The Vitality

The section of Orff’s Carmina Burana in the previous post got me thinking about something I haven’t thought about for a long time. The Carmina Burana is a collection of 200 some odd songs, poems, and plays from the 11th to 13th centuries that were discovered in manuscript in a German monastery in the first decade of the 19th century. They’re satirical, sometimes scatological, sometimes obscene, common themes being the corruption of the Church, wine, women, and song. They’re written in Medieval Latin, Old German, Old French, sometimes in combination (macaronics) with a smattering of other Western European languages.

Here are the first several lines of the O, Fortuna section in the original Latin:

O Fortuna
velut luna
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis
nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ludo mentis aciem,
egestatem,
potestatem
dissolvit ut glaciem.

Even if you don’t know Latin there are some things that are pretty obvious about this. First, it’s written in trochaic dimeter. That means two “feet” per line, each foot containing two syllables with the stress on the first syllable. Here’s an example you should recognize of that meter:

Bubble, bubble,
Toil and trouble.
Fire, burn!
And cauldron bubble.

It’s actually a little more complicated than that with triplets, two lines of trochaic dimeter followed by a single line of trochaic trimeter. And, importantly, it rhymes.

Compare that with the opening of the Lay of Hildebrand, one of the earliest works of German literature:

Ik gihorta ðat seggen
ðat sih urhettun ænon muotin
Hiltibrant enti Haðubrant untar heriun tuem
sunufatarungo iro saro rihtun
garutun se iro guðhamun gurtun sih iro suert ana
helidos ubar hringa do sie to dero hiltiu ritun

The Lay dates from, probably, the 7th or 8th century.

The language is peculiar. It’s written in a combination of Old Bavarian and Old Saxon, understandable since it was found in a German monastery founded by Anglo-Saxon monks. However, look at the versification. It’s constructed along very different lines from the verse of the Carmina although the latter was composed only a few hundred years later. It’s alliterative verse like Beowulf or the Norse Eddas. The earliest poem in Old English that rhymes is the Rhyming Poem in the 10th century. A rhymed version of the gospels was written by Otfried of Weissenburg in the 9th century.

Pretty clearly something happened to induce such a transition. In my opinion what happened was contact with Arab culture.

From approximately the 8th century through roughly the 10th century Arab culture was the most energetic, vital, and influential culture in the world. Like the Roman culture from, say, the 1st century through the 3rd century and the Chinese culture in the 5th through 8th centuries, Arab culture influenced art, literature, cooking, manners, and, as in this case, poetry.

In its turn something happened to Arab culture: invaders from Central Asia, initially the Turks but the final nail was hammered by the Mongols under a grandson of Temujin’s. Arab culture changed from being vital, rational, ethical, and expansive to pessimistic, repressive, and dogmatic.

However, I think it’s important to consider that the influence of Arab culture wasn’t just the hard power of military and economic might but soft power as well. It was attractive, energetic, and vital.