In cultural and linguistic terms, and largely based on the religious impulse during the spread of Christianity in western-central Europe, the late eighth and early ninth century are characterized by the conversion of a spoken tongue into literary language. The central documents that mark the breakthrough into literacy of the dialects known as Old High German in the south and Old Saxon in the north form the subject of the seven chapters comprising Cyril Edwards’s book. A short introductory essay informs the reader of the recording, transmission, and survival of the earliest continuous German texts and outlines the myriad unsolved mysteries that still surround the localization, dating, and interpretation of virtually the entire body of Old High German literature, an extremely scant corpus of mostly copied (and thus not originally recorded) material that ultimately reflects the religious and political complexity of the polydialectal society of the Carolingian era.

What follows is a colourful mix of loosely connected and, for the most part, well-written articles that promise to lead the reader on a journey full of fascinating discoveries. Chapters one and two are concerned with what is generally considered the earliest religious poem in German, the Wessobrunner Gebet, in which Edwards sees “a geographical and chronological hybrid” (26) produced at a provincial Carolingian scriptorium, the exact geographical location of which, he concludes, is impossible to establish. Whereas the first chapter is comparative in nature in that it links the text to several Anglo-Saxon analogues, the second chapter – written in collaboration with Jennie Kiff-Hooper – attempts to contextualize the Prayer within the manuscript that preserves it in order to find clues that would allow us to establish the “date, provenance and motives underlying the compilation” (41) of the text. Chapter three, then, focuses on the Old High German heroic lay, the Hildebrandslied, and on the Muspili, the ninth-century eschatological poem about the end of the world. Here, Edwards unravels the long history of applying reagents to medieval manuscripts, an essentially destructive practice employed to facilitate the reading of blotted and barely legible letters.

The next two articles explore the codical context of the Merseburg Charms, the mysterious examples of pagan magical spells contained in a Christian manuscript where they invoke gods familiar from the Old Norse pantheon. Whereas chapter four – written in collaboration with Andrea Hodgson – arrives at the conclusion that “the only possible motive for preserving the charms, in the face of official hostility of the Church, was that they were held to work” (91), chapter five, where Edwards seems overly keen on weeding out solid proof from scholarly guesswork, provocatively leaves everything to uncertainty, doubt, and conjecture. Chapter six follows the few traces of early German love-poems that have survived in spite of a millennium of censorship imposed by the Christian Church and that have only recently received serious critical attention. The final chapter, then, is devoted to what Edwards calls “the Ossian of the period,” or, as the article’s title more precisely indicates, “The Strange Case of the Old High German Lullaby,” in which Edwards, after much meandering and in line with the opinio communis, sees only an ingenious nineteenth-century forgery.

Throughout his study, Edwards draws effectively on linguistic and scriptological, as well as on codicological and art- historical expertise. But while this strong interdisciplinary thrust that informs each chapter guarantees an interesting read, many of the author’s findings are neither groundbreaking nor new. The two chapters on the Wessobrunn Prayer are revised versions of articles published in 1984 and 1989, and the essay on the beginning of the German lyric (chapter 6) is an expanded version of an article that has appeared more recently in the proceedings of the 1997 conference held in Schönmühl bei Penzberg, edited by Wolfgang Haubrichs (deGruyter, 2000).

Furthermore, the study is plagued with a number of unpleasant idiosyncrasies. Most pertain to the general organization and completeness of the material covered, others concern the clarity of the central argument (or lack thereof) in each of the seven articles. Sometimes it takes Edwards a long time to get to the point, as is the case in chapter seven, where we are first introduced to a general history of the lullaby in Old Irish, Old Welsh, late Middle High German, Middle English, and then Early Modern English, before we are finally introduced to the notorious five lines that comprise the controversial Old High German Lullaby. Several chapters are left open ended, that is, without a concluding hypothesis or statement that would tie together the profusion of conjectures that may logically be expected within an otherwise well-carried out interdisciplinary study. Notwithstanding the wealth of socio-historical, linguistic, and editorial details presented, the book is not without its share of unnecessary redundancies. Surprisingly, Edwards relies very heavily on older research findings, and thus frequently appears only too ready to make an old frock look new. While the questions puzzling research are debated in an exhaustive manner, the author hardly adds anything new to what is now a centuries old dispute concerning the origin, dating, preservation, and reasoning of all non-liturgical vernacular texts, such as, for example, the Hildebrandslied or the Merseburg Charms. There is very little hard evidence to support one hypothesis over another even though scientists have been able to rule out some of the earliest theories concerning the provenance of these texts. And as Edwards himself demonstrates, the tampering with the few surviving documents over the centuries, particularly over the past two hundred years, has made it increasingly difficult to return to these original sources and to subject the oldest remaining manuscripts to further, and hopefully sounder, scientific scrutiny.

In a few places the author’s choice of words is simply unbefitting. Unscholarly in this day and age are the remarks that strike as homophobic, notably in chapters one and six, where, for example, Walahfried Strabo’s poetic celebration of a young man’s beauty is inappropriately referred to as “some rather sickly verses” (18) and where the plot of an erotically ambiguous poem about a huntsman in love with a hind is, without any further explanatory comment, said to twist “in the direction of Oscar Wilde” (133). Here the all-encompassing eroticism of early medieval vernacular texts remains largely unexplored, since Edwards seems to break off his interpretation and debate precisely at the point where the discussion promises to become interesting.

Despite these drawbacks, Edwards’s conglomerate of comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches to the central texts located at the beginning of German literature is a treasure packed with valuable information and a testimony to the author’s extensive knowledge of the primary texts, including their editorial history and scholarly reception. The way Edwards debates the pros and cons of older and more recent theories make his study ideal for introducing newcomers to the field. The fact that he tries to stay on neutral ground, that he refuses to come up with definitive answers, invites the reader to engage in further study and research. Edwards’s collection of essays thus promises to be of interest to both graduate students and scholars in the fields surrounding Old High German language and literature, as well as early medieval literary culture. The book is adorned with fourteen black-and-white photographs of the surviving manuscripts under discussion, and offers a carefully selected bibliography that is subdivided into three sections: dictionaries and other works of reference; editions, facsimiles, and translations of primary texts; and a rather limited section of secondary sources. The study concludes with an index that references titles of primary texts and the names of pre-twentieth-century scholars and librarians.

CHRISTOPH LOREY University of New Brunswick