Product Code Database
Hibernicus exul (floruit 8th century) was an anonymous Hiberno-Latin poet, Philologist, and dialectician. His works include a comic mock epic, a panegyric to Charlemagne, epigrams of advice to young scholars, and a poetic overview of the seven liberal arts.
The poem, Ad Karolum Regem ("To King Charles") in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and In Praise of Poetry in Peter Godman's excerpted English translation, is written as a dialogue between poet and Muse (the parts of which are difficult for modern editors to perfectly discern), an idea picked up by Walahfrid Strabo.The editio princeps is Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Poetae Latini medii aevi, I (Berlin, 1881); Peter Godman (1985), Latin Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), pp. 24–25, discusses the poem briefly and provides a critical edition and translation of it, pp 174–79. The poem is the earliest Carolingian eclogue.
The poem begins with a description of Charlemagne and Tassilo, dux inclitus ("distinguished duke"). Charlemagne's gifts to the disobedient Tassilo, Tassilo's ceremonious submission and payment of tribute, and the reconciliation of the two Christian princes are the major themes of the opening part of the work. The remainder is filled with the dialogue of the humble poet and the Muse who shows him the immortality of poetry.
To the historian, the exul's poem indicates the high value ascribed to generosity and reconciliation amongst Christians and portrays the defeated duke in a fair light.Stuart Airlie (1999), "Narratives of Triumph and Rituals of Submission: Charlemagne's Mastering of Bavaria", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .), p. 112, demonstrates the Christian moral tone and the evenhanded treatment of Tassilo. The exaltation of poetry (by a poet) was necessary in a world that concentrated on material and especially martial success. The poet also affirms that secular subjects are equally worthy as sacred ones for versification, making the Ad Karolum Regum one of the earliest Latin Christian defences of Curia regis/public panegyric.
"The poems of this exile show that he was not only a poet but a Philologist and dialectician as well. They also reveal his status as that of a teacher, probably in the palace school. Of more than ordinary interest are the verses which describe the attitude of the ninth-century teacher towards his pupils. His metrical poem on the seven liberal arts devotes twelve lines to each of the branches, grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, etc., showing the origin, scope, and utility of each in succession. Like the lines on the same subject by Theodulf of Orléans, they may have been intended to accompany a set of pictures in which the seven liberal arts were represented. The style of these poems, while much inferior to that of the classical period is free from many of the artificialities which characterize much of the versification of the early Middle Ages."
|
|
