three parts: the religious or spiritual history of the world and its salvation, from the creation to the time of Anno II; the secular history of the world up to the foundation of the German cities (including the theory of the world empires derived from the vision of the Book of Daniel); and finally the "Vita Annonis", or the biography of Archbishop Anno II. A recent interpretation sees this threefold structure in the context of the poet's remark in the prologue that in the beginning God created two worlds, one spiritual and one earthly, and then he mixed these to create the first human, who, being both, was a "third world". The poem then charts spiritual and secular history and finally shows the two culminating in the biography of the man who stands at the centrepoint of history. This is a remarkable and highly original historiographical approach. Parts of the Annolied were incorporated into the later Middle High German Kaiserchronik and the two works are often considered together. German origin story The poem includes sections on four German peoples, the Swabians, Bavarians, Saxons and Franks, a typical medieval story, telling in each case of their origins in the classical near east. The Annolied is the first text to give what later became quite a popular motif whereby the ancestors of the Bavarians migrated from Armenia. Excerpt See also Middle High German literature Vita Annonis Minor Notes Editions [Critical edition]. [Diplomatic edition with English translation]. Literature External links Digital images of Opitz's edition Text with English translation Das Annolied (Bibliotheca Augustana) Mittelhochdeutsches Textarchiv (mhgta): full text online Middle High German literature Medieval German poems 11th-century poems 11th-century German poets Christian hagiography Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor