Evangelienbuch

The present Gospel book, the narrative of the life of Christ according to New Testament tradition, is the first testimony of vernacular biblical poetry in the German-speaking world. Otfrid, a monk and priest at the Alsatian monastery of Weissenburg, likely composed it in the third quarter of the 9th century. The work was wrested from a still clumsy, grammatically unregulated, and orthographically non-standardized (only orally used) language, marking the beginning of German literary history.