Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Side 41
23
German manuscripts in the Old High German vemacular, edited by K.
Miillenhoff & W. Scherer, revised and re-edited by E. von Steinmeyer.
Our Icelandic creed contains a feature which seems to be rare, i.e.
the articles 9-10 of the above translation. In the German texts, these
articles occur in the eleventh-century first Wessobrun, and in the
twelfth-century Bamberg confessions:2
‘Ich gloubo daz ér also toter in sina sittun giwundot wårt, unde
sament da uz floz bluot unde wåzzer.’
This is the Bamberg text; for our purposes of comparison the
Wessobrun text is wholly identical, and the two have actually been
edited as one text by von Steinmeyer. Both the German - and in
particular the Bamberg - texts are longer and more prolix than the
Icelandic version; moreover, they begin by renouncing the devil and his
works, an item which comes at the end of the Icelandic text.
In Germany these texts, and their early emergence, are bound up
with special developments within the German liturgy in post-Caroline
times.3 The most appropriate point in the Mass for the catechetical
instruction of the people enjoined by the Caroline rulers, would be
after the Gospel, or the sermon. This instruction was built around the
recitation of the Pater and the Apostles’ Creed. From the tenth century
onwards a public confession was added to these texts by the recitation
of an amplified Confiteor in the vernacular (ojfene Schuld). These
German texts, as a rule, are found at the beginning of collections of
sermons.
From the presence of a creed in the form of a German ‘Gemeinde-
SymboP, followed by an amplified Confiteor in the Icelandic Homiliu-
Bok, it would be too rash to infer that these usages were adopted by
the Icelandic Church in the twelfth century. But it should be remem-
bered that the earliest connections of the Icelandic episcopate were
with the German Church. The first bishop of Skålholt, Isleifr Gizurar-
son (1056-80), was educated at the nunnery of Herford in the diocese
of Paderborn; his son, and successor, Gizurr Isleifsson (1082-1118), in
2 E. von Steinmeyer, Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmåler (Berlin
1916), no. XXVIII, p. 138.
3 J. A. Jungmann, Die lateinischen Bussriten in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung
(Innsbruck 1932), pp. 280 sqq.; Idem, Missarum sollemnia2, 1 (Wien 1949), pp. 606
sqq.