Einhard
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The popular ballads, or cantilènes, as French writers have styled them, where the exploits of the great Charles were sung and handed down from his own to later days, formed at once the basis of the longer chansons de geste and of such spurious relations as Turpin's Chronicle. Wholly distinct from sober history, as recorded in works such as Eginhart's "Memoir of Charlemagne," written in Latin, and therefore accessible to but few, they were composed in the language of the people, uncommitted to writing, and consequently subject to all the diversifying and differentiating influences of oral tradition."--History of Fiction (1814) by John Colin Dunlop |
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Einhard (c. 775 – March 14, 840 AD) was a Frankish scholar and courtier. Einhard was a dedicated servant of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious; his main work is a biography of Charlemagne, the Vita Karoli Magni, "one of the most precious literary bequests of the early Middle Ages."
Literary context
Historians have traditionally described the work as the first example of a biography of a European king. The author tried to imitate the style of that of the ancient Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, who is most famous for his Lives of the Caesars. Einhard's biography used especially the model of the biography of Emperor Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire.
