(“Spring comes, girdled even in a garland of flowers. Winter comes, completely covered
by frozen, frosted hair. Both were to debate a great debate over the song of the cuckoo.”)
Walafrid Strabo has some magnificent lines on the cultivation and care of roses: Iam
nisi me fessum via longior indupediret. An epic, the Waltharius, evidences the power and
compression of Carolingian poetry:
At vir Waltharius missa cum cuspide currens
evaginato regem importunior ense
impetit et scuto dextra de parte revulso
ictum praevalidum ac mirandum fecit eique
crus cum poblite adusque femur decerpserat omne....(“Having thrown his spear, the manly Walter ran at the king more savagely with a drawn
sword, and attacked. The [king’s] shield was ripped away from his right side, and
[Walter] struck a huge and awful blow. The [king’s] thigh with the hough all the way to
the foot, he [Walter] cut off completely....”)
Guido d’Arezzo, the 11th-century Benedictine, used the following verses of Paul the
Deacon’s Hymn to John the Baptist to derive the notes of the “great scale”:
UT queant laxis REsonare fibris
MIra gestorum FAmuli tuorum,
SOlve polluti LAbii reatum sancte Johannes.When compared with the dearth of Latin poetry in the Merovingian period (ca. 482-ca.
751), the poetry of this period deserves the name “Carolingian renaissance.” When
compared with the brilliance of 12th-century Latin poetry, however, this same poetry
may appear unengaging.
Ernest A.Kaulbach
[See also: LATIN LYRIC POETRY; LATIN POETRY, MEROVINGIAN]
Poetae latini aevi carolini, ed. E.Duemmler (Vols. 1–2), Ludwig Traube (Vol. 3), Karl Strecker
(Vol. 4). Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Berlin: Weidman, 1881–1923.
Strecker, Karl, ed. Die Lateinischen Dichter des deutschen Mittelalters: Poetarum latinorum medii
aevi. Vol. 6, fasc. 1. Munich: Monumenta Germaniae Historica, 1978.
Raby, Frederic James Edward, ed. The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse. Oxford: Clarendon,
1959, pp. 87–132.
Ghellinck, Joseph de. Littérature latine au moyen âge. Brussels: Bloud et Gay, 1939, pp. 84–130.
McGuire, Martin R.P., and Hermigild Dressler. Introduction to Medieval Latin Studies. 2nd ed.
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1977, pp. 89–99.
Norberg, Dag L. La poésie latine rythmique du haut moyen âge. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell,
1954.
Raby, Frederic James Edward. A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages. 2nd ed. 2
vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1957, Vol.1, pp. 178–269.
——. A Histoty of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages. 2nd
ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953, pp. 155–210.
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