SOURCE: “Feminist Repercussions of a Literary Research Project,” Atlantis, Vol. 6, No. 1, Fall, 1980, pp. 84-90.

In the following essay, Lösel-Wieland-Engelmann provides a personal account of her experiences in promoting the idea of female authorship for the Nibelunglied.

The following experiences may show how a woman who never was much involved in feminism can suddenly be made aware of a multiplicity of problems that are peculiar to women.

Up to a quiet day in August 1977 I fulfilled my usual duties as a middle-aged part-time secretary to a small number of professors of German. Then I was given some lecture notes to type, the contents of which I found rather strange. They dealt with the Nibelungenlied¹ (NL), an extremely well-known medieval epic that had been meticulously studied for over 200 years, and about which large library shelves had already been filled. And yet the lecture notes stressed again and again that...