palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle. From England came Alcuin and Moduin, named
respectively “Flaccus” (Horace) and “Naso” (Ovid) at the imperial court. Charles invited
“Pindar” (Theodulf of Orléans) from Spain, and “Homer” (Angilbert) from the old
Frankish territories. Paul the Deacon, Peter of Pisa, Paulinus of Aquileia—all three from
Lombardy—and a small group from Ireland, including Clement and Dougal, round out
the first generation of Carolingian poets.
The dictamina of Alcuin and Theodulf incorporate Virgilian, Horatian, or Ovidian
quantitative half-lines; but the lines are often stamped with an accentual metric, and
scansion is impeded by Carolingian pronunciation of Latin (e.g., periclum for periculum).
For example, Aeneid 1.531, resounds in Alcuin’s Verses on the Saints in the Church of
York:
Est antiqua, potens bellis et corpore praestans,
Germaniae populos gens inter et extera regna,
Duritiam propter dicti cognomine Saxi(“Among the peoples of Germania and the foreign powers, there is an ancient race, strong
in war and sturdy in body, called Saxons on account of their hardness”); but the -iae in
Germaniae must be scanned as one syllable to make the hexameters work. Theodulf’s
verses on Palm Sunday,
Gloria, laus et honor tibi sit, rex Christe redemptor,Cui puerile decus prompsit osanna pium....
(“Let glory, praise, and honor be to You, O Christ, King and Redeemer. Children utter a
loyal and well-turned ‘Hosanna’ to You...”), are still chanted in the liturgy of Palm
Sunday; but the music does not indicate whether cui is pronounced as one syllable or two.
It is not important that classical Latin was a “foreign language” to the Carolingian poets;
they developed a latinity of their own. Poems composed in acrostics, carmina figurata,
abecedaria, and aenigmata show the skill and pleasure that Charlemagne’s court and the
monastic schools took in intricate combinations of letters and in Teutonic-Latin
semantics.
Some exquisite pieces came out of this period. In liturgical use today are the
anonymous Veni, creator spiritus and Ave, maris stella, and Paulinus of Aquileia’s Ubi
caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Something close to Germanic alliteration permeates the
anonymous Debate Between Winter and Spring over the proper time for the cuckoo to
sing:
Ver quoque florigero succinctus stemmate venit,
frigida venit Hiems, rigidis hirsuta capillis.his certamen erat cuculi de carmine grande
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1000