliteration in line 47 (note 2), that Hildebrandslied was composed in a High German dialect. Other High German features are the consistent application of the second sound shift and the retention of many diphthongs. However, some Saxon features, like the assimilation of nasals before old /þ/, are also consistently observed. If these, instead of being the invention of a Saxon scribe, were authorial and based on a border dialect with features from both Old Saxon and Old High German, the problem would be solved. On the other hand, such a dialect is (to my knowledge) not well attested.

2. Assuming that hevane is a translation from *himile in the archetype,

   1. the translation by a Saxon scribe whose native dialect only knew hevan. Modern Low German does indeed use a descendant of hevan, not himil, which suggests that the literary Old Saxon studied above does not neccessarily speak for the whole community as it existed. On the other hand, the Heliand was written by a native Saxon for a Saxon audience, which shows that himil must have been well known in Saxony. This leads to

   2. the translation by an Anglo-Saxon. In the Old English translation of the Saxon Genesis (see note 3), himil is consistently translated as heofon, since himil is never known to have existed in English. However, I know no other signs of English influence in the Hildebrandslied, and no other words in it have been replaced with Old English synonyms.

Observation 2: gudia and hiltia

Now for a less empiric discussion.

In the 66 lines of Hildebrandslied we encounter these two feminine nouns, both meaning ‘battle, fight’. Readers of Norse and English poetry may recognize their cognates ON gunnr, hildr, OE gúþ, hild, all of which are used exclusively in traditional poetry. Enjoyers of Norse myth may also recognize the two Norse walkirries (valkyrjur) Hildr and Gunnr.

On the other hand, the author(s) of the Heliand and Genesis in their ~6300 lines never once use(s) *gúðia. Considering how often this word gets used in English and Norse poetry, and considering that it was clearly known on the continent (seen not least by its huge prevalence in female given names all the way down to Visigothic Spain), this is somewhat strange.

hildia is not found in Genesis, but it is in the Heliand. Here it appears almost to have taken on a derogatory sense! It and its derivatives appear twice.

First is l. 68, where the Jews under Herodes are called hildi-skalkos ‘battle-servants’, before being described as ‘very steadfast friends’ toward him. While this is not derogatory in itself, being a translation of a gospel harmony, the Jews in the Heliand are not elsewhere described in the prettiest terms. Further, the disciples of Christ are never referred to by any such kenning, and this in spite of the fact that they are very frequently called thanes and other words associated with the Germanic warrior band (the comitatus).

Second is l. 5043, which is clearly an attack on the traditional Germanic warrior culture, and purposefully uses vocabulary otherwise known from Beowulf and the Eddas. Here hildi seems to mean something like zeal in war. The following excerpt is ll. 5040–5045:

Be þiu nis mannes bág · mikilun bi·þęrvi,
hagu-staldes hróm: · ef imu þiu helpe godes
ge·swíkid þurh is sundjon, · þan is imu sán aftar þiu
breost-hugi blóðora, · þoh hé êr bi-hêt spreka,
hrómje fan is hildi · ęndi fan is hand-krafti,
þe man fan is męgine.

Therefore no man’s boasting is of any avail,
a young warrior’s praise, if the help of God
fails him due to his sins. Then very soon afterwards
is the heart in his breast bloodier, even though he may have spoken a boastful vow⁶,
or praised his own zeal and strength of hand,
that man, his own might.

So which words are used for war or battle in the Heliand and Genesis? stríd, ur-lagi, wíg, and gi·winn. The first three are neuter; the fourth is masculine. It seems like the traditional feminine war-words have been excised from the text! It is probably fruitless to dwell further on whether this is due to the existence of walkirries named Gúdja and Hildja among the Saxons, or simply due to a repudiation of traditional warrior ideology, but the former is perhaps not impossible.

1. The Saxon Genesis and Heliand form the entire corpus of Old Saxon alliterative poetry, excepting a three-line magical charm or galder, the poetic nature of which is questionable. In Old High German there exist, apart from the Hildebrandslied, only one text which can be called epic in any way, viz. the 104-line Muspilli, a description of the day of judgment, which however is much less indebted to the native tradition than the other texts here discussed, and which in any case is not relevant for the four words under discussion.

2. Namely in line 47: dat du noh bi desemo riche · reccheo ni ƿurti, where the alliteration between riche ‘realm, kingdom’ (= OS ríki) and reccheo ‘exile’ (= OS wrekkio) relies on an exclusively High German sound change where old initial wr- merges with r-.

3. This translation is found embedded in the native Old English Genesis (commonly called Genesis A), and was first identified as a translation by Edward Sievers in 1875 (in Der Heliand und die angelsächsische Genesis), 19 years before the original Old Saxon Genesis was discovered. Lines 791–817 of the Old English Genesis correspond exactly to lines 1–26 of the Old Saxon.

4. On line 266, the manuscript C has himilkuning, while the ms. M has hevankuning. I believe that this is the only case of the mss. differing in the use of himil or hevan. For the rest of the study I follow the reading of M.

5. This last word has a particular connotation with the green meadows of the afterlife, and is probably a pagan inheritance.

6. OS bi·hêt is cognate with OE béot, ON hęit, both used to refer to the oftten boastful vows of warriors who swore to perform great deeds. See the Wikipedia articles for béot and heit-strenging.