Author Description

The Late Middle Low German (henceforth 'MLG') Rhytmi Mensales of Johannes Junior from 1601 is the earliest attestation of poetry featuring 'liver-rhymes'. Chapter 1 explores the widespread popularity of this genre following the printing of the Rhytmi Mensales. Versions in Early New High German (henceforth 'ENHG') followed that either were translated directly from or closely resemble the Rhytmi Mensales in form, and this spread to multiple Germanic languages. The ceremonial context of the liver-rhymes, where one receives an animal organ and recites a stanza before it can be passed on to the next person, is reminiscent of a custom described in the late fourteenth-century Volsa þattr from Olafs saga hins helga hin mesta. Liver-rhymes are also nearly identical to the modern Faroese drunnur, a rhyming tradition that has been independently linked to Volsa þattr. Chapter 2 is an edition of title page, reverse side, and all 216 stanzas of the Rhytmi Mensales. Evidence will be provided in Chapter 3 showing that ENHG influenced the orthography / phonology, morphology and lexicon of the Rhytmi Mensales. Multiple orthographic signs of this influence permeate the Rhytmi Mensales, including 'Dehnungs-h' and before (instead of ). Social mechanisms, such as prestige and occupational jargon, were often the vehicle for ENHG influence on MLG. Chapter 4 illustrates that, despite the growing prestige of ENHG at the expense of MLG already in the late fifteenth century, certain orthographic conventions from the Lubeck variety of classical MLG proved to be tenacious. These include word-final and word-medial, word-medial and word-final, word-medial and word-final, as well as in all positions (Lasch 1918). In Chapter 5, examples from the edition (see Chapter 2) will be compared with dialect data from sources like Peters' (2012) Variablenkatalog. Data, such as doubling of the consonants d t m n p and Einheitsplural forms ending in -(e)n, suggest that the dialect footprint left by the compi