The Nibelungenlied Poet

The poet of the Nibelungenlied left no name; scholars suppose that he lived around 1200 in the Danube region, probably in the service of the bishop of Passau. Familiar with the manners and fashions of the courtly world, he reworked Germanic hero legends handed down for centuries, among them memories of the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom by the Huns in the fifth century, into a vast chivalric epic. Almost forgotten in the late Middle Ages, the poem was rediscovered in 1755 and hailed as 'the German Iliad'; Wagner's cycle The Ring of the Nibelung draws on it.