Dec 24, 2009

Nibelungenlied | Critical Overview

The Nibelungenlied was one of the most popular poems of its age, and is probably the best-known Germanic poem from the Middle Ages. Most literary analysis of the poem began after 1800, and soon Germany embraced the poem as a work of nationalism, often comparing it with Homer's Iliad. Essentially, commentary on the Nibelungenlied falls into three categories: the study of source-texts; socio-historical studies; and literary interpretations.

Much of the critical work on the Nibelungenlied since the eighteenth century has been done in German, but English...