HILDEBRANDSLIED. This invaluable example of Old German alliterative poetry is contained in a MS. originally belonging to the library of Fulda, and now preserved at Cassel. It is written on the first and last pages of a volume of Biblical and theological contents by two contemporary hands apparently belonging to the beginning of the 9th century. The conclusion of the poem is unfortunately wanting, evidently from want of space. From such misreadings as man for inan, axApuas for wuas or was (with p for the Runic w sign sometimes used here as in Old English MSS.), it is manifest that our text was not written down from memory,—as has often been assumed,—but is a transcript from an older original. This conclusion is confirmed by the state of the language of the fragment, which shows a curious mixture of Low and High German forms that can never have existed in any living dialect of Germany, but can only be explained as the result of an attempt made by a Low German scribe to adapt the forms of a High German original to his vernacularidiom....
The fragment is mostly taken up with a dialogue between Hildebrand and his son Hadubrand. When Hildebrand followed his master Theodoric the Great, exiled from Italy by Odoacer, he left his young wife and an infant child behind him. At his return to his old home, after thirty years’ absence at the Hunnic court, he is met by a young warrior and challenged to single combat. Before the fight begins, Hildebrand, asking for the name of his opponent, and discovering his own son in him, tries to avert the fight, but in vain. “Then they let their horses run with their sharp spears, and then they hewed their white shields until they were beaten to pieces with their weapons.” With these words the fragment stops abruptly, giving no clue as to the issue of the combat. It is certain, however, from allusions to the tale made in the Old Norse Asmundar Saga, that it must have been fatal to Hadubrand. But in the later traditions both of the Old Norse Thidrika Saga (13th century), and the so-called Jüngere Hildebrandslied—o. German popular song preserved in several versions dating from the 15th to the 17th century, but evidently originating at an earlier time, — Hadubrand is represented as defeated simply, and obliged to recognize his father.
The Ηildebrαηdslied was discovered and published for the first time as a prose story, as early as 1729; but it was not till 1812 that its metrical character was recognized by the brothers Grimm. Since that time numerous reprints and critical editions have been published, among which Lachmann’s text holds the foremost rank as to critical exactness and sagacity, although some of the metrical rules laid down by Lachmann, and followed in his text, have since been shown not to be applicable to the Old German alliterative verse in which the Hilctebrandslied is written. ®
9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 11, p. 814 [498 words — estimated reading time: 3 minutes]
HILDEBRANDT, Eduard (1817-1868), was born in 1817, and served his term as apprentice to his father, a house-painter at Dantzic. He was not twenty when he came to Berlin, where he was taken in hand by Wilhelm Krause, a painter of sea-pieces. Like other artists who have earned a name for subtle and rapid execution, he worked at first in a formal, smooth, and timid fashion. Several early pieces exhibited after his death,—a breakwater, dated 1838, ships in a breeze off Swinemiinde (1840), and other canvases of this and the following year,—show Hildebrandt to have been a careful student of nature, with inborn talents kept down by the conventionalisms of the formal school to which Krause belonged. It is difficult to say what the outcome of his art would have been if Hildebrandt had not felt other influences than those of his native schools. Accident made him acquainted with masterpieces of French art displayed at the periodical exhibitions of the Berlin Academy, and these awakened his curiosity and envy. He made up his bundle and wandered to Paris, where, about 1842, he entered the atelier of Isabey and became the companion of Lepoittevin. In a short time he sent home pictures which might have been taken for copies from these artists. Gradually he mastered the tricks of touch and the mysterious secrets of effect in which the French at this period were already so perfect. He also acquired the necessary skill in painting figures, and having done this he returned to Germany, unsurpassable in technical execution, and well skilled in the rendering of many kinds of landscape forms. His pictures of French street life, done about 1843, are impressed with the stamp of the Paris school, but they reveal at the same time a spirit eager for novelty, quick at grasping, equally quick at ...rendering, momentary changes of tone and atmosphere in varying space and medium. After 1843 Hildebrandt, under the influence of Humboldt, extended his travels, and in 1864-65 he actually went round the world, But whilst his experience became enlarged his powers of concentration broke down. He lost the taste for detail in seeking for scenic breadth, and a fatal facility of hand diminished the value of his works for all those who look for composition and harmony of hue as necessary concomitants of tone and touch. In oil he gradually produced less, in water colours more, than at first, and his fame will probably rest on the sketches which he made in the latter form, many of which are known to the general public by means of chromo-lithography. His course may best be compared to that of a meteor, being breathlessly rapid, brilliant, and charged with colour. No other had the same art of combining elements singly unpicturesque into a picturesque and striking whole, and this chiefly by contrasts of tint and observation of natural phenomena. Fantasies in red, yellow, and opal, sunset, sunrise, and moonshine, distances of hundreds of miles like those of the Andes and the Himalaya, narrow streets in the bazaars of Cairo or Suez, panoramas as seen from mastheads, wide cities like Bombay or Pekin, narrow strips of desert with measureless expanses of sky,—all alike display the bravura of a master who had innumerable admirers in his day on account of this facility, and deserved all the admiration he received, subject to the merited reproach that all these fireworks would have been more satisfactory if combined with deeper meditation on the art of composition and more patient study of detail. Hildebrandt died young at Berlin, on the 25th of October 1868. His pictures are scattered in vast numbers throughout Germany. But good selections are accessible in the royal palaces and in the collections of Borsig, Raabe, and Ravené at Berlin.
HILDEBRANDT, Theodor (born at Stettin 1804, died at Düsseldorf 1874), was a disciple of the painter Schadow, and, on Schadow’s appointment to the presidency of a new academy in the Rhenish provinces in 1828, followed that master to Düsseldorf. Bred in the academy of Berlin, and finished under Schadow (1820-24), Hildebrandt began by painting pictures illustrative of Goethe and Shakespeare; but in this form he followed the traditions of the stage rather than the laws of nature. His artificial modes of thought were not, however, without admirers, and he produced rapidly Faust and Mephistopheles (1824), Faust and Margaret (1825), and Lear and Cordelia (1828). He visited the Netherlands with Schadow in 1829, and wandered alone in 1830 to Italy; but travel did not alter his style, though it led him to cultivate alternately eclecticism and realism. At Düsseldorf, about the year 1830, he produced Romeo and Juliet, Tancred and Clorinda, and other works of the same kind which deserved to be classed with earlier ones; but during the same period he exhibited (1829) the Robber and (1832) the Captain and his Infant Son, examples of an affected but kindly realism which captivated the public of the time, and marked to a certain extent an epoch in Prussian art. The picture which made Hildebrandt’s fame is the Murder of the Children of King Edward, of which the original, afterwards frequently copied, still belongs to the Spiegel collection at Halberstadt. It challenges comparison with a similar composition by Paul Delaroche, though rather to Hildebrandt’s disadvantage. Hildebrandt chose the moment when the children are asleep, and the murderers pauseere they smother their victims with a pillow. Delaroche with subtler sense of artistic propriety represented the princes seated on their bed, unconscious of the near approach of their assassins, whose vicinity is betrayed by a streak of light at the bottom of the door and the watching of a dog. The execution of Delaroche is spirited and delicate, that of Hildebrandt finished and smooth. But the German master, who was below Sohn and Schadow in power, is also naturally far below his French competitor. Comparatively late in life Hildebrandt tried his powers as an historical painter in pictures representing Wolsey and Henry VIII., but he lapsed again into the romantic in Othello and Desdemona, a fair replica of which, in Schulte’s collection at Düsseldorf, gives a good idea of his shiny, ineffective, technical execution. After 1847 Hildebrandt gave himself up to portrait painting, and in that branch succeeded in obtaining a large practice.
9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 11, p. 814 [635 words — estimated reading time: 4 minutes]
No thesaurus entries found for "Hildebrand".
No Bible verses found for "Hildebrand".
This site uses cookies to remember your display preferences (search sources and editions, Bible version, auto-link, images, light/dark theme). No personal data whatsoever is collected. Privacy Policy
