Angelbert

Who is Angelbert?

Angelbert was a Frankish soldier and poet, possibly from Aquitaine. His "Verses on the Battle that was Fought at Fontenoy" are a first-hand description of the Battle of Fontenoy of 25 June 841, in which he participated with the army of Lothair I. They are an important piece of battle literature from the twilight of the Carolingian Renaissance. Historian Bernard Bachrach has examined them as a source for the emotional effects of battle during the ninth century.

According to his poem, Angelbert fought on the front line, stationed on a hill overlooking a stream. He was the only survivor of the men in his unit. The night after the battle is "especially terrible". The day after the battle he cannot hold back tears, but he urges the other survivors to hold them back. This battle, he says, should be forgotten: Laude pugna non est digna, nec canatur melode.

Two major streams of interpretation of Angelbert's poem exist. The first sees it as a "ballad of victory" rooted in vernacular Germanic poetry. Angelbert is assumed to have spoken Old High German, and the imagery of birds and beasts consuming the corpses of the dead has been assumed to be borrowed from Old High German literature. There is no such surviving literature with such imagery and it is supposed to have existed on analogy with Old English and Old Norse traditions of the same. The imagery is also found in other Carolingian poetry, e.g. of Radbod of Utrecht and Florus of Lyons, and it probably reflects the reality of battle, not Germanic tradition