The correct adjective-noun phrase (modern German) is “meine Augen” (accusative plural”. “MeineN Augen” is dative plural (indirect object) and flat out impossible here. Older German readily drops a final -e on adjectives, whether in everyday speech or for poetic reasons (rhythm, sounding folksy). The famous Bach example is (Bach on left, “correct” modern German on right):

Ein’ fest Burg ist unser Gott, / Eine feste Burg…

Ein’ gute Wehr und Waffen. / Eine gute Wehr…

Both Burg and Wehr are feminine (“die”) nouns. (Never mind WaffeN - big can of worms.)

The un-present -e may be left unmarked or may be replaced by an apostrophe. I see some “now I close my eyes” German texts without the apostrophe, some with, and some with tacit “correction” to “meinE”. Note too that schliess / schlie? is “correctly” schliesse / schlie?e. (My doggone email spellchecker wants to change schliess to schlep!).

A trickier instance of dropped -e occurs in a cantata almost as prominent as Feste Burg: Aus tiefer Not (BWV 38), which our Portland Bach Cantata Choir is rehearsing tonight in preparation for a farewell concert and then performance in Leipzig 11:30 am, Tuesday, 11 June, in the Nikolaikirche, along with Feste Burg and Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit (BWV 115). The opening chorale has:

dein gn?dig Ohr neig her zu mir

und meiner Bitt sie ?ffne

FOUR -e endings have been dropped, as have two other endings of a different kind that I’ll explain shortly. I’ve put them back here:

deinE gn?digEN OhrEN neigE her zu mir

und meiner BittE sie ?ffne

The basic word for “ear” is “das Ohr”. The plural is “die Ohren”. It is possible for people, and certainly for God, to bend down one ear, or both, or turn a deaf ear or ears. If that were the case, modern non-colloquial German would have “dein gn?digES Ohr”. But the second line, directly translated, is “and open __ to my plea”. If “dein gn?dig(es) Ohr” is truly singular, “sie” is impossible, because Ohr is a neuter noun and its accusative (direct object) pronoun is “es”. “sie” can be feminine singular nominative or accusative (she OR her) or plural nominative or accusative (they OR them). Yes, it can be translated as “it” if the corresponding noun is feminine, but within German, “sie” and “Ohr” are incompatible grammatically.

But all the early sources have “sie”. Here is Luther’s German of 1524:

Herr Gott erh?re mein ruffen, Dein gnedig oren her zu mir (NO neig)* und meyner bit sie offen.

“oren” is clearly plural. That is also the word in Ps. 130:2, the inspiration for the hymn:

Herr, h?re meine Stimme! La? deine Ohren merken auf die Stimme meines Flehens.

So the original intent was “earS” - at least in the “original” German. Someone else can check the Vulgate, the Septuagint and the Hebrew. “Correct” modern German would be the text I gave above with all the re-supplied “E” and “EN” endings.

It is marvelous to see how the German has been adjusted at various times and how the translations try to make sense of it all. I’ve seen hymnals and such with “dein gn?dig Ohr” retained and “sie” replaced by the grammatically consistent “es”. The rhythm for singing is undisturbed. It would be difficult to sing “deine gn?digen Ohren” so that the grammar is a “correct” fit with the original “sie”.

The translations vary in their approaches. Some simply translate “sie” as “it” and ignore that it would be incompatible with “dein gn?dig Ohr” if the dropped -e endings are simply overlooked. ?Our group is using the Carus edition. It has “your ear bend down to me and listen to my pleading”. The periphrase of the second phrase removes the incompatibility by converting “open (?ffne) it to my pleading” to the result (listen) of that opening of the ears.

Short commercial here (and I think I’ve earned it): My book “When God Sang German: Etymological Essays about the Language of Bach’s Sacred Cantatas” (Amazon) has chapters about Bach’s vocabulary and grammar, and also part of a chapter about whether that feste Burg is really a fortress or something else. If you don’t want to buy the book, email me and I’ll send you relevant PDFs.

If you DO want to buy it, consider this: I can sell author copies, which I get cheap(ly), but by contract I cannot undersell Amazon. At our Portland BCC concerts we use the book for fundraising. I donate copies to the group, people buy them from the group at the list price, and the proceeds all go to BCC. When people buy from Amazon, I donate all the royalties to the group as well, but then Amazon gets a cut. So I could send you a book and you could send money to our choir (best yield for the choir), or I could have Amazon send you the book and you could send money to the choir.

See email address below, as well as links to my personal-professional website and to my Amazon author page.

Current book project: “Printing Bach: Technology, People, Aesthetics, Economics, and a Tragedy”. Hope to have it out in 1.5 years, and I’ll do a presentation about B?renreiter at the ABS conference in Atlanta in September. The focus is the technology of printing, not manuscript study, editing, and publishing. Think chunks of lead, messy ink, woodcuts, engraving plates, creaky presses, lithography, offset printing, and some interesting people. The tragic one is Henri Hinrichsen, long-time owner and director of Edition Peters in Leipzig, to whom the book will be dedicated. Civic benefactor etc. etc. but then murdered at Auschwitz. Am yisrael chai.

*About “neig”, to bend or incline, as one’s ear: That, too, is a clipped form. The “full” form is “neige” (second person singular imperative). Bach’s “neig” is clipped to fit the rhythm, so you could call it “poetic license”. But Goethe, that greatest of German poets, retained the “neigE” in what I regard as one of his greatest pieces of poetry. It happens that it too is based in Psalm 130 and almost certainly echoes Luther’s hymn. In Faust, the seduced, abandoned and pregnant Gretchen - think about this if you go to Leipzig and eat at Auerbachs Keller, where part of Faust is set - prays to Mary in her prison cell as she awaits execution for killing her newborn:

Ach neigE,

Du Schmerzenreiche,

Dein Antlitz gn?dig meiner Not!

My translation:

Thou woman so rich in sorrows,

in your grace

turn your face

down to my misery!

“Neige” and “gn?dig” are from the shared sources already discussed. “Neige” has that -e ending because “Schmerzen(s)reichE” simply cannot drop the final -e. Where Luther and Bach have Bitte, with God bending His ears to “pleading”, Goethe brings in Not, “misery”, almost certainly from “aus tiefer Not”.

Schubert set it as “Gretchen im Zwinger”, D 564.