Jüngeres Hildebrandslied

A late attestation of Germanic heroic legend, the ballad features the same basic story as the much older Hildebrandslied, but was composed without knowledge of that text.

Rather, it reworks the oral legend of the warrior Hildebrand and his fight against his son (here Alebrand) in accordance with late medieval and early modern taste.

It is highly sentimentalized and focuses on Hildebrand's return home rather than the tragic conflict of the older tradition.

The Jüngeres Hildebrandslied was an extremely popular ballad in the age of print, and continued to be reprinted into the eighteenth century.

[1] In the nineteenth century it was collected as a traditional piece of German folk poetry by the editors of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

[5] It is generally assumed that in the original form of the story, Hildebrand kills his son, an assumption that a few verses in eddic meter in the Old Norse Ásmundar saga kappabana appear to support.

[6] It is possible that a version of the story with a tragic and a happy ending coexisted for a time in thirteenth-century Germany,[7] however the version of Hildebrand's battle with his son found in the Old Norse Thidreksaga (c. 1250), based on Low German sources, already includes the survival of both father and son.

The name of Hildebrand's son in the Thidrekssaga matches that found in the Jüngeres Hildebrandslied ("Alebrand"), as opposed to the Old High German form "Hadubrand".

[3] In the Norse text as in the Younger Lay, moreover, Hildebrand accuses his son of having been taught to fight by a woman after receiving a powerful blow with a sword—these aspects of presumably oral story-telling were thus relatively stable over time.

[5] The Jüngeres Hildebrandslied is composed in a stanza form known as the "Hildebrandston," so named because the Jüngeres Hildebrandslied was the most famous poem to use this metrical form throughout the early modern period, where songs were often marked "im Thon: Wie man den alten Hildenbrandt singt" (in the melody that one uses to sing the old Hildebrand).

"[11] An example of this form is the version of the Jüngeres Hildebrandslied that found its way into Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Meier, John, ed.