Walafrid, alternatively spelt Walahfrid, nicknamed Strabo (or Strabus, i.e. "squint-eyed") (c. 808 – 18 August 849), was an Alemannic Benedictine monk and theological writer who lived on Reichenau Island in southern Germany.

According to his own verses, it seems that the real cause of his flight was that, notwithstanding the fact that he had been tutor to Charles the Bald, he espoused the side of his elder brother Lothair I on the death of Louis the Pious in 840.

Incidentally, he introduces into his explanations the current German expressions for the things he is treating of, with the apology that Solomon had set him the example by keeping monkeys as well as peacocks at his court.

[4] While Johannes Fried is wary of associating this idealised scheme too much with current ideas about state and court in Louis' reign, Karl Ferdinand Werner and Stuart Airlie are rather more sympathetic to its relevance for contemporary thought at court: what gives the text added interest is that it was written by a courtier (Walafrid), representing a "view from the centre".

As Walafrid tells his audience, he was only eighteen when he sent it, and he begs his correspondent to revise his verses, because, "as it is not lawful for a monk to hide anything from his abbot", he fears he may deserve to be beaten.

Many of Walafrid's other poems are, or include, short addresses to kings and queens (Lothar I, Charles, Louis, Pippin, Judith, etc.)

It is an account of a little garden in Reichenau Island that he used to tend with his own hands, and is largely made up of descriptions of the various herbs he grows there and their medicinal and other uses, including beer brewing.

"[1][7] The poem De Imagine Tetrici takes the form of a dialogue; it was inspired by an equestrian statue depicting a nude emperor on horseback believed to be Theodoric the Great which stood in front of Charlemagne's palace at Aachen.