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The date of the so-called ‘Aachener Karlsepos‘, a panegyrical epic about Charlemagne, is controversial. Whereas some believe, it is a complete poem, written in summer 799 at Paderborn, when pope Leo III. visited Charlemagne, especially Dieter Schaller takes a view, that it is the only preserved third book of an epic, which originally had four books and ended with the imperial coronation of Charlemagne; that means, that it must have been composed after 800. I was able to confirm this thesis by a literary interpretation of the whole text in 1997, but now it is possible to present other arguments, too. In the Carlias, an epic written in the 15th century by the Florentine poet Ugolino Verino and first edited 1995, which presents the medieval legends about Charlemagne fighting against the Saracens in the form of a Vergilian epic, we can find many traces of the Carolingian epic. Furthermore it is possible to reconstruct some lost scenes of the ‘Karlsepos‘ by comparing the Carlias with the epic of Ermoldus Nigellus, dedicated to Louis the Pious: Ermoldus, who used the ‘Karlsepos‘ very extensively, probably was not known to Verino, because you cannot find any clear citations of his poem in the Carlias; on the other hand in many scenes Ermoldus has some specific details in common with Verino, which partly cannot be paralleled otherwise. Especially this is the case in the scene of Charlemagne’s coronation in the last book of the Carlias, where Verino seems to have used the corresponding scene of the ‘Karlsepos‘ today lost – one further argument for dating the Karlsepos in the years after 800.
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