Notes
Weis' "Ancestral Roots. . ." (141:16) gives Oda as OTTO's mother. Noattempt is made to identify Oda's parents. See the following note, whchpresents the possibility that Oda was the
daughter of BILLIUNG, DUKE OF SAXONY and his wife, Aeda. (RIN 2164). AEDAis theorized to be a daughter of PEPIN, KING OF ITALY (RIN 1194) andgranddaughter of CHARLEMAGNE.
Subject: Ottonian descent from Charlemagne
Date: 1997/04/28
Author: Matman
. "I came across this descent when I was looking up Henry the Fowler'sancestry, in an article by E. Hlawitschka in RheinischeVierteljahrblatter, 1974, p128 . . .
. The evidence/argument for this descent goes like this:
There are a number of entries among a large collection of documentsconcerning the abbey of Corvey in Westphalia, Germany (Codex traditionumCorbeiensium, ed. J.Falke) concerning the ancestry of Countess Oda, wifeof Ludolf, and grandmother of Henry the Fowler. These are:
Nata fuit Oda ex Aeda seu Attala Caroli Magni filii anno 806
(Falke, p760). That is "In the year 806 was born Oda by Aeda-Attala,daughter of Charles the Great". . There is a charter of the Bishop ofHalberstadt in 1121, which
mentions comitissa Oda regia stirpe orta. That is "Countess Odadescended (or born of) the royal line"
. As Oda died in 913, it would seem unlikely that she was 107,
moreover her own parents are usually said to be Billung and Aeda.
. However Hlawitschka suggests she was actually the daughter of adaughter of Pippin IV of Italy (d.810). The evidence for this is:
. Another entry in these Corvey documents (K.Eckhardt, StudiaCorbeiensia, II, p477) mentions that countess Oda had founded acommunity of nuns in honor of St.Laurent in 885. In this entry she iscalled Oda comitissa Pippin regis Italiae ex filia neptis. That is"Countess Oda neptis of Pippin king of Italy, from a daughter." Now_neptis_ can mean niece, but the traditional meaning I think, isgrand-daughter, which is the meaning which seems to make the most
sense here. So Oda was the grandaughter of Pippin IV, by one of hisdaughters.
. Einhard in his life of Charles (ch. 19), mentions the 5 daughters ofking Pippin, who he says Charlemagne took care to bring up after thedeath of his son. One of these was called Atula, another Adalheid.Putting all this evidence together, it would seem likely that this Atula,daughter of Pippin of Italy, was the Aeda-Attala, who was confused as adaughter of Charlemagne himself, who later married a man called Billung,and was the mother of Oda, wife of Ludolf. Hlawitschka
goes on to suggest that it was this Aeda-Attala/Atula daughter of Pippinof Italy who was born in 806, rather than Oda herself.
. This would mean however, that Luitgarde, daughter of Oda was distantlyrelated to her husband Louis II (d.882) of Germany."
