The Nibelungenlied has long played a dominant role in German cultural history and politics. It is the medieval epic that had distinct roots in a dramatic, poetic tradition that was grounded in the Germanic past. Its narrative matter and themes are, primarily, those of a warrior society and of a poetic tradition that is oral rather than literary. The Nibelungenlied, as a text of the High Middle Ages, of its classical period around 1200, thus attempts to integrate, however loosely at times, the values and notions of two societies that essentially were at odds.

In the Middle Ages, narrative matter determined to a large extent its retelling, as the audience was familiar with the outlines and developments of stories often retold. This explains, for instance, why Wolfram insists that his telling of Parzival is the original story, not the one told by Chrétiens de Troyes. The Nibelungenlied, in like manner, reworked the narrative tradition of the so-called Nibelungen matter, incorporating into its narrative frame cultural notions and customs of its own time. Siegfried, the hero of the first part of the epic, was known in the Germanic world as the dragon slayer, a champion who had roamed to unknown lands. In the High Middle Ages, romantic love was a central trope. Thus, for the sake of romantic love, Siegfried allied himself with the Burgundian king in Worms, thereby setting into motion events that would seal his death in a society founded on kinship and honor. In the second part, these values are undermined. The epic has moved from Worms to the court of Attila, the Hun, a reminder of the period, centuries earlier, when Germanic tribes were either his allies or enemies.

The course will center foremost on the Nibelungenlied and include the discrete, though occasionally congruent literary traditions that it has incorporated. We shall study its sources, their narrative forms, and the fictionalized historical events of the Migration Period (fourth and fifth centuries) on which the narrative rests. We shall also examine oral tradition, its conservative and transformational aspects, as well as the demands of a literary culture eager to adapt narrative tales and themes from the past. Concomitantly, we shall explore what was the dominant literary theory for decades, the evolution of the epic from single heroic poems, lost or extant. Now defunct, the theory was a vibrant part of German studies until the modern exploration of orality, story telling in Yugoslavia, initiated its slow demise. Actual recordings of storytellers proved that story telling was dynamic despite the narrative constraints of traditional tales. The study of the Nibelungenlied, a composition of a highly literate age, and of its oral sources reveals conclusively the explorative impulse of this tradition.