Muspilli

Muspilli is an Old High German poem known in incomplete form (just over 100 lines) from a ninth-century Bavarian manuscript. Its subject is the fate of the soul immediately after death and at the Last Judgment. Many aspects of the interpretation of the poem, including its title, remain controversial among scholars.

The text is extant in a single ninth-century manuscript, Clm 14098 of the Bavarian State Library, Munich. The bulk of the manuscript contains a Latin theological text presented between 821 and 827 by Adalram, bishop of Salzburg, to the young Louis the German (ca. 810–876). Into this orderly written manuscript, the text of the Muspilli was untidily entered, with numerous scribal errors, using blank pages, lower margins and even the dedication page.

Though in Carolingian minuscules, the handwriting is not that of a trained scribe. The language is essentially Bavarian dialect of the middle or late 9th century. The poem's beginning and ending are missing: they were probably written on the manuscript's outer leaves, which have since been lost. Legibility has always been a problem with this text, and some early editors used reagents which have left permanent stains. There are many conjectural readings, some of them crucial to modern interpretation of the work.

Most of the poem is in alliterative verse of very uneven quality. Some lines contain rhymes, using a poetic form pioneered in the ninth century by Otfrid of Weissenburg (ca. 790–875). This formal unevenness has often led scholars to regard the surviving text as a composite made up of older material and younger accretions—an impression reinforced by the poem's thematic and stylistic diversity. But it is also possible that a single poet deliberately chose to vary the verse forms in this way.

In 1832 the first editor, Johann Andreas Schmeller, proposed as the poem's provisional title what seemed to be a key word in line 57: dar nimac denne mak andremo helfan uora demo muspille ('there no kinsman is able to help another before the muspilli). This is the sole occurrence of this word in Old High German. Its immediate context is the destruction of the world by fire, but it is unclear whether the word denotes a person or some other entity. Distinctively, Kolb (1964, 5f. and 32) took uora as a local preposition ('in front of'), with muspilli signifying the Last Judgment itself, or perhaps its location or its presiding Judge.

...
Wikipedia