Muspilli

[c] This formal unevenness has often led scholars to regard the surviving text as a composite made up of older material and younger accretions – an impression reinforced by the poem's thematic and stylistic diversity.

In 1832 the first editor, Johann Andreas Schmeller, proposed as the poem's provisional title what seemed to be a key word in line 57: dar nimac denne mak andremo helfan uora demo muspille ('there no kinsman is able to help another before the muspilli).

Distinctively, Kolb[8](pp 5 ff, 32) took uora as a local preposition ('in front of'), with muspilli signifying the Last Judgment itself, or perhaps its location or its presiding Judge.

The Old Saxon Christian poem Heliand (early or mid 9th century) presents (and perhaps personifies) mudspelli (mutspelli) as a destructive force, coming as a thief in the night, and associated with the end of the world.

[17] In Old Norse, Muspellr occurs as a proper name, apparently that of the progenitor or leader of a band of fighters ('Muspellr's sons'), who are led by fiery Surtr against the gods at Ragnarök (a series of events heralding the death of major deities, including Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr and Loki).

[19] Muspilli is usually analysed as a two-part compound, with well over 20 different etymologies proposed, depending on whether the word is seen as a survival from old Germanic, pagan times, or as a newly coined Christian term originating within the German-speaking area.

Already by 1900, this (literally) marginal work had come to be monumentalised alongside other medieval texts against a background of German nation-building, but also in keeping with the powerful, European-wide interest in national antiquities and their philological investigation.

Early researchers were keen to trace the work's theological and mythological sources, to reconstruct its antecedents and genesis, and to identify its oldest, pre-Christian elements.

Seeking analogues, Neckel was struck, for example, by similarities between the role of Elias in our poem and the Norse god Freyr, killed by Surtr, who is linked with Muspellr and his sons.

Conceding that the 'hunt for parallels' was passing into discredit, Schneider[11](pp 9) was nonetheless insistent that, until all potential Christian sources had been exhausted, we should not assume that anything still left unexplained must be of pagan Germanic origin or the poet's own invention.

[11](p 32) Commentators have long been troubled by breaks in the poem's thematic sequence, especially between lines 36 and 37, where the Mighty King's summons to Final Judgment is followed by an episode in which Elias fights with the Antichrist.

[11](pp 6, 28 ff) In contrast, Gustav Ehrismann (1918) respected the work's integrity: he saw no need to assume interpolations, nor any pagan Germanic features apart from possible echoes in the word muspille.

Though he found the transition from line 36 to 37 'hard and abrupt', he attributed it to the author's own limitations, which in his view also included poor vocabulary, monotonous phraseology, and incompetent alliterative technique.

Verdicts such as these left critics hovering somewhere between two extremes: a technically faltering composition by a single author, or a conglomerate of chronologically separate redactions of varying quality and diverse function.

[13] Minis[13] stripped away the sermonising passages, discarded lines containing rhymes and inferior alliteration, and assumed that small portions of text had been lost at the beginning and in the middle of the poem.

Increasingly, the aim has been to approach the Muspilli as a complicated work that is functionally adequate, regardless of its ostensible stylistic flaws, and to interpret it in its 9th century Christian context, whilst also sharply questioning or rejecting its allegedly pagan elements.

Publishing in 1977 views which he had formulated some 20 years earlier, Wolfgang Mohr saw older poetic material here being re-worked with interpolations, as a warning to all, but especially the rich and powerful.

In a landmark dissertation of the same year, Finger[15] saw no further need to search for survivals from pagan mythology, since even the most problematic portions of the Muspilli contain nothing that is alien to patristic thought.

of the Apocalypse tells how two witnesses (Greek martyres, Latin testes), empowered by God, will be killed by a beast, but then revived by the Spirit of Life and taken up into Heaven.

The Antichrist is most closely identifiable with one or other of the beasts described in Apocalypse 13, though the term itself is used elsewhere (1 John 2, 18) to denote apostates, false Christs, whose coming will signal the 'last days'.

And unlike the beast of the biblical Apocalypse, which temporarily kills God's two witnesses, the Antichrist (with Satan at his side) will be brought down and denied victory.

Different again is a reference in Tertullian's De anima (early 3rd century), where Enoch and Elijah are martyred by the Antichrist, who is then 'destroyed by their blood'[15](pp 42 ff) However, our poet continues, (many?)

[9](p 14) Good support for a firm linkage came at last in 1980 from Groos and Hill,[39] who reported on a close Christian analogue, hitherto unknown, from an 8th century Spanish formulary, predicting that on Judgment Day an all-consuming flame will rise up from the blood of Enoch and Elijah.

Most strikingly, the King of Heaven issues His summons (kipannit daz mahal), using a technical expression rooted in Germanic law, but relevant also to contemporary politics.

[8](pp 63 ff) In Kolb's view, the difference between earthly and Heavenly justice was most explicitly stated in line 57: Rejecting this interpretation, Finger[15](pp 73 ff) saw no legal implications whatever in this line: Bavarian legal sources offer no proof of regular oath-taking by kinsmen, and in the passage quoted above, leuda (a Frankish form) means 'tribe' or 'people' (not precisely 'kin').

[5](pp 72) The poem is starkly dualistic, dominated by antagonisms: God and Satan, angels and devils, Heaven and Hell, Elias and the Antichrist.

Our text breaks off in narrative mode, on a seemingly conciliatory note: Preceded by the Cross, Christ displays at this Second Coming His stigmata, the bodily wounds which He suffered for love of humankind.