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The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand
This study is an interpretation and appreciation of the art of the Heliand, the 9th century Saxon epic poem in which the Christian Gospel of the four evangelists is translated in Germanic terms. Murphy examines in detail the ingenious and sensitive poetic analogies through which familiar texts--the Nativity, the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer, the Passion and Resurrection--are transformed into Germanic settings and concepts. The first book in English on The Heliand, this study offers a new socio-political explanation of the possible motives of the unknown author in undertaking this enormous and brilliantly realized poetic task.
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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July 5, 2020
Immediately before the Ascension, the last command of Christ to the Apostles was to “make disciples of all nations.” Ever since, at least until very recently, proselytizing has been a core goal of all Christians. This work has often not been easy. Christianity is always counter-cultural, opposed to the inherent dubious tendencies of mankind. Moreover, the history narrated in the Gospels is embedded in the world of first-century Palestine, and that world is starkly alien to most cultures that have been the target of conversion. Such challenges have been met in various ways by Christian missionaries, and by Christianizing conquerors. The Heliand, a ninth-century “gospel harmony” used to persuade the pagan Saxons defeated by Charlemagne to accept Christianity, was one such way.
A gospel harmony is a book written combining, and synthesizing, the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) into one account. The Christian tradition of creating such harmonies began with Tatian’s creation in the second century of the Diatessaron. Tatian’s book, very popular and used for centuries, omitted duplicative material and smoothed out the minor differences between the Gospels. This was not heterodoxy; Tatian did not add any significant text or modify the context, since his goal was to provide a useful document to Christian communities at a time when what was “canonical” was not yet fixed. No doubt the Diatessaron served to proselytize as well, though that was not its main purpose.
The Heliand is also a gospel harmony, one that is quite different in key ways from the Diatessaron. The author of the Heliand was probably a monk at Fulda, the monastery founded by Saint Boniface in 744. His purpose was, it appears, to persuade the restless and rebellious Saxons of the truth of the Good News, by writing a gospel that would resonate with them, in their own language, Old Saxon. The author’s problem was that the Gospels do not exactly exude a Germanic warrior ethos, which utterly pervaded the Saxons. He solved this problem by making his work an epic poem, deftly recasting scenes and events to depict Christ as a Germanic war lord, drohtin, and the disciples as his comitatus, a loyal war band. Described this way, it sounds faintly ridiculous. But as this book relates, it was actually amazingly successful, and done without corrupting the original message of the Gospels.
This book, The Saxon Savior, is not a translation of the Heliand, but a gloss on it, which discusses key aspects and serves as an introduction. The author, G. Ronald Murphy, a Jesuit priest teaching at Georgetown University, separately wrote a translation of the Heliand (parts of which appear here). Reading the whole poem is for the truly dedicated—it’s nearly 6,000 lines. For most people, this relatively short book provides all the information necessary to learn about the poem, which is called the Heliand, although it is not itself titled, because that is the word the poem uses for Christ—the Saxon word for “Savior.” Murphy’s goal is to discuss aspects of the Heliand in the context of their times—namely, the reign of Louis the Pious, successor to Charlemagne, who had forcibly converted the pagan Saxons to Christianity.
It is hard to imagine a culture more distant from first-century Palestine than North Germanic warrior cultures of the ninth century, although certainly today’s decaying neo-pagan West is also very distant, if on a different axis. The Germans had gradually been converted to Christianity through the aggressive and fearless efforts of men like Boniface (who was ultimately martyred for his trouble), and as Charlemagne consolidated his empire, the last Germanic holdouts were the Saxons, against whom Charlemagne fought a long and brutal series of campaigns. By the time the Heliand was written, the Saxons had been subdued, at least on the surface, but they were not happy about it, and the decentralization of the Saxon nation made rebellion somewhere a constant possibility. The author of the Heliand thus not only wanted to persuade the Saxons of the truth and beauty of the story of Christ, but to show that submission to Christ was not dissimilar to submission to the Franks. Christ had submitted himself to his enemies, and in the same way both Christ and the Franks should be accepted. That is to say, there is a distinct but subtle element of propaganda in how the Heliand casts episodes in the life of Christ, given the political situation of the early ninth century. For example, the Heliand implies that the position of the Jews in first-century Palestine under Rome was similar to the position of the Saxons of the ninth century. Murphy contrasts this sympathetic propaganda as an alternative, based in persuasion, to the more aggressive earlier approach of such as Boniface, or of Charlemagne, who massacred the Saxons and chopped down their sacred trees.
The Heliand is a largely original document, though it relies on earlier writings for its core. It is in part a synthesis of Latin and Old High German versions, or rescensions, of the Diatessaron, combined with material taken from commentaries such as those of Alcuin, along with descriptive interpolations meant to set and condition the scene, and interpretive interpolations meant to condition the listener. And the Heliand takes quite notable liberties with scene-setting, especially. Most landscapes are turned into scenes familiar to Saxon listeners, with cold water, large waves, and gravel beaches. Christ recruits young men for his retinue in and near the forest, not in the Judean desert, and they gladly follow Christ, the “generous mead giver.” Christ walks on water near where the disciples are struggling to cross the Sea of Galilee—in a Viking longboat. And so on, transposing the original Gospel scenes, in effect, to the North Sea.
It’s not just scene-setting, though. Some more substantive modifications are also made. In the Nativity, the baby Christ is wrapped not in swaddling clothes, but jewels, as befits a Saxon lord. Saint Joseph is a noble Saxon; the angels sing not to shepherds, but to the grooms tending his horses. And the famous line “there was no room for them at the inn” simply disappears—no doubt the author thought his Saxon audience would not swallow that the Lord of All would not be given a place to lay his head, in an honor culture obsessed with hospitality. Similarly, when Christ is baptized by John the Baptist, where the Bible (and the Diatessaron) merely say the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove was over Christ, the Heliand says “a magnificent dove . . . sat upon our Lord’s shoulder,” creating an echo of Odin with the ravens Nunin and Hugin always on his shoulders, whispering to him knowledge of all things. In the Beatitudes, where Christ emphasizes humility, a totally alien concept to the Saxons, the author does not shy away from Christ’s commands, but emphasizes Christ revealing secret knowledge in the same way as runes were said to grant hidden knowledge, but far better and more powerfully. And the injunction of the Lord’s Prayer to “give us this day our daily bread” is changed to “give us support each day.” Murphy points out that perhaps “the author’s listeners would have thought it lazy to ask heaven for bread, so the expression was broadened to include more practical support, the support of a lord.”
The Saxon Savior emphasizes how the author of the Heliand manages to work into the Gospel the overriding Germanic theme of Fate, without undercutting the supremacy of the Christian God. In numerous spots, Fate is mentioned, but typically as a servant or emanation of God, ultimately operating by his choice and usually in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, not blindly or randomly, as the old Germanic view would have it. God wills that John the Baptist be born; Fate determines he will be a beautiful child. At the same time, it is always made clear that Christ dictates to Fate—thus showing he is, indeed, God, not subject to Fate as all men are.
The Heliand also elevates Peter as the crucial figure among the disciples. Peter is the disciple the most like a Saxon warrior, of course, culminating in his severing of the ear of Malchus, the high priest’s servant, in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Heliand does not wholly rewrite Peter’s role, but it pumps up some of his actions, including turning the ear-severing into a major incident where Peter squares off against “the first man of the enemy” and chops half his face off, only to be rebuked by Jesus, not only because “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword,” but because “we cannot by our deeds avert anything,” again adding an element of Fate, but Fate as dictated by the Father. Nor does the poem shy away from showing Peter deserting the Lord, a grave failing in Saxon culture—but one that happened often enough, as other epic poems show. The Heliand has an explanation, though—not only was it so fated, but also in this way Peter was prepared, by understanding human frailty and the importance of forgiveness, to be the leader of the new Church. By such devices does the Heliand seek to resonate with its audience and still convey the gospel truth.
Finally, the Heliand has to deal with the Crucifixion, a humiliating death not at all in keeping with Saxon concepts of glory. The Passion is therefore depicted as a type of battle, in which Christ suffers war-wounds. And “The death of Christ is brilliantly treated as an escape of a prisoner of war from his captors, and the resurrection as the return of a warrior leader to his own people.” Interestingly, this has much in common with the Eastern Orthodox view of Christ’s death and resurrection, emphasizing not defeat but victory. In Orthodox icons, often the inscription above Christ’s head is not the biblically-accurate INRI, the acronym for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” but “The King of Glory.” This evokes Christ’s descent to Hades and his defeat of Satan, smashing the doors of Hades and releasing his people while flagellating the demons. No doubt the Saxons would have thought highly of that vision of Christ, which was already receding at this point in the West in favor of the concept of Christ as sacrificial victim.
Murphy’s overarching claim for the Heliand is that it played a key role in reimagining what Christian discipleship meant, recasting it in soldierly terms, and that this recasting not only pacified the Saxons, but played a key role in later European history, “a founding element of the culture of Europe.” As is well known, for most of its first thousand years, Christianity was largely pacifist, and only around the turn of the millennium, in Europe, did soldiering for Christ become a comprehensible, and then civilizational, concept. Although martial imagery appears a few places in the Gospel, the Heliand was the first complete re-imagining of the Gospel in terms compatible with a warrior culture, and Murphy suggests its effects were felt far beyond the land of the Saxons. In support of this, he notes how the Heliand was widespread in its day, although later forgotten and only published again in the nineteenth century. So Murphy’s claim is plausible, though unprovable. In effect, this draws a causal line connecting the Heliand and the Crusades, and onward to a millennium of Western muscular Christianity.
Proselytizing is no longer a core Christian goal, at least not in this age—we will see about in the next, as this age crumbles to dust. Yes, some evangelical Protestants still go in for it, and Pentecostals, but mainline Protestants reject it. Catholics too—last year that servant of Antichrist, Pope Francis, who rejects the commands of Christ here as in most things, informed his flock that anyone who proselytizes “is not a disciple of Jesus.” Why Francis rejects it is not clear, as with all of his grossly heretical pronouncements. Why mainline Protestants reject it, on the other hand, is clear. They correctly see conversion as historically tied to colonialism—that is, tied to the West’s global improvement of primitive cultures, of which Christianity was a glorious pillar. Now, collapsing into a singularity of self-hatred, they reject proselytizing, along with actual Christianity itself. No matter—all such milksops will be gone soon. The vibrant, if quasi-Christian, Mormons till proselytize, it is important to notice, and I predict the future of conversion efforts will be like the past, once we’ve scrubbed the stupidity of the modern age from off the globe. The Heliand itself will remain a curiosity, but if we survive, new ways of preaching the Gospel in new cultures will arise. Who knows, perhaps if mankind throws off the chains of stupid and manages to flourish, conquering Space, how preaching to asteroid miners or colonists of Jupiter’s moons might be best done? Or, even how preaching to aliens might be done? A vigorous and confident religion finds ways to address these questions, learning lessons from its past, and we can hope that will be our future.
A gospel harmony is a book written combining, and synthesizing, the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) into one account. The Christian tradition of creating such harmonies began with Tatian’s creation in the second century of the Diatessaron. Tatian’s book, very popular and used for centuries, omitted duplicative material and smoothed out the minor differences between the Gospels. This was not heterodoxy; Tatian did not add any significant text or modify the context, since his goal was to provide a useful document to Christian communities at a time when what was “canonical” was not yet fixed. No doubt the Diatessaron served to proselytize as well, though that was not its main purpose.
The Heliand is also a gospel harmony, one that is quite different in key ways from the Diatessaron. The author of the Heliand was probably a monk at Fulda, the monastery founded by Saint Boniface in 744. His purpose was, it appears, to persuade the restless and rebellious Saxons of the truth of the Good News, by writing a gospel that would resonate with them, in their own language, Old Saxon. The author’s problem was that the Gospels do not exactly exude a Germanic warrior ethos, which utterly pervaded the Saxons. He solved this problem by making his work an epic poem, deftly recasting scenes and events to depict Christ as a Germanic war lord, drohtin, and the disciples as his comitatus, a loyal war band. Described this way, it sounds faintly ridiculous. But as this book relates, it was actually amazingly successful, and done without corrupting the original message of the Gospels.
This book, The Saxon Savior, is not a translation of the Heliand, but a gloss on it, which discusses key aspects and serves as an introduction. The author, G. Ronald Murphy, a Jesuit priest teaching at Georgetown University, separately wrote a translation of the Heliand (parts of which appear here). Reading the whole poem is for the truly dedicated—it’s nearly 6,000 lines. For most people, this relatively short book provides all the information necessary to learn about the poem, which is called the Heliand, although it is not itself titled, because that is the word the poem uses for Christ—the Saxon word for “Savior.” Murphy’s goal is to discuss aspects of the Heliand in the context of their times—namely, the reign of Louis the Pious, successor to Charlemagne, who had forcibly converted the pagan Saxons to Christianity.
It is hard to imagine a culture more distant from first-century Palestine than North Germanic warrior cultures of the ninth century, although certainly today’s decaying neo-pagan West is also very distant, if on a different axis. The Germans had gradually been converted to Christianity through the aggressive and fearless efforts of men like Boniface (who was ultimately martyred for his trouble), and as Charlemagne consolidated his empire, the last Germanic holdouts were the Saxons, against whom Charlemagne fought a long and brutal series of campaigns. By the time the Heliand was written, the Saxons had been subdued, at least on the surface, but they were not happy about it, and the decentralization of the Saxon nation made rebellion somewhere a constant possibility. The author of the Heliand thus not only wanted to persuade the Saxons of the truth and beauty of the story of Christ, but to show that submission to Christ was not dissimilar to submission to the Franks. Christ had submitted himself to his enemies, and in the same way both Christ and the Franks should be accepted. That is to say, there is a distinct but subtle element of propaganda in how the Heliand casts episodes in the life of Christ, given the political situation of the early ninth century. For example, the Heliand implies that the position of the Jews in first-century Palestine under Rome was similar to the position of the Saxons of the ninth century. Murphy contrasts this sympathetic propaganda as an alternative, based in persuasion, to the more aggressive earlier approach of such as Boniface, or of Charlemagne, who massacred the Saxons and chopped down their sacred trees.
The Heliand is a largely original document, though it relies on earlier writings for its core. It is in part a synthesis of Latin and Old High German versions, or rescensions, of the Diatessaron, combined with material taken from commentaries such as those of Alcuin, along with descriptive interpolations meant to set and condition the scene, and interpretive interpolations meant to condition the listener. And the Heliand takes quite notable liberties with scene-setting, especially. Most landscapes are turned into scenes familiar to Saxon listeners, with cold water, large waves, and gravel beaches. Christ recruits young men for his retinue in and near the forest, not in the Judean desert, and they gladly follow Christ, the “generous mead giver.” Christ walks on water near where the disciples are struggling to cross the Sea of Galilee—in a Viking longboat. And so on, transposing the original Gospel scenes, in effect, to the North Sea.
It’s not just scene-setting, though. Some more substantive modifications are also made. In the Nativity, the baby Christ is wrapped not in swaddling clothes, but jewels, as befits a Saxon lord. Saint Joseph is a noble Saxon; the angels sing not to shepherds, but to the grooms tending his horses. And the famous line “there was no room for them at the inn” simply disappears—no doubt the author thought his Saxon audience would not swallow that the Lord of All would not be given a place to lay his head, in an honor culture obsessed with hospitality. Similarly, when Christ is baptized by John the Baptist, where the Bible (and the Diatessaron) merely say the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove was over Christ, the Heliand says “a magnificent dove . . . sat upon our Lord’s shoulder,” creating an echo of Odin with the ravens Nunin and Hugin always on his shoulders, whispering to him knowledge of all things. In the Beatitudes, where Christ emphasizes humility, a totally alien concept to the Saxons, the author does not shy away from Christ’s commands, but emphasizes Christ revealing secret knowledge in the same way as runes were said to grant hidden knowledge, but far better and more powerfully. And the injunction of the Lord’s Prayer to “give us this day our daily bread” is changed to “give us support each day.” Murphy points out that perhaps “the author’s listeners would have thought it lazy to ask heaven for bread, so the expression was broadened to include more practical support, the support of a lord.”
The Saxon Savior emphasizes how the author of the Heliand manages to work into the Gospel the overriding Germanic theme of Fate, without undercutting the supremacy of the Christian God. In numerous spots, Fate is mentioned, but typically as a servant or emanation of God, ultimately operating by his choice and usually in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, not blindly or randomly, as the old Germanic view would have it. God wills that John the Baptist be born; Fate determines he will be a beautiful child. At the same time, it is always made clear that Christ dictates to Fate—thus showing he is, indeed, God, not subject to Fate as all men are.
The Heliand also elevates Peter as the crucial figure among the disciples. Peter is the disciple the most like a Saxon warrior, of course, culminating in his severing of the ear of Malchus, the high priest’s servant, in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Heliand does not wholly rewrite Peter’s role, but it pumps up some of his actions, including turning the ear-severing into a major incident where Peter squares off against “the first man of the enemy” and chops half his face off, only to be rebuked by Jesus, not only because “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword,” but because “we cannot by our deeds avert anything,” again adding an element of Fate, but Fate as dictated by the Father. Nor does the poem shy away from showing Peter deserting the Lord, a grave failing in Saxon culture—but one that happened often enough, as other epic poems show. The Heliand has an explanation, though—not only was it so fated, but also in this way Peter was prepared, by understanding human frailty and the importance of forgiveness, to be the leader of the new Church. By such devices does the Heliand seek to resonate with its audience and still convey the gospel truth.
Finally, the Heliand has to deal with the Crucifixion, a humiliating death not at all in keeping with Saxon concepts of glory. The Passion is therefore depicted as a type of battle, in which Christ suffers war-wounds. And “The death of Christ is brilliantly treated as an escape of a prisoner of war from his captors, and the resurrection as the return of a warrior leader to his own people.” Interestingly, this has much in common with the Eastern Orthodox view of Christ’s death and resurrection, emphasizing not defeat but victory. In Orthodox icons, often the inscription above Christ’s head is not the biblically-accurate INRI, the acronym for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” but “The King of Glory.” This evokes Christ’s descent to Hades and his defeat of Satan, smashing the doors of Hades and releasing his people while flagellating the demons. No doubt the Saxons would have thought highly of that vision of Christ, which was already receding at this point in the West in favor of the concept of Christ as sacrificial victim.
Murphy’s overarching claim for the Heliand is that it played a key role in reimagining what Christian discipleship meant, recasting it in soldierly terms, and that this recasting not only pacified the Saxons, but played a key role in later European history, “a founding element of the culture of Europe.” As is well known, for most of its first thousand years, Christianity was largely pacifist, and only around the turn of the millennium, in Europe, did soldiering for Christ become a comprehensible, and then civilizational, concept. Although martial imagery appears a few places in the Gospel, the Heliand was the first complete re-imagining of the Gospel in terms compatible with a warrior culture, and Murphy suggests its effects were felt far beyond the land of the Saxons. In support of this, he notes how the Heliand was widespread in its day, although later forgotten and only published again in the nineteenth century. So Murphy’s claim is plausible, though unprovable. In effect, this draws a causal line connecting the Heliand and the Crusades, and onward to a millennium of Western muscular Christianity.
Proselytizing is no longer a core Christian goal, at least not in this age—we will see about in the next, as this age crumbles to dust. Yes, some evangelical Protestants still go in for it, and Pentecostals, but mainline Protestants reject it. Catholics too—last year that servant of Antichrist, Pope Francis, who rejects the commands of Christ here as in most things, informed his flock that anyone who proselytizes “is not a disciple of Jesus.” Why Francis rejects it is not clear, as with all of his grossly heretical pronouncements. Why mainline Protestants reject it, on the other hand, is clear. They correctly see conversion as historically tied to colonialism—that is, tied to the West’s global improvement of primitive cultures, of which Christianity was a glorious pillar. Now, collapsing into a singularity of self-hatred, they reject proselytizing, along with actual Christianity itself. No matter—all such milksops will be gone soon. The vibrant, if quasi-Christian, Mormons till proselytize, it is important to notice, and I predict the future of conversion efforts will be like the past, once we’ve scrubbed the stupidity of the modern age from off the globe. The Heliand itself will remain a curiosity, but if we survive, new ways of preaching the Gospel in new cultures will arise. Who knows, perhaps if mankind throws off the chains of stupid and manages to flourish, conquering Space, how preaching to asteroid miners or colonists of Jupiter’s moons might be best done? Or, even how preaching to aliens might be done? A vigorous and confident religion finds ways to address these questions, learning lessons from its past, and we can hope that will be our future.
May 13, 2023
A regrettably uneven examination of an extremely interesting topic. The main subject -- The Heliand, an Old Saxon Gospel harmony cast as Germanic heroic verse -- is interesting for its own sake, and interesting further still for its early 9th century cultural-historical contexts, e.g., the scholarly activities of the early German church, the protracted and brutal conflict between the pagan Saxons and the Christian Charlemagne, the English mission to the Continent, shared English/Saxon literary and linguistic currents, all of that. Murphy's study has some illuminating gems, but also a lot that's just plain confounding. Some of the translations are disingenuous and (mis)leading†; a few are outright wrong.‡ There's a pervasive credulousness to the book, as in the uncritical tendency to describe semantically complex terms like wurd (OE wyrd) and rūna (Old English rūn) simply as "Fate" and "rune." There's a tendency towards hyperbole -- referring to a scene as "reinterpreted" by The Heliand-poet, when it is only moderately modified, is a characteristic exaggeration.
If anything, I come away with a strong sense that The Heliand's "Germanic adaptation" is rather more mundane than its reputation suggests: the poem certainly employs the vocabulary of Germanic heroic verse, and casts its setting, events, and characters into the milieu of Germanic culture; but on the scale of things, it's more in the category of the Old English Genesis A and Daniel, a fairly rote and faithful Biblical verse adaptation with a relatively superficial veneer of "Germanic-ness," rather than in the category of the Old English Exodus and the Old Saxon Genesis-fragments, Biblical verse adaptation more interpretive, more original, and frankly more brilliant. (Not that The Heliand is without passages of moving, excellent poetry itself.)
With all of the above said, Murphy's desire to sympathetically enter into the world of the poem and of its audience is a strength of the book; and the book really does offer some illuminating insights: for instance, the way the poet's description of the Magi's ancestral ability to interpret the spel godes, "message of God" (a play on "Gospel," etymologically god-spel, the "good news") emphasized the ability of all pagans to understand God's truths; or the way the seventh Beatitude ("blessed are the peacemakers") unexpectedly fits in with the Germanic heroic ethos -- an ethos which, while commending vengeful retribution as a point of honor, nevertheless often seems to hold the precipitation of conflict in low regard.
So there are some evident gems here. The problem is that it's a matter of sifting the wheat from the chaff. The book has to be read with caution.
† e.g., rendering frodan man as "a sage" certainly sounds more "epic" or "mythic" than simply "a wise old man," but the latter is more apt.
‡ Such as "that is the choice of a thane: that he standeth steadfast with his liege together" for that is thegenes cust, that hie mid is frahon samad fasto gistande: it should be "he is the best of thanes who should stand [subjunctive] steadfast with his liege together").
If anything, I come away with a strong sense that The Heliand's "Germanic adaptation" is rather more mundane than its reputation suggests: the poem certainly employs the vocabulary of Germanic heroic verse, and casts its setting, events, and characters into the milieu of Germanic culture; but on the scale of things, it's more in the category of the Old English Genesis A and Daniel, a fairly rote and faithful Biblical verse adaptation with a relatively superficial veneer of "Germanic-ness," rather than in the category of the Old English Exodus and the Old Saxon Genesis-fragments, Biblical verse adaptation more interpretive, more original, and frankly more brilliant. (Not that The Heliand is without passages of moving, excellent poetry itself.)
With all of the above said, Murphy's desire to sympathetically enter into the world of the poem and of its audience is a strength of the book; and the book really does offer some illuminating insights: for instance, the way the poet's description of the Magi's ancestral ability to interpret the spel godes, "message of God" (a play on "Gospel," etymologically god-spel, the "good news") emphasized the ability of all pagans to understand God's truths; or the way the seventh Beatitude ("blessed are the peacemakers") unexpectedly fits in with the Germanic heroic ethos -- an ethos which, while commending vengeful retribution as a point of honor, nevertheless often seems to hold the precipitation of conflict in low regard.
So there are some evident gems here. The problem is that it's a matter of sifting the wheat from the chaff. The book has to be read with caution.
† e.g., rendering frodan man as "a sage" certainly sounds more "epic" or "mythic" than simply "a wise old man," but the latter is more apt.
‡ Such as "that is the choice of a thane: that he standeth steadfast with his liege together" for that is thegenes cust, that hie mid is frahon samad fasto gistande: it should be "he is the best of thanes who should stand [subjunctive] steadfast with his liege together").
January 5, 2026
Pretty interesting, oddly moving. Wish it had provided a little more context on the history/politics of conversion but that’s also not what this book was about so not really a fault
May 14, 2023
I have never read the Heliand, so I can not comment on the quality of the author's commentary. However, the author references many secondary sources and examines selections from the Heliand compared to other writings, and then identifies Northern European traditions in Christendom that likely grew from the Heliand.
March 6, 2017
It's a neat little book for those who've read The Heliand. Nice that there's not much overlap with the extensive appendices Murphy has with his separate translation.
January 19, 2021
An important book if you're interested in this particular time in history.
June 2, 2020
Charlemagne conquered the pagan Saxons of north Germany in the late 8th/early 9th century and incorporated them into his empire. One major facet of their being conquered was their being forced to convert to Christianity. Mass baptisms ensued. But how to make the conversions more than superficial? At this point, sometime in the 9th century, an anonymous Saxon monk composed the epic poem, the Heliand. This poem narrated the gospel story of Jesus Christ in the Germanic context of the Saxons' warrior culture. Jesus is portrayed as a warrior chieftain with his disciples as his following retinue. When Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove lands on him, the poet has the dove on his shoulders, echoing the pagan image of the god Odin who had two ravens on his shoulders who whispered into his ear, making him aware of all things. Implicitly, Christ is the new Odin authority. Throughout this book, Murphy shows how the poet incorporates many of the cultural assumptions and images of the older pagan culture. And the inculturation worked. A few generations later, the Saxon Otto I became Holy Roman Emperor in succession to Charlemagne who had conquered them.
December 12, 2023
Murphy’s concise commentary on the Heliand highlights the sympathy which the poet felt for his Saxon audience who were traumatized by Frankish brutality in its convert by force attempts. Murphy explicates the places where the Heliand poet subtly changed the gospel text, translating it to fit into a Saxon world picture without compromising the message. Murphy gives a window into the “Humane spirit and compassionate heart,” of the poet who, “confronted with two cultures in conflict, sought to create a harmony between them. … With his love and poetry he was able to bring these cultures into a stunning and peaceful communion by reimagining the entire Cristian Gospel in Saxon Northern Europe. Murphy shows exactly what can happen when the historian is able to see with more nuance what he might at first label syncretism.
July 26, 2009
Murphy has done much to open up the Heliand to the English-speaking audience, both through his translation of the book and through this short book-length study of it. It's a great overview of what one might call the basic point about the poem -- that it tells the story of the Gospel in a Northern, Germanic, and Saxon context. Still, there are moments when Murphy's relentless historicism begins to grate. Although he is attentive to the spiritual meanings of the poet's choices, he still needs to interpret almost every detail in light of the Frankish-Saxon conflict, to the point where he seems to be grasping to make his point.
July 8, 2012
Murphy sees the Heliand as a conversion tool used by sympathetic Carolingian churchmen to convert the pagan Saxons to Christianity. He explains how the poet used pagan imagery, Germanic epic poetry and the cultural world of Northern Europe in accomplishing the task of composing the poem. A much needed study of this much neglected epic poem, that should rank alongside Beowulf and the Hildebrandslied.
July 7, 2014
Murphy shows how the anonymous monk/author of the Heliand translated the gospel story from its original Mediterranean setting to the Saxon one of northern Germany, and in so doing helped make their conversion, forced upon them by the Franks, take on a meaningful and spiritual character. An interesting exposition of an early attempt at contextualization.
August 19, 2017
An interesting way to present the Gospels, not sure that I agree with the approach of alteration.
It did prompt interesting discussion in class.
It did prompt interesting discussion in class.
October 27, 2013
Profoundly illuminating.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews