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This collection contains poems Walafrid Strabo composed while at the court of Louis the Pious at Aachen, where he was tutor to the young Charles (the Bald). The first and most famous, De imagine Tetrici, is a dialogue between the poet and Scintilla (‘Spark’), his inspiration, in springtime, which describes and criticises the equestrian statue of Theoderic the Ostrogoth brought from Ravenna to Aachen by Charlemagne, before turning to praise of Louis, his sons Lothar, Louis and Pippin, and the empress Judith and her son Charles. Other poems address courtiers such as the archchaplain Hilduin.
The De imagine Tetrici is one of the most important political poems of the Carolingian age, using the image of the Arian king as a foil for the ideal of Christian kingship and offering a portrait of the imperial family in the years before the rebellions of Louis’s sons. It also provides a rare description of a monument at Aachen. Together the court poems show Walafrid as a skilled panegyrist in the tradition of the poets of Charlemagne’s circle.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 114, Parisiis 1852), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.