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010 _a24023867
040 _aUtSlPG
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_2iso639-1
050 4 _aDC
100 1 _aKurth, Godefroid,
_d1847-1916
245 1 0 _aHistoire poétique des Mérovingiens
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2026
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
500 _aRelease date is 2026-03-07
508 _aLaurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)
520 _a"Histoire poétique des Mérovingiens" by Godefroid Kurth is a historical and philological study written in the late 19th century. The work investigates how epic oral traditions and popular legend shaped the earliest narratives of the Merovingian kings, especially in sources like Gregory of Tours, Fredegar, and the Gesta Regum Francorum, and seeks to distinguish poetic invention from recoverable history. It sets the Frankish beginnings within the wider Germanic epic milieu and proposes a disciplined method to sort legend from fact in early Frankish annals. The opening of the study traces its origin to classroom readings of Gregory of Tours, where Kurth noticed uneven tones and a mosaic of disparate pieces—prompting research that revealed a strong oral-traditional element in Merovingian historiography. The introduction defines epic as the primitive form of history, explains how legend and song precede and long coexist with written annals, criticizes historians for discarding legendary matter wholesale, and credits philology with identifying epic markers in putatively historical tales. It then surveys scholarship from Wolff and the Grimm brothers through Fauriel, Ampère, Schlegel, Junghans, Lecoy de la Marche, and others, culminating in Rajna’s argument for a Merovingian epic cycle, while faulting notable historians for ignoring these insights; the author announces his aim to apply this lens and apportion legend and history systematically. At the start of Book I, the sources are framed by evidence that Germanic peoples preserved history in song (citing Tacitus) and by examples from Goths and Lombards (via Jordanes, Cassiodorus, Ammianus, and Paul the Deacon), including legendary cycles around Hermanaric, Attila, Theodoric, Alboin, and Authari. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cParis: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1893
653 _aFrance -- History -- To 987
653 _aMerovingians
856 4 _uhttps://books.google.fr/books?id=MrhcAAAAcAAJ
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78135
999 _c118855
_d118855