HILDEBRANDSLIED

English Song of Hildebrand Old High German alliterative heroic ballad on the fatalistic theme of a duel of honour between a father and a son. The fragmentary ballad, dating from c. 800, is the sole surviving record of Old High German heroic poetry. Its hero, Hildebrand, appears in Germanic legend as an elder warrior, a magician, and an adviser and weapons master to Dietrich von Bern, the poetic incarnation of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great. In the Song of Hildebrand the hero is forced into a duel by the aggressions of a young warrior, Hadubrand, who does not know that Hildebrand is his father. Though the fragment stops short of a conclusion, it leaves no doubt that Hildebrand kills his son. An inferior 15th-century version, The Younger Lay of Hildebrand, ends in the reconciliation of the two men.