The Heliand is a retelling of the Gospel in Old Saxon. It uses cultural reference-points that would make sense to Vikings, which term I am using approximately: The Three Wise Men are warriors (presumably on horseback), Jesus is wrapped not in swaddling clothes but in a bejewelled raiment, and suchlike.
Here, for example, is the Lord’s Prayer in the Heliand:
Father of us, who art all Thy folk-bairns,
Thou who art on high in the kingdom of Heaven,
Hallowed Thy name here in every world,
Thy kingdom come in strength and craft,
Thy will be done over all the world;
As here on earth; so there above
On high in the kingdom of Heaven.
Give us each day, good Lord, Thy gracious guidance,
Thy holy help, and absolve us, O Warder of Heaven,
From the manifold mischief we do against mankind.
Let not loathsome wights lead us astray,
As is their will and as we are worthy;
But help us against all our evil deeds.
And the Ten Commandments:
That thou shalt not slay;
Neither commit adultery;
Nor steal nor cause strife;
nor swear falsely,
nor bear thou false witness nor be thou too stubborn of mind,
Nor hating nor hateful; commit thou no robbery.
Forsake thou all envy; to thine elders show kindness, to thy father and mother.
Be thou fair to thy friends,
to thy nearest be gracious.
Then wilt thou be granted joy in the kingdom of Heaven, if thou wilt keep this and follow God’s teachings.
The Heliand is the coolest thing I’ve read in years, and almost the only book in living memory I devoured from cover to cover. The book I refer to is the translation by Mariana Scott.
Now, this book has all sorts of copy-errors, not atypically absent or unbalanced quotation marks. The PDF is internally malformed, as all PDFs not put together by me tend to be, and yielded no end of errors when output to plain text or like formats. Most preposterously, the fl ligature was misrendered as R.
Still, I tell anyone who will listen that I am the last severe technical editor extant. Certainly I have all the right tools – in this case, BBEdit and a wide monitor.
Hence I have produced a version of the Heliand in valid HTML that you can read on any device. Go ahead and start reading now.
Ms Scott’s book is licensed under Creative Commons, but in a manner that forbids derivatives. I have ignored this restriction.
Lacunæ in original (actually, original and translation) are noted.
In the Saxon original and in Ms Scott’s translation, considerable whitespace is used within lines. I believe it is there to indicate pauses in meter, as the original is meant as verse to be canted. Such whitespace makes no sense in onscreen presentation because it is to be experienced as a gestalt on a page, hence was elided.
Hours of effort went into rendering largely accurate linebreaks. What I’m more concerned about is the fact that the malformed PDF sometimes diabolically intermingled halves of adjacent lines, only a few of which I managed to catch. The odd thing here is that the translated language is opaque enough that I doubt anyone will notice.
Hanging indents are used to make linebreaks visible on narrow screens and in similar environments.
Æthling/æthling (“A member of a noble family, a prince, lord, baron”) is rendered thus by my preference. The canonical English spelling is in any event atheling, so this is a mistake on Ms Scott’s part (or her publisher’s).
Another rendering of the title Heliand (“Saviour”) is Hêliand. Apparently ê represents a diphthong one would not easily predict.
Ms Scott’s translation uses American spellings (Savior; center), which make no sense at all and have been Canadianized (this also means Anglicized) where possible. I may have missed some.
As a perfectionist, I will inevitably make barely-noticeable corrections from time to time. Note that the only way to copy-edit this thing properly would be to print out what I have here and compare it, line-by-line and word-by-word, against the book and/or PDF. That’s not gonna happen.
As ever, what I am presenting here is valid HTML, i.e., all the syntax is correct.
Now there’s an ePub E‑book version you can try.
There’s an online version that sets Saxon and English verses side-by-side. A rival version, one might say.
You can watch a tubby Aussie Orthobro in an ugly studio get quite a few basic facts wrong on YouTube (that’s how I found out about the Heliand in the first place).
Scott Shell has a whole playlist of analysis.
I did this and you didn’t.
And the second-most-important point: Scott T. Shell told me “What you have done is amazing and worthy of praise.”
Posted: 2025.06.26 ¶ Updated: 2025.07.05–
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