SHEEP AND SACKPIPES

Leaping headfirst into the macabre picaresque maelstrom that is Simplicius Simplicissimus, I am immediately rewarded with a raucous evocation of herdsman-royale King David, and how his example solaces Teutonic everyman Melchoir Sternfels as he protects his father's flock of sheep from wolves with the aid of his trusty Sackpfeiffe (i.e. bagpipes). 

In his words,

damal gleichete ich wol dem David auſſer daß jener an ſtatt der Sackpfeiffe nur eine Harpffe hatte welches kein ſchlimmer Anfang ſondern ein gut Omen fuͤr mich war

Englished:

"So I was much like David -- though in place of a bagpipe he only had a harp -- which was no bad start but a good omen for me..."

Dann von Anbegin der Welt feynd jeweils hohe Pesonen Hirten gewesen wie wir dann vom Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, seinen Sohnen und Moyse selbst in H. Schrifft lesen welcher zuvor seines Schwehers Schaf huten muste ehe er Heerfuhrer und Legislator uber 600000 Mann in Israel ward.

 "Since from the beginning of the world high persons have been shepherds, as we read in Holy Scripture of Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his sons, and of Moses himself, who tended his in-law's sheep before becoming the leader and lawgiver of 600,000 men in Israel."

The novel, written by the fantastically named Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, recounts the miseries and misadventures of the aforementioned Teutonic everyman during the Thirty Years War -- an unimaginably destructive catastrophe that was basically WWII and WWI rolled together.

From vague references throughout the years I've gathered that it's something like a cross between Eine Frau in Berlin and a Huckleberry Finn. Whether this impression has any basis in reality remains to be seen. 

p.s. I'm reading the excellently produced online edition on the DTA Deutsches Text Archiv website, which features facing pages from the original, a facsimile and the normalized orthography.