The centrepiece of CorDon at 20,400 words of text is the four-part cycle Metai ("The Year", DM), written in metrotonic hexameters. It consists of the poems Pavasario linksmybės (PL, "The Joys of Spring"), Vasaros darbai (WD, "The Toils of Summer"), Rudenio gėrybės (RG, "The Boons of Autumn") and Žiemos rūpesčiai (ZR, "The Cares of Winter"). It was created between 1765 and 1775 and is the longest autochthonous Old Lithuanian text in existence.
It is joined by two fragments associated with the Metai – the so-called "Fortsetzung" (DF, "Continuation") and Pričkaus pasaka apie lietuvišką svodbą (DPP, "Fritz’s Story about the Lithuanian Wedding") – as well as six pasakos, fables (DP): Lapės ir gandro česnis (LG, "Fox and Stork at Dinner"), Rudikis jomarkininks (RJ, "The Mutt at the Market"), Šuo didgalvis (SD, "The Big-Mouthed Dog"), Pasaka apie šūdvabalį (PS, "The Fable of the Pillbug"), Vilks provininks (WP, "The Wolf as Judge") and Aužuols gyrpelnys (AG, "The Boastful Oak-Tree").
Two parts of the Metai – Pavasario linksmybės and Vasaros darbai – as well as the "Fortsetzung" have been preserved in the original manuscript. The manuscript is kept at the library of the Institute for Lithuanian Literature and Ethnology in Vilnius (Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, Vilnius, Sign.: F1-5259; earlier signature of the Preußisches Staatsarchivs in Königsberg: Msc. A 120a-f. fol.). These texts have been annotated in CorDon based on a diplomatic transcription of the manuscript.
The autographs of the two remaining parts, Rudenio gėrybės and Žiemos rūpesčiai, were lost (at the latest) during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars between 1807 and 1812. Around 1794 Friedrich Hohlfeldt (1763–1829) made a copy of the Donelaitis manuscript. The fate of this copy, kept until the Second World War in the library of Königsberg University, is unknown today.
In 1818, on the basis of the Donelaitis autograph and Hohlfeldt’s copy, Ludwig Jedemin Rhesa (1776–1840) published the first edition of the Metai together with his own German translation of the poems (DMRh 1818). This edition also contains German comments by Rhesa (DMRh 1818, 135–162). In 1824 Rhesa published the first edition of the Donelaitis fables, without a German translation or accompanying texts (DPRh 1824). The second edition of the Metai and fables was published by August Schleicher in 1865 (DMSch, DPSch). It also includes the first edition of "Fritz’s Story" (DPPSch). While Schleicher did not provide a German translation of the Lithuanian texts, his edition does include a comprehensive Lithuanian-German glossary (pp. 163–331). The third edition, including all Lithuanian texts by Donelaitis and a new German translation in hexameters, was published in 1869 by Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (DMN, DPN, DPPN). Nesselmann’s edition includes "critical and explanatory notes", (pp. 195–214) as well as an extensive Lithuanian-German glossary (pp. 215–368).
While none of the three 19th-century print editions can be considered wholly accurate to the manuscript, these are the only editions based directly on Donelaitis’s manuscript and Hohlfeldt’s copy. Nesselmann’s edition deviates least from the original text; therefore a diplomatic transcription of the Nesselmann text has been used as the basis for the CorDon annotation of those texts not preserved in manuscript form.
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