Walafrid or Walahfrid was one of the most prominent luminaries of the latter part of the Carolingian Renaissance, most famous for his poems and his botanical studies, but also important in reflecting the thinking of the time on Purgatory.
Walafrid was a native of Alemmania in southwest Germany, and seems to have acquired the name Strabo or squinted from a genuine physical feature. He was educated at the monastery of Reichenau, on an island in the Rhine. Here, as a teenager, he met Gottschalk, with whom he remained friends for the rest of his life. It was also during this time that Walafrid wrote a number of poems, including his famous Visio Wettini, written when he was only 18. The poem described a vision which the monk Wetti, one of Walafrids tutors, experienced the night before his death, and was apparently based on a prose version of Wettis own description. Accounts of visions were popular in the ninth century indeed, the part of Gregory the Greats Dialogues that deals with them was one of the most copied works of the time. The Visio Wettini, however, was one of the longest, and the first to take a poetic form indeed, the first to be cast as literature rather than a simple report. Thus, Walafrids work can be seen as a sort of fore-runner of Dantes, as Wetti is taken on a tour of the afterlife by an angel. The tone is harsh, as Walafrid focuses on the torment of immoral priests, almost to the exclusion of anyone else although Charlemagne is also found suffering peculiarly unpleasant torments. Apart from the rigorous moral preaching of the work, it is most interesting as an early account of Purgatory: Charlemagne, although suffering, will ultimately find his reward, and we are told of one abbot currently purging his sins on a mountain before moving on to heaven.
After this work, Walafrid moved to Fulda, to study under Rabanus Maurus; but his poems from the time suggest that he did not get on well with Rabanus, an outspoken opponent of Gottschalk. He did, however, correspond favourably with Agobard of Lyon. By 829, Walafrid was at the court of Charlemagnes son Louis the Pious at Aachen, where he became tutor to his son, the future Charles the Bald. In 833, however, following Louis defeat at Lügenfeld, Charles was imprisoned and Walafrid disappeared: he seems to have gone to the monastery at Weissenburg.
Louis was reinstated in 834, and Walafrid seems to have returned to his service, writing some more poems in a suitably flattering tone. In 838, when Charles came of age and no longer needed a tutor, Walafrid was rewarded for his work by being made abbot of Reichenau. There was evidently some political motive behind this, as the monastery was friendly to Louis the German, Louis the Pious son and sometime enemy, and the emperor doubtless wanted an ally as abbot there.
At Reichenau, Walafrid produced a number of writings, including the prose Liber de exordiis et incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum, an unusual work describing the origins of church practices, mingled with edifying moral and spiritual teachings. He also wrote his most well known work, De cultura hortorum, one of the first studies of herbs and their properties. The work consists of 27 short poems, based on Walafrids own experience of working in the monastery garden, and the different plants of the garden and their uses. Walafrid is also traditionally credited with compiling a gloss on the scriptures which in later centuries would become the Glossa ordinaria, most associated with Anselm of Laon.
However, Walafrid died young, drowned while crossing the Loire on a diplomatic mission from Louis the German to Charles. A sort of common-place book of Walafrids, containing autobiographical notes and extracts from authors such as Bede and Isidore of Seville, was discovered in 1950 but remains unpublished.
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Oops. I just did exactly what I was criticising... drawing vague generalities 
. Spot on, thanks for the reminder.
