Herder, Percy, and the Song of Songs

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In view of the long-recognized influence of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry upon Johann Gottfried Herder's literary theory, especially upon his “Sturm und Drang” essays and Volkslieder, it comes as a surprise to note that Herder's Lieder der Liebe (1778), containing his German translation of the Biblical Song of Songs as well as his commentary thereon, omits all reference to Percy's earlier English translation and commentary, The Song of Solomon, Newly Translated from the Original Hebrew (1764). To be sure, Percy's work (like Herder's own) appeared anonymously. But in the eighteenth century there were ways of discovering the identity of anonymous writers, as both Percy and Herder knew to their chagrin. Yet in none of Herder's works is there any reference to Percy's Song of Solomon, and in none of his published letters is there any mention of the little book. When one considers Herder's usual scholarly habit of documentation and his willingness to acknowledge sources, one must conclude that he was ignorant of Percy's work. One can speak, naturally, of a permeating influence of the Reliques on this work of Herder's, as one can speak of such an influence on any of his writings. In fact, the thesis of the following pages is that this very influence, fused with a few others having the common denominator of folk-poetry, led Herder to a conception of the Song of Songs quite different from that reached by Percy himself and strikingly similar to Percy's theory in one point only: a negative attitude toward the theory of J. D. Michaelis, which was known to both. The contrast between Herder's and Percy's views of the supposedly Solomonic Song of Songs throws an interesting light upon the critical approach of Herder to a document that could fit perfectly into his definition of poetry as “eine Welt- und Völkergabe” and illustrates the peculiar use he made of the Reliques (along with some other, later works) in the support of his original theory of poetry, which differed so remarkably from that of Percy.