Genesis is anOld SaxonBiblical poem recounting the story of theBook of Genesis, dating to the first half of the 9th century, three fragments of which are preserved in a manuscript in theVatican Library,Palatinus Latinus 1447. It and theHeliand, a heroic poem based on theNew Testament, a fragment of which is also included in the same manuscript, constitute the only major records of Old Saxon poetry. It is also the basis of theAnglo-Saxon poem known asGenesis B, andEduard Sievers postulated its existence on linguistic evidence before the manuscript was discovered.
Palatinus Latinus 1447 is acomputus and is assembled from several components, the earliest of which have been dated to around 813 and are shown by internal evidence to have been originally produced at theSt. Alban's Abbey inMainz.[1] The Old Saxon material must have been written down later than an astronomical calculation dated to after 836, and theGenesis fragments are in three different hands which have been assigned onpalaeographic evidence to the third quarter of the 9th century.[2]
BothGenesis andHeliand appear to be in an artificial literary language,[3] and hence can be placed in the context of a relatively brief period between about 819 and approximately the death ofLouis the Pious in 840, when the nativeSaxon poetic tradition had waned and theCarolingians sought to interest therecently and forcibly converted Saxons in Christian stories.Genesis must be the later of the two, because it alludes toHeliand.[4] Its composition has been located by some scholars at theAbbey of Fulda, a Frankish centre on the edge of Saxon territory, and by others at theAbbey of Werden, in the centre of the Saxon area.[5]
In 1875, preparatory to publishing an edition of theHeliand,Eduard Sievers argued in a monograph on it and the Anglo-SaxonGenesis that lines 235–851 of the Anglo-Saxon work were originally a separate poem, which he named 'Genesis B' to distinguish it from the remainder, Genesis A, and that this was an Anglo-Saxonised version of a lost Old Saxon poem corresponding to the Genesis poem referred to in the Latin preface to theHeliand.[6] His inference, made on metrical and linguistic grounds, was confirmed in 1894 whenKarl Zangemeister, the professor of Classics at theUniversity of Leipzig, found and identified the fragments on a visit to the Vatican Library.[7] Photographs were made and the first edition of the Old Saxon poem, by Zangemeister withWilhelm Braune and with an introduction byRudolf Kögel, was completed by the end of the year.[8] Sievers did revise his original hypothesis that the same poet was responsible for bothHeliand andGenesis.[9]
The manuscript preserves three fragments:
These correspond respectively to lines 790–817a, 151–337, and 27–150 of the Anglo-SaxonGenesis B.[10]
Stylistically,Genesis even more than theHeliand shows that it is the product of a written tradition: although it retains features of Germanic oral heroic poetry such as alliteration and formulaic diction, it is discursive and uses long, connected clauses, and the language shows signs of developing towards the use of particles rather than case endings. Anglo-Saxon poetry had a longer written history beginning with the retaining of oral poetry, and the Anglo-Saxon translator ofGenesis B has tightened up the loose connections by using more subordinate clauses.[11] The metre is also less varied than in theHeliand.[12] In some places,Genesis B has been further revised in the manuscript to make it more Anglo-Saxon in syntax, word forms, and (late West Saxon) spelling.[13] Metrically and grammatically, the Anglo-Saxon poem shows few signs of being a translation.[14]
The poem diverges from the story of the Fall as told in theVulgate. Adam is tempted by a demon in the guise of an angel, not by a "serpent" as in the Bible, and Eve plays a much more active role: Adam is tempted first and refuses, and the tempter tells her to persuade him by telling him the forbidden fruit bestows divine powers; she instead proves it to him by recounting a blissful heavenly vision.[15][16] Although it has been suggested that the vision derives from a Germanic source—the relationship of the lord to his war-band orcomitatus—the likeliest source appears to be Jewishapocryphal texts and the writings of PopeGregory the Great[17] or other contemporary biblical interpreters,[18][19] including theHeliand.[20] It also reflects the theological crisis in the Carolingian Empire in the mid-9th century over free will andpredestination, focussing onGottschalk of Orbais.[21] However, the poem also reflects Germanic concepts in the role of Eve as advisor to her husband, in the feud element of the Fall, and in the mention inGenesis B, presumably present in the Old Saxon original and also present in theHeliand, of Satan employing ahæleðhelm orhelm of disguise.[22]