As noted in the introduction, the documents relating to Hermann's biography, other than his own Chronica, are an obituary notice and a Vita by his fellow monk Berthold, as well as an anonymous legend preserved in Gb-Ccc 111. All of these have been edited, some more than once, and have been translated into German; Ellinwood included Berthold's obituary notice, in English. These three sources appear together here, in English translation, for the first time.

Berthold's Obituary Notice

[1054] Hermann, the son of Count Wolfrat, crippled in all his limbs since childhood but surpassing all men of that time in wisdom and virtue, died and was buried on his estate at Altshausen.

Berthold's Life of Hermann

[I]

Hermann (meaning “great hero”), son of the religious count Wolfrat, [was] from an early age, in his exterior form, crippled in all his limbs by an enfeebling paralytic affliction but marvelously amplified before all men of his time by the “natural genius” in “the inner man.” The complexities of all the arts and the subtleties of the [poetic] meters he understood completely on his own, by his own observation. Always, from his first years, he gave himself to study of this sort, and without leisure, and accomplished such a complete mastery of divine and sacred literature that he was held by all, from every quarter, in confluences of astonishment and admiration for his erudition and teaching. Yet the structure of his joints was so terribly weak that, once he was set in a place, he was not able to move to any other place by himself without the help of another or turn himself over, but, when placed by a servant in a portable seat, he was barely able to sit hunched over to work on something.

[II]

In this [seat], this useful and admirable foster-son of divine working—though so weak in the mouth, tongue, and lips that he made broken and scarcely intelligible sounds of words, drawn out in whatever way—nevertheless was to his hearers an eloquent and diligent dogmatist, pleasing them with complete alacrity and very quick in disputing and responding to their queries without the least delay.