Old High German lullaby

The discovery of an Old High German lullaby (Althochdeutsches Schlummerlied) was announced in 1859 by Georg Zappert (1806—1859) of Vienna, a private scholar and collector of medieval literature. Ostensibly a 10th-century poem full of surviving pre-Christian mythology, it is considered a literary forgery of Zappert's by many experts who have commented on it.

According to Zappert, in 1852 he noted some words in Old High German on a strip of parchment glued to the spine of a 15th-century paper manuscript (Hofbibliothek Codex Suppl. No. 1668). Zappert says he purchased the manuscript in August 1858, as the recovering of the strip necessitated the destruction of the manuscript binding. Zappert reports that, once the strip was recovered, it turned out it bore an Old High German poem, apparently a lullaby, in five lines, in a hand of the 9th or 10th century:

Zappert reads this as seven alliterating verses, as follows:

translated: "(1) Docke, sleep speedily / leave off crying // (2) Triuwa forcefully / fends off the murdering wolf // (3) May you sleep until morning / dear man's son // (4) Ostara for the child leaves / honey and sweet eggs // (5) Hera for the child breaks / flowers blue and red // (6) Zanfana on the morrow sends // white little sheep // (7) and One-Eye, herra hurt, swift, hard spears." Docke is a term of endearment addressing the child. Triuwa is "truth" personified, Ostara is a hypothetical spring goddess, here portrayed as "leaving eggs for the child", which would be a striking attestation of a pagan origin of easter egg customs. Also extremely striking would be the survival of Tanfana, a theonym only attested by Tacitus in the 1st century, in Old High German form. "One-Eye" would be Wotan, also a very striking confirmation of the Eddaic tradition of Odin being one-eyed, otherwise unattested in West Germanic sources.

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