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The composer Richard Wagner was an avid reader of pre-modern literature and scholarly studies of the Middle Ages and the Reformation era; nearly all of his mature operas reflect this lifelong interest. This dissertation examines his reception of the Middle High German courtly literary tradition and its after-echoes in Early New High German textual culture in two of his operas, Tannhäuser (1845) and Die Meistersinger (1868). Chapter 1 argues that whereas Tannhäuser represents an experimental stage in Wagner’s medievalism, one that incorporates a number of ideas Wagner had encountered in his early explorations of Germanic philology, Die Meistersinger demonstrates a remarkably nuanced understanding of the differences between thirteenth- and sixteenth-century poetic idiom and style. The same chapter also discusses the barriers, both linguistic and historical, that have for many decades stood in the way of a more philologically informed assessment of Wagner’s reception of the sixteenth century, and to a lesser extent, his reception of the High Middle Ages. Chapter 2 looks at broad trends and developments within the field of Germanic philology in the 1800s, with a particular focus on the reciprocal influence between philological scholarship and the fine arts during this era. Chapter 3 discusses a representative sampling of works on Germanic philology that Wagner is known to have owned or consulted, situating them within the developments discussed in Chapter 2. Chapters 4 and 5 consider Wagner’s staging of High Medieval courtly culture and his reception of minnesong in Tannhäuser. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 consider Die Meistersinger, arguing that the views of the heldentenor character Walther von Stolzing, on both art and life, have been indelibly stamped by the chivalric literature of the High Middle Ages, which he claims as his ancestral heritage. These chapters demonstrate as well that the real challenge facing Walther is one of cultural assimilation to the urban, bourgeois milieu that Wagner depicts in his fictional early modern Nuremberg. They trace Walther’s acculturation process through a close examination of his and the other characters’ diegetic songs, comparing them with examples of authentic texts from the High Middle Ages and the early modern period.

The adverb ungemete, unigmetes in Beowulf and elsewhere in Old English verse creates significant metrical problems. I revive and expand the proposal of Fulk (1992) to read this as *unmet. This rest...

The paper analyzes professional training of future philologists in higher education institutions in Ukraine. It determines and justifies the content of future philologists’ professional training on the example of the degree programme on Germanic Languages and Literature (including Translation), taking into account the new regulatory requirements. It describes the most effective forms, methods and technologies of organizing educational activities of future philologists. It clarifies the components of professional competency of future specialists in Germanic philology. It specifies the procedures and measures for assuring the internal quality of philological education at higher education institutions. Some general characteristics of future philologists’ professional training in higher education institutions in Ukraine, justified in the paper, have proved the need to update the content of such training and introduce effective organizational forms and methods of teaching and learning, which will promote the subject-subject interaction in the educational process, as well as contribute to personality development and assure the quality of education.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restricted circumstances’, with many investigators claiming that this limitation holds only under ‘secondary stress’ (sometimes broadened to include subordinated stress in general). This article reviews the operation of Kaluza’s law in Beowulf, arguing that the correct conditioning is the position immediately following a heavy syllable. The level of stress carried by the (non-)resolving sequence is irrelevant. A phonological explanation for this restriction may be that the resolution ideally produces bimoraic (light-light) units; accordingly, resolution of light-heavy sequences, which is anomalous from a typological and phonological perspective, is only permitted in word-initial position, or in metrical equivalents.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restricted circumstances’, with many investigators claiming that this limitation holds only under ‘secondary stress’(sometimes broadened to include subordinated stress in general). This article reviews the operation of Kaluza’s law in Beowulf, arguing that the correct conditioning is the position immediately following a heavy syllable. The level of stress carried by the (non-)resolving sequence is irrelevant. A phonological explanation for this restriction may be that the resolution ideally produces bimoraic (light-light) units; accordingly, resolution of light-heavy sequences, which is anomalous from a typological and phonological perspective, is only permitted in word-initial position, or in metrical equivalents.

Review of A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages by R. D. Fulk, 2018.

The essay examines the themes, poetic diction, metaphors, and rhetorical devices of the Exeter Book riddles 12, 52, and 72, selected because they associate Welsh servitude to oxen and because they include images of captivity and bondage, showing a connection between slavery, ethnicity, and conduct through the multifaceted term wealh, which relates to slavery, Celtic origin and transgressive behaviour. The noun came to signify both racial and social difference; the analysis reveals that it conveyed moral otherness as well. The cultural equivalence of ‘slave’ and ‘beast’ gives Celtic slaves a status as ethnic, social, and moral ‘other’, so that the figures of the riddles embody the cultural distance between labourers and aristocratic elite, illuminating the opposition between ‘self/other’, ‘English/Welsh’, ‘free/bound’. The subjugated condition of the Welsh is exploited with the didactic aim to convey monastic concerns such as the transience of wordly joys and the loathing of earthly life.

Proverbs in the medieval Frisian laws have been studied ever since Jacob Grimm called them to his readers’ attention in 1816. Most energy was thereupon placed in spotting and collecting them for inclusion in large collections of German proverbs which were fashionable in the nineteenth century. Also in the twentieth century, scholarly activity focused on signalling their stylistic ‘Germanic’ beauty or lifting them out of their context and placing them in lists and anthologies. In this contribution, the proverbs in the Old Frisian law texts are analysed in the light of recent paremiology with an eye to both their form and the function they have in their immediate context.

The generic tone in which practical instructions and moral advice are formulated in medieval didactic texts is one of the features which guaranteed them success and broad diffusion as it permitted their use in different contexts. This assumption applies also to the Leken Spieghel, a didactic treatise written by Jan van Boendale in the second decade of the fourteenth century. This essay presents the sections connected to the urban sphere and, in more general terms, to the Duchy of Brabant, by comparing the information contained in the Leken Spieghel with the author’s other texts and by taking into account also some historical events. The aim is to provide a better understanding of the Leken Spieghel teachings and of the possible reason for their inclusion in this text.

Gnomic tradition in medieval Germanic texts can be studied from different points of view. Maxims, proverbs, wise sayings, and various rules of life and behaviour pertain both to phraseology and paremiology, since they can display particular syntactic features as well as a reflection of the social and cultural environment in which they were transmitted. The analysis of these phrases and of their context leads to interesting results enriching our knowledge of past traditions, archaic words and constructions, and it allows to observe the development of meaning and form of ancient idioms still in use. The present contribution aims to focus on this particular branch of historical linguistics, which brings philology closer to other disciplines ranging from language history to pragmatics.

As it is now widely recognised, The Wife’s Lament, one of the most intriguing and enigmatic Old English poems, is based on a female speaker uttering her grief for the absence of her loved one. Partly due to its grammatical ambiguities and the unclear chronology of events, many passages of the poem remain obscure and defy a shared understanding. The interpretation of the final lines (42-53) has frequently been a matter of passionate debate: some scholars believe they contain a curse against the man who deserted the woman; but they should rather be considered as a series of gnomic reflections on the need to endure distress and unhappiness with stoic resignation. The essay examines the structural and lexical features of the concluding lines of the poem, comparing them with analogues from other Old English texts; the final considerations show the coherence of those lines in relation to the poem as a whole.

In his poem about Robert Bruce’s life and enterprises, John Barbour (1319-95) uses the gnomic element in a variety of ways. Proverbs, maxims, and occasional gnomic utterances or verses are employed to shape the text, as commentary, prolexis, summary, example, and comparison, in order to give an insight into the personality of important characters (especially the protagonist), and highlight propagandistic and ideological themes that are an essential part of the poem’s complex frame.

The present essay raises the question whether the so-called ‘mystical saying’ (Mystikerspruch), a widespread phenomenon in spiritual German literature and flourishing in the fourteenth century, is the minimum unit of the treatise and the sermon from a purely formal aspect – i.e., a quotation attributed to various authorities who reportedly pronounced it – or if the saying corresponds, for its content, to the literary genre of the dictum (Spruch) and therefore deserves, with good reason, to be considered part of gnomic literature together with sentences and proverbs. The essay first challenges the category of the ‘saying’ in modern scientific literature, then examines the use of the quotation in medieval manuscripts, and finally traces the presence of sayings in Eckhart’s German sermons and in texts by Tauler and Seuse. It ends with the analysis of two sayings attributed to Meister Eckhart.

Line 1122 of Beowulf represents a problem where the findings of metrics, historical phonology, and the reading of the manuscript are in conflict with one another. I revive and adapt Tolkien's proposal to emend lāðbite līċes līġ ealle forswealg to lāðbite līġes līċ eall forswealg “the cruel bite of fire swallowed up the entire bodies”. This emended reading allows the line to be scanned in accordance with Kaluza's law without any complications to the standard historical phonology of Old English, and furthermore improves both the syntax and semantics of the overall passage.

The adverb ungemete, unigmetes in Beowulf and elsewhere in Old English verse creates significant metrical problems. I revive and expand the proposal of Fulk (1992) to read this as *unmet. This restoration receives support from metrics and from the comparison with Old Saxon unmet of the same meaning, and the alteration to ungemet(e), etc., in the manuscripts is easily explained by Old English scribal practices.

Eduard Sievers’ Altgermanische Metrik remains a foundational work for Germanic metrical research, even 125 years after its publication in 1893. His impact on the field may be roughly divided into three broad approaches: 1) the impulse for the typological categorization and labelling of verses; 2) the four-position principle as the basis for alliterative metre; and 3) the focus on linguistic material in metre, especially his identification of the system of resolution. The typological impulse has waned in recent years, though Sievers’ labels for different verse patterns remain widely used. The four-position principle is currently the dominant paradigm for understanding Germanic metre, but there are reasons to doubt its correctness. Sievers’ most important legacy, and potentially his most enduring, may be his linguistic analysis of Germanic verse forms, including his identification of resolution. Even should the four-position theory, like the typological impulse before it, eventually decline in popularity and be supplanted by other metrical frameworks, it is likely that Sievers’ prosodic-descriptive contributions will endure, and will indeed continue to be the basis on which metrical theories are proposed and criticized.