Linguistics : Rare Insights into Old Saxon and Hēliand (with Prof. Alex Sager)

[@JacksonCrawford]

For more content on Germanic languages on the continent, see this video on Frisian: kzbin.info/www/bejne/f4OygZqQjrCaocU

[@skynet9939]

As a huge fan of Old Continental Germanic languages and Old English, this was a great discussion with Professor Sager. Love the content, keep it up!

[@twerg11]

Thank you!

[@acaciabaker5935]

Thank you for hosting many academics, you are the hub that brings many rightly related fields together, the more we can overlap literature, archeology, language and cultural history the better for the collective knowledge, great stuff as always!

[@Rio_der_Reiser]

I had the absolute pleasure of getting to listen to Dr. Sager in person for a good few years while getting my German B.A. and M.A. at the University of Georgia. This felt like sitting in a grad school seminar all over again. Super interesting stuff and it's so cool to see Dr. Sager reach a big audience. He deserves it!

[@twerg11]

Many thanks, Brandon. I hope you are doing well!😁

[@brandonpieplow9207]

Loved this conversation! I learned two big things: one, that the Heliand was part of the Carolingian missionary efforts, and two, that Luther cited it while making his case for the German vernacular Bible. That's really cool. Also, as a lifelong Ohioan myself, I kept listening to Dr. Sager and thinking, "he's either originally from Germany, or he's from Ohio!"

[@twerg11]

Thanks. Where in Ohio?

[@brandonpieplow9207]

@@twerg11 The northeast corner.

[@twerg11]

@@brandonpieplow9207I’m from Toledo

[@manfredconnor3194]

Oh heavens, you need to get out more! Take a trip to Schleswig or Haithabu or better yet go somewhere with mountains like the Pays Basque. Imagine if you had been born next door in Pennsylvania and had just stayed there!? It makes one think of Plato's allegory of the cave!

[@mountainspryte]

❤ his reading of old Saxony put me in a old world cabin with a cozy fire crackling in the background. He has a beautiful style and flow. Almost like a mystic druid

[@twerg11]

Why thank you 😊

[@joebarrera334]

One of the best guests you've had on, Jackson. His knowledge and passion are infectious. And that reading of the Heliand 🤌

[@twerg11]

Thank you!

[@YolayOle]

Well he was a joy to listen to. I can't wait for another interview with him,

[@twerg11]

Many thanks, I will indeed see you again soon!

[@alinapopescu872]

Very, very interesting and informative! Thank you, Prof. Sager, for taking the time!

[@twerg11]

Thanks, a great pleasure!

[@alinapopescu872]

I hope to see and hear you again soon! And yes, what a delightful, delightful reading!

[@twerg11]

@@alinapopescu872 Many thanks

[@twerg11]

@@alinapopescu872 Thank you!

[@bjarnitryggvason7866]

Superb guest and questions. 👍

[@twerg11]

Many thanks!

[@derwaldjunge]

Prof Sager is a great guest. I enjoy his talks so much and I think it sounds great when he reads Old Saxon (and when he slips German words in 😁)

[@twerg11]

Thank you!

[@jackforseti224]

Definitely get him on again if possible! Great guest!

[@twerg11]

Thank you, hope to see you again soon!

[@UppsalaBooks]

Brilliant conversation, Jackson! Thanks for sharing such excellent content.

[@teutoniceagle2368]

Greetings from a german Saxon from Lower Saxony!

[@aag3752]

Nice. I really want to visit Lower Saxony some day. Not from there, I'm actually Lebanese American, though I have some Anglo-Saxon and German mixture in my dna...But much more important than that, I love the culture and the Germanic languages. Including the Archaic ones. Good stuff.

[@keithhampton9700]

Greetings from a Texas Hic with Saxon Ancestry!! Yee Haa Y'all!!🤘🤠🤘

[@kaikalter]

Greetings from the Saxon half of the Netherlands!

[@twerg11]

Greetings from Athens, Georgia!

[@trinity_null]

@@keithhampton9700nah

[@karolw.5208]

I have never heard of Heliand, thank you for this interview - great minds working together.

[@twerg11]

Many thanks!

[@henriknielsen8305]

God, I love this channel so much

[@patriciamayhew6321]

I’m so happy to see this program! I’ve been waiting a long time for it, since Dr. Crawford first mentioned this about a year ago. Thank you so much! I love “The Heliand!” I have only read the English translation by Dr. G. Ronald Murphy. Oxford University Press, 1992, which I found fascinating and delightful.

[@proinsiasbaiceir6580]

I like that you are featuring more and more West Germanic Languages as well. Now you had talks about Old Frisian and Old Saxon, I’m looking forward to a talk about their common neighbouring Germanic language: Low Franconian, the ancestor of Dutch and Afrikaans. There may be not too many texts in it, but an expert will have enough to tell about it.

[@robertbussard6155]

Many thanks to both of you for such an interesting and enjoyable presentation!

[@twerg11]

Thanks, and you are welcome!

[@lottifuehrscheim]

Heliand has been translated into many Lower-Saxon dialects, 4 variants in the Netherlands alone. There is clearly a feeling of connection.

[@twerg11]

That is very cool

[@rienksjoerdsma]

Hearing Old Saxon as a Dutch and Frisian speaker is interesting. I can pick out a few words and for some of the words I don't understand their pronunciation does seem similar to Dutch.

[@Maricavdven]

As a Dutch lady living in Norge, I'm very interested in Old Norse.

[@HB_King_of_Doggerland]

This was good stuff. A lot of things I never heard about before.

[@GrimLordofOregon]

Fantastic! Thank you.

[@jorgkrause2362]

Greetings from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Thank you very much for this interesting video. Old Saxon is a really exciting topic. It's a great pity that fewer and fewer people speak its successor language, Low German. Here in my home region it is a protected regional language, but only a few, mostly elderly people speak it in everyday life. You can learn it at school here, but most of the teaching material is West Low German, which sounds strange to a speaker of East Low German. (This has nothing to do with East Germany and West Germany and is a purely linguistic categorization).

[@twerg11]

Greetings from Athens, Georgia! So you yourself are a Low German speaker, right? Do you use it much in your day-to-day life? By the way, I taught in at the University of Rostock for a month years ago, my uni had a faculty exchange partnership there at the time (no longer unfortunately). I very much enjoyed seeing a bit of the M-V countryside and small towns. My wife and I visited a Tierpark where old-traditional species of farm animals (sheep, goats, cattle, pigs) lived.

[@jorgkrause2362]

@@twerg11 I can understand Low German reasonably well. But I don't speak it. We didn't speak Low German at home because my mum came from Saxony (near Dresden) (where, interestingly, Low German was never spoken) and didn't understand Low German at all.

[@twerg11]

@@jorgkrause2362Yeah, the populations of today’s Sachsen and Sachsen-Anhalt came from all parts of Germany beginning in the later middle ages, during the eastward expansion.

[@northwestpassage6234]

I’d love to learn Low Saxon (low German) but it’s quite hard without knowing German or Dutch first. My mom is from Northern Germany and ancestry on both sides of my family are from Saxon (low German), or North Frisian speaking areas. It’s a shame the language is at such risk of dying and after many decades of neglect and suppression many Germans today still think it’s just a “farmer’s or fishermen’s dialect of ‘bad German’” without realizing it’s a separate language. I would love to see more revival efforts like the Netherlands is achieving or Celtic languages in the UK.

[@aag3752]

As I'm listening to this, I'm wondering about the possible mutual intelligibility between Old Saxon and Old English? I'm learning OE right now, so it would be amazing if that would give me some kind of edge (after gaining more proficiency) for reading Old Saxon texts.

[@lskazalski]

I was wondering the same thing. I studied history of the English language & Beowulf etc. as an undergrad (45+ years ago!) and I've found that I can roughly understand Old Norse and can read Old German.

[@aag3752]

@@lskazalski That's a good sign. Thanks for sharing

[@lskazalski]

​@@aag3752 I should add that I can also read 19th century and modern German fairly well.

[@Lebst]

It doesn't seem different enough to me to be a major hindrance in understanding each other, but who can say? Old English had palatalized consonants but also had dialects without them (or not completely) in the north of England so they were probably familiar with both pronunciations, so maybe Old English speakers would have an easier time understanding Old Saxon speakers than the other way around?

[@lskazalski]

​@Lebst That sounds like a very plausible theory. There are regional dialects found in the US that can be traced back to 17th & 18th century English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish regional dialects. It isn't as pronounced since the age of TV and the internet but in my living memory, I've encountered regional dialects that were only nominally American English - including the upstate NY mountain dialect I grew up speaking. I learned to code switch at an early age. What I spoke with my grandfather had little to do with what I spoke at school.

[@proinsiasbaiceir6580]

I leant that Old Saxon is indeed the ancestor of Low German, but that between the Old Saxon and Middle Low German period it was quite heavily influenced by Franconian.

[@ansibarius4633]

I always found it curious how the -n- apparently got reintroduced in words like mond/Mund en (oor)kond(e)/(Ur)kund.

[@hive_indicator318]

The giruni thing makes me wonder about possible Gnostic influences. What a wonderful convergence of two of my interests! Now I have to tag @Esoterica so he can also scratch his head. Or not, since he knows way more than me about it

[@acaciabaker5935]

Yea please please bring him backnfor the middle german nibelungenlied topics!! Pleease yay

[@twerg11]

See you soon on this!

[@acaciabaker5935]

@@twerg11 awesome! Love the overlap of this time period in languages that illustrate the interactions between cultures and the interpretations you shared were right in those intersections! 👏👏👏 went to your web links and folloing whatever i can, thank you!

[@twerg11]

@@acaciabaker5935I appreciate that!

[@dcdcdc556]

17:20 Sounds like a "hearts and minds" approach

[@michaelshelton5488]

Taylor Swift would NEVER convert me to a new religion. If she endorsed it, I would absolutely reject it and double down on my current beliefs. 🤣

[@Kalebstclair-uh4dz]

Would to love to see a copy of the heliand done like the wanderers havamal. The footnotes and original Saxon would be very interesting.

[@twerg11]

Hackett, Jackson's publisher, actually asked me if I would be interested in doing a Heliand translation, but alas that would take several years and I have too many other things going on. A facing-page translation would have to be 2 volumes, it's a massive thing

[@AutoReport1]

There are traditionally a set of specifically Saxon runes.

[@neilog747]

Not sure that is true. The Etruscan-derived Runes I know of seem to be Anglish, Norse and Fries but not Saxon or Frankish. Happy to be proven wrong though. Areas in England settled by the Old Saxons seem to be Rune-free.

[@twerg11]

There are runes to be found in some Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, but none from continental Saxony to my knowledge 🤷‍♂️ would be happy to learn otherwise

[@sagenheim]

"Frankish"/hunlandic runes on the Scheibenfibel of Soest. ​@@neilog747

[@sagenheim]

​​​@@twerg11Check "Runenknochen von der Unterweser" and the footstool belonging to the "Thron aus der Marsch". The Saxon K-Rune is as large as the other runes, the U-Rune very unique, the R-Rune is as well. You also see double-runes in words among the Saxons, which is a specialty. And not Saxon, but from Hunland is the "Runenfibel von Soest".

[@twerg11]

@@sagenheim Wow, ok, amazing--thank you very much. Makes perfect sense that artifacts of this kind are preserved. Do you know of any manuscript evidence?

[@teutoniceagle2368]

Charlemagne, the Saxon Butcher, 782 A.C the blood court of Verden, 4500 Saxon Noble Men killed!

[@twerg11]

What’s crazy is that the Saxons later came to take pride in that brutal history!

[@andriesscheper2022]

'Charles' the Great was a king of the Francs, South of the river Rhine. The Saxons were a completely different Germanic tribe from North Western Germany, later on situated between Frisians and Danes. And indeed, he butchered a lot of Saxons. That's what Christening was all about in those days. As the Romans weren't only exporting civilisation...

[@ansibarius4633]

@@andriesscheper2022 Not so very completely different in their origins though, and their languages were quite similar. But I always think of the Franks of that time more as a beginning international aristocracy bound by loyalty to their ruler and his heavenly protector Christ than as a tribe, unlike the more 'primitive' Saxons. The Western Franks, or those who identified with that name, must have been heavily Romanized by the 800s, after centuries of local rule.

[@twerg11]

@@ansibarius4633 Good point on Romanization. One of the main impulses behind Clovis's conversion way back in 500 was to allow for better integration between his Germanic Franks and the subject Gallo-Roman population of the cities. That was probably one of the main reasons Clovis chose Catholicism as opposed to Arian Christianity. In contrast, the Arian Goths in the Iberian peninsula kept socially aloof from their Catholic Roman subjects much longer, though they eventually gave it up as well (7th century).

[@seanOfLegend]

"When did the Saxons disappear?" Saxe-Coburg is still sitting on multiple European thrones

[@GhostintheMachine-eg5wm]

When I hear "Old Saxon," the first thing I think of is James Cathey and his essay Give us this day our daily "rad"...

[@twerg11]

😂

[@midshipman8654]

werent the franks also known to be rather insistent on the more violent aspect of christianity? at least in their earlier adoption of it, which granted is a good deal before the conquest of the saxons. I remember they were more focused on the conquest and slaughter of the old testament and rather preoccupied with the symbolism of blood. And its just interesting to think that the franks insisted on detracting from the very aspects of the bible that were particularly of interest to their ancestors during their own conversion.

[@twerg11]

Yes, already beginning with Clovis the Merovingian, the Franks combined Christian missionizing with Germanic-king-style military expansion and conquest. I'll be talking with Jackson soon again about Clovis.

[@benedyktjaworski9877]

re around 53:00: 3rd-4th generation Christian Saxons boasting that “Charlemagne preached with the iron tongue, but it was necessary” (so that they accept the true faith) and “we’re now going to do the same to the Slavs” kinda explains well why we do have some pagan stories from Celtic and Germanic lands, especially Ireland and Iceland, but nothing from Slavic and Baltic…

[@ekesandras1481]

all the Old Saxon text are linked to the monastery of Fulda, which was founded by the Frankish Kings, but populated with Bavarian monks ... and those Bavarian monks were the ones who wrote down local stories and mythologies from the Old Saxon people they were supposed to missionized. Almost no text is written by a Saxon himself or by a Saxon native speaker.

[@benedyktjaworski9877]

@@ekesandras1481 Yeah, that’s my point. In Iceland and Ireland you get texts with pre-Christian lore written by native speakers as they don’t have the trauma. They themselves decided to accept the new religion, but keep parts of the older tradition and write openly about it. You get some of that (though not as much) in England too. But in Slavic and Baltic countries you get fairly violent conversion and big taboo regarding the old traditions. They definitely survive for some time - we get echoes in Christian festivals adapted from them, we get some folklore remembering deity names (even Polish word for lightning, ‘piorun’, continues the god’s name, *Perunъ, similarly to English ‘thunder’ related to the deity name) - but no literature at all dealing with them. In fact we get very little literature in west Slavic languages at all for a few centuries, only in the 15th c. longer texts are being written in Polish instead of Latin.

[@twerg11]

⁠@@ekesandras1481 There were monks from all parts of converted Germania in Frankish monasteries, they were not all Bavarians. The presence and influence of Anglo-Saxon monks at Fulda was also extremely important, and shows up in the manuscripts via Anglo-Saxon scribal conventions. And there is indeed evidence of continental Saxon monks too. The first line of the Hildebrandslied, as Jackson notes, is Old Saxon: “Ik gihorta dat seggen”.

[@twerg11]

@@ekesandras1481And of course the Heliand and the Old Saxon Genesis themselves were almost certainly composed by native continental Saxons. By the early/mid 9th century, there were many Saxon monks fully integrated into Christian literary and theological culture. Most famously Gottschalk of Orbais, one of the most interesting theologians of the era.

[@ekesandras1481]

@@twerg11 it goes like this: Iro-Scottish and Anglo-Saxon monks were called by the Franks to bring mainstream catholicism to the Bavarian lands in the 7th century. Before that the Bavarians had been under the influence of Gothic Arian christianity (Non-Trinitarian). A century later they used those now catholic clerics and sent them North to do the same to the Saxons. Fulda was explicitly populated first by Bavarian monks under Saint Sturmius. Of course their first task was to take in local novices and educate them to form a local clergy as soon as possible. But as mentioned in the video, the writing of Old Saxon text than soon was interrupted, so the few texts we have are still very much from this first missionizing periode. That's why the "Hildebrandslied" is written in a mixed Old Bavarian/Old Saxon language, which is weird since the two regions don't even border each other. The same is true for the "Wessobrunner Gebet". There are also Rhine Frankonian and Saxon mixed texts, like the Horse Blessings of Trier (Trierer Pferdesegen).

[@bob___]

In the excerpt read so excellently, is it possible that "giruni" may in part reflect an awareness that the source material was in the Greek alphabet (a writing system requiring special knowledge to decode)? This could be in addition to the significance discussed in this talk.

[@twerg11]

Hmm interesting. If the poet was a monk/clergy trained in Latin, yes, he will have known the original gospels were in Greek, although himself probably unable to read Greek (few Carolingian clergy could). That may be involved in this sense of mystery. You often see monks who have a little bit of Greek using Greek letters in their Latin texts/phrases (“God is the alpha and omega” etc) in a kind of magical way, like runes. But that is all very “inside” stuff. If the poet was a Caedmon-like figure (working with trained clergy), he probably would not have known about Greek. In my own view, the mystery-sense in girūni is an accommodation to the sensibilities of the illiterate post-pagan audience, which will not have known about Greek.

[@bob___]

@@twerg11 Given the subject matter, it seems unlikely that the author of the Heliand was not trained as a cleric, regardless of whether that person was ultimately ordained or not. Even the palace school founded by Charlemagne, which was about as close to a secular school as Europe had in that era, was started by monks (notably Alcuin of York). Even Caedmon, the rough-hewn 7th century poet whose song is discussed in this talk, worked as a herdsman at a monastery and later became a monk. European education was the province of the Church until the Renaissance. Moreover, it's possible that a monk trained in Britain or Ireland could have known a little Greek (it was through the mission of British and Irish monks to the continent that such knowledge was brought back to Western Europe), but the audience of the Heliand wouldn't have known Greek, of course.

[@twerg11]

@@bob___Yes, I pretty much see it the way you do. Harald Haferland has an interesting theory whereby a Caedmon-like poet worked with a group of monkish theologians. They made sure of the orthodoxy, he supplied the language savvy and the skill in the vernacular heroic medium. I like that theory, but it may be too complicated.

[@bob___]

@@twerg11 No disagreement. There's no reason to exclude the possibility of a poet, perhaps himself a monk or an associate of monks, with a dual education in heroic poetry and the gospels (if not the monastic scribal tradition) working with others. The reason the point about "giruni" hit me was the association of the word with "rune" and the association of "rune" with the sense of whisper or secret. A foreign, non-Latin alphabet might have been described with words pertaining to runes (though it's pure conjecture). I think people underappreciate the fact that there were medieval people who were very learned. Bede is an example, as is Alcuin.

[@midshipman8654]

on the topic of period depictions of biblical scenes, I have a hard time recalling art that depict a 18th or 17th century setting. Was that about the time where it fell out of prominence? I feel like during those times, baroque art and stuff, biblical scenes tended to show them in robes and classical looks. while even into the 1500’s I can think of a few examples of biblical characters in slashed landschneckt doublets and stuff. maybe somwthing to do with the reformation, counter reformation, or classicism?

[@twerg11]

Yes, the period-updating of Biblical scenes stops with the Renaissance, right? Baroque painters like Rubens still do a lot of biblical scenes, but then more in a pseudo-historical style. One would have to take a closer look. An interesting question! Perhaps it's related to conceptions of "modernity" that begin to emerge then?

[@douwefondermeulen5458]

Was ä Friësic Bernlef the po'et/writer of Hëeliând? INGuaeonic: än Ôld Anglo-Friesic-sk & Ôld Saxon?

[@krazyFlipy]

Greetings, Mr Crawford (& Co). Much respect from a total layman and uneducated amateur. :D I'm having great fun reading the Ynglingasaga in original form. "Huleis Norji byggdist" is how the phrase would be spoken here in town, this day. Humbly suggesting, that a closer study of us Root Language speakers - a mere couple of 100 000's left in this world - might shed serious light as to the forever fleeting historical concept of "Kvenland". Nor/Norri (makes me lol - would still today be a totally modern and normal calling name over here: "Morjens, Norri!" hahaha) seems to be the root of "Nor-way". I come across (again and as always) Beowulf. I suspect the scholarly interpretation "Bee-wolf" is a misconception. "Böui" is a pre-ancient (:D ) word, still in daily use over here. The term in Van Language is "Mörkö". It means "monster", "supernatural foe" etc. "Ita opp gröitn diin, annus kombä Böui å taar de!" ("Finish [eat up] your porridge, otherwise Böui will come take you!"), my Mom said :D Ulf earned the name "Böu-Ulf", because he slew Böui in the lands to the South. Just saying. I know 'Kvenland' is confusing, just as the Suomi-Finland of today is, to academica. But the truth still lives... Feel free to disregard. :) O-den Allfader sees all, knows all. Whether he gives a d**n is a totally nother question hahaha :D The ancestors did not have "gods", back in På-rad-is times. ;) "O" is simply the oldest word for the sun, because the first Asir man/woman who wished to audio-form thee most crucial object in his natural surrounding tried to emulate its apparent shape with his lips. Short distance to ze brrrain ;) The suffix "-den" is clear as sunlight to all Nordic people. Finally: We were always here, did not come "out of Africa". Now shoot me down :D Peace å hälsninga från Grundlandi, "Ostrobothnia", Öster-Land!

[@beepboop204]

🙂

[@michaelshelton5488]

Jesus is Theoden? Thou shalt ride for wrath, thou shalt ride for ruin.......

[@nathansageclift]

Hi, my name is Nathan Clift. I studied under Loren gruber And Peter fields Who both taught at university of Denver . They were my mentors at Missouri valley college .. umm there is this poem that goes …. When skies darken, the spear of Odin illuminates, the hammer of Thor thunders in the sky, and freya’s tits burst with milk, and a Viking soul Shines bright… are u familiar with this? Till valhall

[@twerg11]

I'm not familiar with that poem. Viking and Nordic stuff is Jackson's specialty. It sounds more modern / neo-Viking to me than Viking-era. Where did you encounter it?

[@andriesscheper2022]

I'm sorry, but Carolingians weren't Saxons, but Francs. Also Germanians, but a completely different tribe...

[@twerg11]

Absolutely, I do not believe I claimed otherwise

[@hive_indicator318]

Yes, that's why they wrote about Charlemagne using his iron tongue on them (the Saxons)