Anonymous (Old High German)

The Lay of Hildebrand (Hildebrandslied) is the only surviving heroic lay in Old High German, composed in alliterative verse and probably written down in the 830s. It survives in a single manuscript, copied by two scribes at the monastery of Fulda onto the blank outer leaves of a theological codex, and is now kept in Kassel. The text breaks off before the end, and in places shows a mixture of Upper German and Low German forms.

The lay tells how Hildebrand, returning after some thirty years of exile in the service of Theoderic (Dietrich of Bern), meets his grown son Hadubrand between two armies. Hadubrand takes the stranger for a deceiver and refuses the gift of arm-rings offered in peace, so that father and son are driven toward combat; in the surviving text the outcome is not given. The poem is among the oldest witnesses to the Germanic heroic tradition, and the version here is Francis B. Gummere's English rendering of 1909.