German
Anonymous (Middle High German)
The Nibelungenlied, the great Middle High German heroic epic, is anonymous. It was composed in the Danube region, probably in Austria, around 1200, and survives in several dozen manuscripts and fragments, of which the chief are Manuscripts A, B and C, copied in the 13th century. Its author drew on older Germanic legends of Siegfried and of the fall of the Burgundians, and set them in the courtly world of the Hohenstaufen age.
The poem is written in four-line stanzas of long lines, each divided by a mid-line pause (the caesura), and tells in thirty-nine "adventures" how Siegfried wins Kriemhild, is murdered through Hagen's treachery, and how Kriemhild, now married to Etzel, king of the Huns, brings about the destruction of the Burgundians. It is the national epic of the German-speaking world and a source for Wagner's Ring cycle.
Major Works (4)
- Gudrun — translated by Mary Pickering Nichols (1889)
- The Nibelungenlied — translated by William Nanson Lettsom (1850; revised edition 1901)
- The Nibelungenlied — translated by George Henry Needler (1904)
- The Nibelungenlied — translated by Daniel Bussier Shumway (1909)
Poems (5)