古ザクセン語
Eduard Sievers realised that "Genesis B" was originally separate from "Genesis A" in the 1870s: by philological and stylistic analysis, he showed that these lines must have been translated from an Old Saxon (continental Low German) original. In 1894 his hypothesis was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of parts of the Old Saxon original in a manuscript in the Vatican: about two dozen lines of the Old Saxon text coincide almost word-for-word with part of "Genesis B".