Notker the Stammerer

Notker Balbulus (c. 840-912), also known as Notker of Saint Gall, was a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Saint Gall in what is now Switzerland. He was a major figure in the music and literature of his age, writing in Medieval Latin within the Carolingian world. His nickname, "the Stammerer", refers to a speech impediment he had all his life. He is best remembered for his sequences, a form of liturgical hymn, and for an early biography of Charlemagne.

He was born around 840 to a well-off family near the abbey, and he was educated there alongside Tuotilo and Ratpert, who would also become composers. He held several posts at the monastery, including librarian and master of guests, and eventually ran its school. One of his pupils was Solomon, later Bishop of Constance. He turned down offers to lead other abbeys and died at Saint Gall on 6 April 912.

His musical output centres on sequences, hymns in which new words were fitted to a melody. In the Liber Hymnorum, completed in 884, he arranged melodies and texts according to the Church calendar. His preface explains that he was inspired by an antiphoner brought from the abbey of Jumièges, and that setting words to melodies made them easier to memorise. His style is simple and practical.

His historical work, the Gesta Karoli Magni, is also called De Carolo Magno and was dedicated to Charles the Fat. It is not a straightforward biography. Instead it presents two books of anecdotal, moral tales about Charlemagne and his family. Historians often compare it unfavourably with Einhard's life of the emperor, pointing to its anecdotal tone and factual errors, though recent scholars have found a coherent vision of society and politics in it. He also compiled a martyrology around 900 and wrote a life of Saint Gall.

His legacy is twofold: musical, through spreading the sequence in German-speaking lands, and literary, as a source for the ninth century. He was venerated at Saint Gall but never formally canonised. His beatification is usually dated to 1512, though sources differ on which pope granted it. Later scholars at the abbey took their names from him.