The Lady Of Hildebrand

Studying closely “Hildebrandslied” or “The Lady of Hildebrand” written somewhere before 800 which Emperor Charlemagne considered as one of the most “barbarian and most ancient lays” I personally found it quite challenging to write my own ending to such a captivating poem. My choice of text fell on the translation by D. L. Ashliman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh whose rendition I found more interesting in terms of imagery and the style of language. Furthermore in this commentary I will explain what foundation I used for my assignment and go more in depth about my plot.

The Lay of Hildebrand is linked to the group of Indo-European hero tales and here we witness a theme of a father-son conflict. The reader witnesses the exchange

In my first two seminars we have closely looked at Aristotle’s ideas and understanding of tragedy, which he divided into two parts: simple and complex. In both plots there is “a change of fortune”. The simple one (metabasis) defined lack of reversal and recognition whereas the latter (complex) combined both reversal and recognition which arise from the structure of the plot and include a somewhat probability. Furthermore I used Aristotle’s idea of tragedy and implemented it into my ending of the poem. Firstly I focused on the language and decided to write my ending in the same style as the original translation. The original ‘The Lay of Hildebrand’ is a mixture of Old High German and Old Saxon and number of words are found only Old Germanic literature , which makes the translation to English more challenging. “Cost what it may, let us see who will boast of this gearand who will lay claim to these two suits of chain mail.” – This is an example of a non-standard English translation, which in fact I used as a base to write the ending. Furthermore the second part was about looking at the meter of the poem in which I did not find any particular rhythm therefore I moved directly on to the structure. The poem is composed of sixty-eight lines and even though it was written in the Old High German period the poem’s structure is not any different to the poems written

In my opinion the poem itself can be seen as a colossal tragedy therefore the ending had to be nothing but tragic. I used the warrior’s blades as a tool of son’s recognition of Hildebrand as his father. In the first six lines of the ending I kept an indignant anger that two men were feeling towards each other however in the last four lines and particularly in the ninth which I call “the pivot of recognition” the tone changes making the audience feel compassion for the son. My initial idea was the father killing his own son, which would have shown the value of loyalty to his master in that period of time however I thought that father’s death would be more tragic for the audience. Hildebrand failed his family when he chose loyalty over his loved ones, which led to the failure of his recognition by Hadubrand, his true son, therefore in my opinion the man who deserves the tragic ending is the father