The lost epic poetry of Charlemagne was destroyed by his own son
In short: We often think of the Middle Ages as a period of preservation, but for the early German language, it was an era of profound loss. While Charlemagne once ordered the collection of Germanic epic lays, his successor’s religious zeal would lead to their near-total destruction.
Old High German (OHG) represents the earliest stage of the German language, spanning roughly from 750 to 1050. Rather than a unified tongue, it was a collection of West Germanic dialects—often called 'monastery dialects'—that had undergone the Second Sound Shift. These dialects were tied to specific ecclesiastical centers like Fulda, Reichenau, and St. Gallen, where the written tradition first emerged through glosses—marginal notes used to translate Latin texts.
The linguistic landscape was shaped by conquest and shifting borders. While Charlemagne’s victories by 788 brought various tribal kingdoms into a single polity, the language of administration and the Church remained Latin. This prevented the rise of a standardized German. In the west, the Franks gradually adopted Gallo-Romance, establishing a linguistic boundary near the Meuse and Moselle rivers. In the south, the Lombard dialect survived in Northern Italy until the Frankish conquest in 774, eventually dying out as the population became bilingual and transitioned to Romance.
The survival of OHG literature is remarkably fragile. Although the Carolingian Renaissance encouraged literacy, much of the era's secular heritage vanished. Charlemagne himself sought to preserve epic poetry for posterity, yet his successor, Louis the Pious, destroyed much of this collection due to its pagan content. Today, we possess fewer than 200 lines of such epic poetry, found in fragments like the Hildebrandslied and the Muspilli. By the mid-11th century, changes in spelling and noun declensions signaled the transition to Middle High German.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Old High German
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