SOURCE: “The Reception of the Nibelungenlied in Germany from the Klage to the Twentieth Century” in The Nibelungenlied, Twayne Publishers, 1984, pp. 84-101.

In the following essay, McConnell offers an overview of the Nibelungenlied's influence on German literature.

If the number of popular and artistic works based on the Nibelungenlied may be considered evidence of the attraction the epic held for subsequent generations of readers and theatergoers, then we may certainly conclude that the poem has proved to be one of the most inspiring “sources” in the history of German literature. I have already considered in the Introduction the extent to which the Nibelungenlied has captured scholarly interest from the time of Obereit and Bodmer to the present. But what of the influence the work exerted in the literary sphere subsequent to its genesis in the form known to us from the turn of the thirteenth century? Actually...