The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

by Michael Pye

The rediscovery of the great Saxon poem Heliand, the Gospels retold in the ninth century in the manner of some North Sea epic, produced a number of fits of fantasy: in the nineteenth century August Vilmar took it to show ‘all that is great and beautiful, with all that the German nation, its heart and life, were able to provide’. It celebrated all sorts of things he reckoned to be especially German, like ‘the lively joy of the Germans in moveable wealth’. He somehow deduced that the Christian conversion of all German lands was proof that Germany was a single nation, ‘clean and resolute, its inner unity and its unity to itself transferred by the poet … onto the persons with his holy story’.35 The Saxon detail and thinking of Heliand became a pan-German myth: Jesus lining up with Bismarck. Vilmar was delighted by the rude remarks throughout the text about the ‘sluggish’ people of the South, who were mostly Jews, and the obvious superiority of the ‘Germanic’ disciples. His ideas persisted. At the time of the First World War the Gospels, told in Saxon verse, had somehow become ‘a pithy story of German manhood’.