He would seem to have been born at Jonschwyl on the River Thur, south of Wil, in the modern canton of Saint Gall in Switzerland; some sources claim Elgg to be his place of birth.
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regardless of historical verisimilitude (Pepin the Hunchback, for example, is supposed to have been sent to Saint Gall as punishment for his rebellion, and – in a trope owed to Livy's tale of Tarquin and the poppies – earns a promotion to rich Prüm Abbey after advising Charlemagne through an implicit parable of hoeing thistles to execute another group of rebels).
Peter Dronke believes it was to the dialogic poem Quid tu, virgo by Notker the Stammerer, written probably in the 860s, that the eleventh-century dramatists were responding with their Rachel sequences.
Notker of Liège | Louis the Stammerer | Notker the Stammerer | Notker |