Annolied

The Annolied ("Song of Anno") was composed around 1100 in Early Middle High German rhyming couplets by a monk of Siegburg Abbey.

Dating

A principal point of reference for the dating is the mention of Mainz as a place of coronation. The German kings were usually crowned in Aachen, and the naming of Mainz in this connection most likely refers to the coronation either of the counter-king Rudolf of Rheinfelden in 1077 or that of Emperor Henry V in 1106.

Content

The Annolied was an encomium to Bishop Anno II of Cologne (d. 1075), later Saint Anno, who was the founder of Siegburg Abbey.

The poem consists of three parts: the religious or spiritual history of the world and its salvation, from the creation to the time of Anno II; the secular history of the world up to the foundation of the German cities (including the theory of the world empires derived from the vision of the Book of Daniel); and finally the "Vita Annonis", or the biography of Bishop Anno II.

A recent interpretation (Dunphy, Herweg) sees this threefold structure in the context of the poet's remark in the prologue that in the beginning God created two worlds, one spiritual and one earthly, and then he mixed these to create the first human, who, being both, was a "third world". The poem then charts spiritual and secular history and finally shows the two culminating in the biography of the man who stands at the centrepoint of history. This is a remarkable and highly original historiographical approach.