sometimes i end up on wild goose chases for only the gods know what and find super cool stuff on the net.

to wit:
http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/csg/0911/4/medium

the scanned pages of the oldest known book with written examples in the german language. it is a latin-german dictionary, written about 780 or so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrogans

cool.