GERIWAN LITERATURE. FIRST PERIOD (600-800). German literature, as distinct on the one hand from writing in German and on the other from such Teutonic writing as the Bible translations of Ulfilas, begins after the triumphs of the great migration and the conquest of the Empire. Forces that had been engaged in the struggle for dominion turned, about the year 600, to the glorification of the nation's heroes, almost at the same time that similar conditions were forming the Anglo-Saxon epic in England. But the songs of warrior gods and heroes exist only in tradition, and a few late recorded frag ments, such as the Hildebrandslied. Then, with the segregation of the High Germans and their partial conversion, literary activity is largely absorbed by the Church and its interests, and from having been national becomes general, catho lic. That there must have been a considerable body of German poetry in this period, both in Upper and Lower Germany, is made probable by allusions in Latin authors. The central figures
around whom the saga-cycles gathered were Er menrich (Ermanaricus), a Gothic king of the fourth century, Theodoric the East Goth, Attila the Hun, the Burgundian Gunther (Gundica rius), and probably a little later and farther to the north, Siegfried, whom some, however, have thought possibly identical with the Arminius who defeated the Roman legions under Varus. All these sagas, or elements from them, seem to have been connected with one another before the close of the first period. The number of these epic songs was sufficient to suggest to Charles the Great the possibility of collecting them, and he gave orders to that effect. Of the result no trace has survived.