The 'Jungeres Hildebrandslied' in its early modern printed versions: a contribution to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century reception history.

The invention of the printing press exerted a remarkable influence on the way late-medieval culture transformed and simultaneously prepared the basis for its own demise.(2) The press was first developed in the early 1430s, and had reached technical perfection with the printing of the Gutenberg Bible at the turn of the year 1455/56. The subsequent technical and intellectual transition is hard to fathom because the paradigm shift affected almost every aspect of daily life.(3) Today we seem to be in the midst of another intellectual-technical revolution in the realm of information transfer, this time, however, brought about by the computer world and its innumerable audio-visual media in which books have little or no meaning at all.(4) By the end of the fifteenth century printing presses could be found in more than 250 cities in Europe, and there were more than 1,100 printing workshops each with at least several printing machines. Consequently, the quantity of printed books, the so-called incunabula (until 1500), reached unforeseen dimensions, not counting the endless flood of broadsheets and pamphlets.(5)

As Michael Gieseke emphasizes, the development of the printing press required an enormous cooperative effort by a diverse group of craftsmen, financially capable investors, and a new type of thinking in terms of market strategies, transportation, storage of the products--books, and production management planning ahead of time for the potential, anonymous buyer.(6) As to be expected, the printing process demoted, in a way, the traditional writing process and thereby also the function of the medieval scribe.(7) At the same time printing opened new avenues for artists, writers, and the community at large, as its effects on the Reformation richly illustrate.(8)

Literary historians, above all, have confirmed the role which the invention of the printing press played in the development of 15th- and 16th-century fictional texts.(9) To illuminate this observation further, I will discuss a curious heroic ballad which was the focus of a number of studies, mainly informed by positivism, in the first half of this century, but which has, overall, not received adequate scholarly attention in terms of what we have learned about early modern communication and public culture since then.(10)

Among all the heroic ballads and epics circulating within the Germanic speaking countries during the Middle Ages, especially the Hildebrandslied and respectively, in its later version, the Jungeres Hildebrandslied experienced a surprisingly long-lasting adaptation process from the eighth through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to some extent even until the nineteenth. In contrast to the Jungeres Hildebrandslied, the Old High German Hildebrandslied was copied only once, in a liturgical manuscript by two monks in the Fulda monastery in the early ninth century, but its oral origin certainly dates back at least to the eighth, if not the seventh and sixth centuries.(11) In other words, even this archaic epic poem went through a lengthy adaptation process before it found its way into written form.

Between 900 and the early thirteenth century no trace of any new version of this balladic text can be found, which is not surprising considering the profound changes in cultural-historical terms from the archaic Old High German culture to a comparatively very sophisticated, very "modern" Middle High German courtly culture.

The Old High German Ludwigslied, the Muspilli the Merseburg Charms, and most other texts from that early period were forgotten or lost during the course of time, probably because they simply no longer appealed to the twelfth- and thirteenth-century courtly audiences which were far removed from ninth-century Carolingian society. Nevertheless, the heroic lay, as represented by the Hildebrandslied, seems to have been a curious exception insofar as a number of authors included references to it in their works from the early thirteenth century onwards. One reason for the Hildebrandslied's survival might have been the interest which the archetypal conflict between father and son, as described in this ballad, aroused at all times and in diverse cultures. We know of many texts in world literature which contain the same motif and which, thereby, confirm the timelessness of the theme.(12)

Wolfram von Eschenbach alludes to a range of balladic songs with heroic themes in his Willehalm, composed around 1218, in order to compare the fierce battle on Alischanz between Christians and Saracens with those military events recorded in the historical ballads circulating widely among his audience and which enjoyed a considerable popularity: