THE OLD HIGH GERMAN PERIOD (c. 750-1050) There are no records which can justify us in inferring that the continental Germanic tribes possessed a written literature be fore the age of Charlemagne. But the sagas out of which the German national epics of a later date were welded originated in the great upheaval of the 5th century known as the Volker wanderung or "Migration." Thus one might speak of an earlier period of unwritten poetry. When the vernacular literature began to emerge in the 9th century, it was merely a faint reflection of the activity of the monasteries; and this, with very few exceptions, Old High German literature remained. Translations of the liturgy, of Tatian's Gospel Harmony (c. 835), of fragments of sermons, form a large proportion of it. Rarely, as in the so-called Monsee Fragments, and at the end of the period, in the prose of Notker Labeo (d. 102 2 ), does this ecclesiastical prose attain any kind of literary style. But it had no vitality of its own; it virtually sprang into existence at the command of Charlemagne, whose policy with regard to the use of the vernacular in place of Latin was liberal and far-seeing ; and it docilely obeyed the tastes of the rulers that followed, becoming severely orthodox under Louis the Pious, and consenting to extinction when the Saxon emperors withdrew their favour from it. Of the poetic fragments the most interesting are the Merseburg Charms (Zauberspruche), the Wessobrunn Prayer (c. 780), the Muspilli, an imaginative description of the Day of Judgment, and the Ludwigslied (881), the first German historical ballad. The Gospel Book (Libor evangeliorum) of Otfrid of Weissenburg (c. 800-87o) is the earliest attempt to supersede alliteration in German poetry by rhyme ; but for the only genuine poetry of this epoch we have to look to the Low German races. To Saxon tradition we owe the earliest extant fragment of a national saga, the Lay of Hildebrand (Hildebrandslied, c. 800), and a Saxon poet was the author of a vigorous alliterative version of the Gospel story, the Heliand (c. 83o), which is worthy of being described as an epic. Of the existence of a lyric poetry we only know by hearsay; and the drama had nowhere in Europe yet advanced beyond an ecclesiastical function. Such as it was, the vernacular literature of the Old High German period enjoyed but a brief life, and the literature of the loth and I ith centuries again reverted to Latin. The Lay of Walter (Waltharilied, c. 93o), by Ekkehard of St. Gall, the moralizing dramas of the nun, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, the Ecbasis captivi (c. 94o), earliest of all the beast epics, and the romantic adventures of Ruodlieb (c. although not in German, foreshadow the future develop ments of German poetry.