Luther Heliand

This work is the result of a research project by Price (PhD, Germanic linguistics, U. of California at Berkeley) that began with the investigation of the age and authorship of the Old Saxon Heliand manuscript fragment--the Heliand being an epic poem and biblical paraphrase that recounts the life of Jesus in the style of Germanic saga--which was found in Leipzig in 2006 and claimed to be the oldest Heliand manuscript fragment found to date by its discoverer. During his investigations, the focus of the research turned to the connections between the manuscript and a rumor about Martin Luther having possessed an ancient Germanic biblical codex and the role of that codex in Luther's translation of the New Testament Gospels. He compares his own transcriptions of the six known Heliand manuscripts in order to see where they overlap with each other, as well as with Luther's translations, while also conducting a historical investigation of the connections of the Heliand to Leipzig (the geographical provenance of the rumor linking Luther with a Germanic biblical codex) and the Heliand fragment's origins and likely location prior to Leipzig. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Timothy Blaine Price received his PhD in Germanic linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as James R. Gray Lecturer of reading and composition and as a lecturer of German. He also served as an adjunct instructor of German at the College of Alameda. He is currently pursuing his Habilitation in Historical Comparative Linguistics as part of the LOEWE-funded ?Digital Humanities? Project at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.