The Dance of Death

There's an expression "to look like Death warmed over". The similar expression in Danish is "to look like Death from Lübeck".

I have always wondered what this charming Christmas-city, with its great beer and overly sweet marzipan, had done to deserve such a disparaging sobriquet.

"Death from Lübeck" was a 30 meter painting, showing Death in a long chain-dance with 24 humans - painted life-size - from all classes of society, from pope to infant. Death dances around in the procession, calling people to the dance, but most of the dancers-to-be try to decline. Pictures and text are combined so we have what may be one of the world's first and greatest comic strips.

The painting was destroyed during the 2^nd world war and, anyway, it was only a copy since the original medieval painting from 1463 was replaced by a new one in 1701. On the other hand the painter, Bernt Notke, had made 2 versions of the painting and therefore in Tallinn, Estonia, one may still see his original work and read part of the original medieval text. On this site you'll find drawings and photos from both Lübeck and Tallinn.

When the painting was replaced in 1701, the old medieval text was replaced by a totally new one but, fortunately, the vicar wrote down as much of the medieval text as he could read. This site contains both of those texts plus the German and Danish manuscripts that are based upon the painting in Lübeck.

The purpose of this site is to make the original texts with pictures available on the Internet for the first time in 540 years. I have put focus on presenting the primary sources whether they are in Low German, High German or Danish.

I have tried to translate some of the texts, but notice the many similarities between Medieval Low German and Modern English. Words like "to", "do", "he", "help", "mine", "is", "spare" "water" and "god" are the same - and countless words are very similar: scal/shall, mi/me, hadde/had, respijt/respite, grot/great, pin/pain, wat/what, dat/that, olth/old, junck/young, essche/ask, jw/you etc. etc.

The best way to start is either by reading the historical timeline or to jump directly into the dance by clicking the pictures below:

I would like to thank Patrick Pollefeys and Per-Erik Skramstad for support and inspiration - Prof. Hartmut Freytag for writing his wonderful book - and the kind and helpful people in Copenhagen's main library, The Royal Library and Karen Brahe's Library for their never-ending patience.

Dancing around

The hands are used for navigating back and forth between related pages on the same level. The piper is at the bottom of every page and will bring you one level up in the hierarchy. The horizontal bone is purely ornamental - clicking it won't do anything. Small red numbers in parenthesis(1) are footnotes.