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| The child: Now I must dance and can't yet walk. |
In the university library of Heidelberg there's an old book from 1455-1458, which is really 7 little blockbooks that have been bound into one. One of these 7 booklets is considered the world's oldest dance of death book.
The text is older still, since Heidelberg's library also has a book from 1443-1447 containing a similar text in a mixture of Latin and German. This older book, however, has no pictures and the text only contains the complaints of the humans - Death does not appear. The text has been reused in many later books and has also inspired the dance of death in Basel.
The text is known as Der Oberdeutscher vierzeiliger Totentanz: "Oberdeutscher", because it's in High German — as opposed to the Low German dances in Lübeck, Tallinn and Berlin — and "vierzeiliger" because each verse has 4 lines — as opposed to Heidelberg's other dance of death, the 8-lined der doten dantz mit figuren.
The lines spoken by the dying people are thus much older than those spoken by Death. Originally the text was simply a long series of complaints by dying people from all stations of society, but in the book that we're examining here, the monologues has been turned into dialogues with Death inviting every person to the dance. The result is that the dancing partners are often talking at cross-purposes: Death greets the humans energetically, vivaciously, ironically - even humorously - while the humans ignore Death's words and keep on lamenting.
Nobody would accuse this book of being great art, but remember that this is a blockbook, which means that the entire page — both text and pictures — have been cut from the same matrix. So please send a kind thought to the artist: Not only has he the letters mirror-inverted, but woodcuts are relief prints, which means that the artist has had to cut away all the wood between the letters.
Notice that Death is polite and addresses most people in the plural: ir, euch, ewr (like Middle English 3e, eow, eower(1) and Medieval English ye, yow, youre), except for the cook, peasant, cripple and child, where Death uses the more familiar form and say du, dich, deyn (like in medieval English thou, thee and thine). This peculiarity is not reflected in my translation.
Heidelberg