- Annolied
The Annolied ("Song of Anno") was composed in about
1100 in EarlyMiddle High German rhyming couplets by a monk ofSiegburg Abbey.Dating
A principal point of reference for the dating is the mention of
Mainz as a place of coronation. TheGerman king s were usually crowned inAachen , and the naming of Mainz in this connection can only refer to the coronation either of the counter-kingRudolf of Rheinfelden in1077 or that of Emperor Henry V in1106 .Content
The Annolied was an
encomium to Bishop Anno II of Cologne (d.1075 ), laterSaint Anno , who was the founder of Siegburg Abbey.The poem consists of three parts: the religious or spiritual history of the world and its salvation, from the creation to the time of Anno II; the secular history of the world up to the foundation of the German cities (including the theory of the world empires derived from the vision of the
Book of Daniel ); and finally the "Vita Annonis", or the biography of Bishop Anno II.A recent interpretation (Dunphy, Herweg) sees this threefold structure in the context of the poet's remark in the prologue that in the beginning God created two worlds, one spiritual and one earthly, and then he mixed these to create the first human, who, being both, was a "third world". The poem then charts spiritual and secular history and finally shows the two culminating in the biography of the man who stands at the centrepoint of history. This is a remarkable and highly original historiographical approach.
Parts of the Annolied were incorporated into the later Middle High German
Kaiserchronik and the two works are often considered together.No manuscript now exists, but the survival of the text was secured by
Martin Opitz , who edited and published it in1639 (reprinted in 2003).ee also
Medieval German literature Editions
* Roediger, Max (ed.), 1895. "Das Annolied"; = MGH, Deutsche Chroniken I, 2. Berlin [Critical edition] .
* Dunphy, Graeme (ed.) 2003. "Opitz's Anno: The Middle High German Annolied in the 1639 Edition of Martin Opitz". Scottish Papers in Germanic Studies, Glasgow. [Diplomatic edition with English translation] .Literature
* Mathias Herweg, "Ludwigslied, De Heinrico, Annolied: Die deutschen Zeitdichtungen des frühen Mittelalters im Spiegel ihrer wissenschaftlichen Rezeption und Erforschung", Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2002.
External links
*de icon [http://mhgta.uni-trier.de/katalogsuche.php?suchwort=annolied Mittelhochdeutsches Textarchiv (mhgta): full text online]
*de icon [http://www.dunphy.de/ac/al.htm Text with English translation]
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