flicking through the pages
‘Owê war sint verswunden alliu mîniu jâr!’
(Alas what has become of all my years now past!)
WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE
On 18 September 1906, the Danish university student J. Christian Bonnichsen purchased a pocket dictionary of Middle High German by Matthias Lexer. His was a seventh edition – the first edition is from 1885. A few years back, a German friend gave me this copy.
The year is 1962. Another friend, one of mine at university, asks me what subjects I intend to choose for Part II of the Tripos in Modern and Medieval Languages. He suggests, apart from Dutch literature, the History of the German Language. This latter academic subject is the toughest one I have ever encountered. It involves the in-depth study of philology and the analysis of Old High German texts from the 7th century onwards, so detailed that I must be able to identify the dialect in which they are written. But it also contains a similar analysis of Middle High German texts. And there I strike gold. Part of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde.
Nearly sixty years have past. But whichever page in my life I turn to, six lines I can quote by heart. They are not part of the great love story, just the sort of intermediate information a tenor evangelist would provide in a Bach mass. And whenever I pick up Bonnichsen, I think of my German friend who is no more. But his voice I can hear by heart.
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