Verse

Ecloga de Laude Calvorum ad Carolum (Hucbald of Elnon, transmitted by Trithemius)

An Eclogue in Praise of Bald Men, to Charles (Hucbald of Elnon; in Trithemius’s transcription) · 1496first English

The Ecloga de Laude Calvorum ad Carolum — "An Eclogue in Praise of Bald Men, to Charles" — is one of the legendary curiosities of medieval Latin literature: a 133-line poem in which every single word begins with the letter C. It is a lipogrammatic tour de force, an entire mock-encomium conducted under that one constraint — the bald-headed are like the sun, like the moon, like polished bronze, like a clear and unclouded sky — and the constraint is the joke as much as the praise. Composed in the Carolingian ninth century and addressed to the emperor Charles the Bald, it earned its author a small immortality outside his more serious musical and hagiographic writings.

Mainz, 1496 · provisional reading text · Latin / English