In the Library
The Nibelungenlied
Unknown, 1200
- Form
- Form Poem
- Reading time
- Reading time 7 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Alice Horton
- Chapters
- Chapters 39
- Length
- Length 96k words
£1.99
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About the book
Siegfried rides into Worms with the dragon's blood still on him and asks for the hand of Kriemhild, who has dreamed of a falcon torn apart by eagles. An anonymous Austrian poet composed this Middle High German epic around 1200, gathering older Germanic legend into thirty-nine adventures of rhymed long-line stanzas. The hero wins the Burgundian princess by helping King Gunther master Brünhild, a queen of supernatural strength who must be tricked into a marriage bed. Treachery follows, then murder at a forest spring, then a slow patient widow's revenge that draws every house of the Rhine and the Danube into one final hall. Honour and oath bring on the catastrophe nothing else could. The dream of the falcon was not a metaphor.