Notker Balbulus

(“the Stammerer”)

(ca. 840–912)

   Notker, called Balbulus (Stammerer), was a monk of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Gall near Zurich, Switzerland. He is known as a composer, a poet, a biographer, and a theorist.

   Notker was born about 840 of prominent Swiss parents, who sent him as a child to study with the monks of St. Gall. St. Gall was a very influential monastery with a valuable musical library. Notker remained as a monk in the abbey for the rest of his life, and aside from being a revered teacher at the school, he is mentioned as holding the offices of librarian, master of guests, and precentor, or choirmaster. Notker was reputed to have been of frail health and to have stammered, but he seems to have had a significant talent for music, and popularized the sequence, a new type of liturgical hymn. This was a hymn sung after the Alleluia and before the Gospel in the Latin mass. Notker composed music and lyrics for these hymns, and in about 880, created a book of hymns containing a number of these sequences.

   In addition to lyrics for hymns, Notker also is known to have written some lives of saints, poems, and letters, and is generally thought to be the anonymous “Monk of St. Gall,” who in 883–84, wrote the anecdotal and idealized biography of CHARLEMAGNE entitled Gesta Caroli (The deeds of Charles). The book, composed for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles the Fat, helped glorify Charles’s great-grandfather Charlemagne as a legendary hero among the German-speaking people. Notker died in 912. Always venerated by the monks of St. Gall, Notker was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1512.

   Bibliography

   ■ Murdoch, Brian O. Old High German Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

   ■ Thorpe, Lewis, trans. Two Lives of Charlemagne. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969.