Walafrid Strabo

Walafrid was born about 808 in Swabia, of poor parents, and was given as a child to the island monastery of Reichenau on Lake Constance. The nickname Strabo means squint-eyed; he seems to have used it himself. He was a quick student, writing verse in his teens, and about 827 he was sent to Fulda to study under Rabanus Maurus, the best teacher in the Frankish world.

In 829 he was called to the imperial court at Aachen as tutor to Charles, the boy who would become Charles the Bald. It was a dangerous place to be. The Empress Judith, Charles's mother, was at the center of a civil war between Louis the Pious and his older sons. Walafrid was made abbot of Reichenau in 838, and when Louis the Pious died in 840 and Lothair took the region, Walafrid was on the wrong side and had to flee. He spent about two years in exile at Speyer before Charles the Bald and Louis the German got him restored in 842.

He drowned in 849, crossing the Loire on an embassy, at about forty-one years old.

He wrote a great deal in a short life. His Liber de exordiis et incrementis rerum ecclesiasticarum, on the origins and growth of the church's practices, is the earliest history of Christian worship in the West: where church buildings came from, why bells are rung, how vestments developed, how the liturgy took the shape it has. Historians of liturgy still use it as a primary source.

He wrote a commentary on the Psalms and other biblical works, rewrote several saints' lives in polished Latin, and edited Einhard's Life of Charlemagne, adding the preface it still carries. He recorded the vision of a monk named Wetti, in verse, one of the more striking medieval accounts of the world beyond death.

His most-loved poem is the Hortulus, the Little Garden: about a hundred and sixty lines on the plot of ground outside his cell, the nettles he had to dig out, the soil he carried in, the sage and rue and horehound and melon and lily and rose, what each was good for, and what each meant. It is one of the earliest garden poems in European literature and reads as though it were written yesterday.

For centuries Walafrid was also credited with compiling the Glossa ordinaria, the standard Bible gloss of the Middle Ages. That attribution has not survived modern scholarship; the Gloss grew out of the school of Anselm of Laon, two and a half centuries later. The correction takes nothing from what he actually did.

Sources: Walafrid Strabo, Hortulus and De exordiis et incrementis rerum ecclesiasticarum; Einhard, Life of Charlemagne (with Walafrid's prologue); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).