History Literature / Nibelungenlied

Technically, the poem is written in four line roughly hexameter stanzas, with strong pauses in the middle of each line, rhyming AABB, and with the final line of each stanza usually lengthened by an extra foot. The language of the poem is Middle High German, ''i.e''., the language spoken in what is now southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, from about the 11th to the 14th centuries. Modern Germans will be able to guess roughly what a sentence is about, but without training they won't be able to make out details, let alone pronounce it correctly, much as with modern English-speakers in regard to Chaucer (though the ''Nibelungenlied'' is some two hundred years more removed from the modern language even than the ''Literature/{{The Canterbury Tales}}''). Thus:

Technically, the poem is written in four line roughly hexameter stanzas, with strong pauses in the middle of each line, rhyming AABB, and with the final line of each stanza usually lengthened by an extra foot. The language of the poem is Middle High German, ''i.e''., the language spoken in what is now southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, from about the 11th to the 14th centuries. Modern Germans will be able to guess roughly what a sentence is about, but without training they won't be able to make out details, let alone pronounce it correctly, much as with modern English-speakers in regard to Chaucer (though the ''Nibelungenlied'' is some two hundred years more removed from the modern language even than the ''Literature/{{TheCanterburyTales}}''). Thus:

Technically, the poem is written in four line roughly hexameter stanzas, with strong pauses in the middle of each line, rhyming AABB, and with the final line of each stanza usually lengthened by an extra foot. The language of the poem is Middle High German, ''i.e''., the language spoken in what is now southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, from about the 11th to the 14th centuries. Modern Germans will be able to guess roughly what a sentence is about, but without training they won't be able to make out details, let alone pronounce it correctly, much as with modern English-speakers in regard to Chaucer (though the ''Nibelungenlied'' is some two hundred years more removed from the modern language even than the ''[[Literature/TheCanterburyTales]]''). Thus:

Technically, the poem is written in four line roughly hexameter stanzas, with strong pauses in the middle of each line, rhyming AABB, and with the final line of each stanza usually lengthened by an extra foot. The language of the poem is Middle High German, ''i.e''., the language spoken in what is now southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, from about the 11th to the 14th centuries. Modern Germans will be able to guess roughly what a sentence is about, but without training they won't be able to make out details, let alone pronounce it correctly, much as with modern English-speakers in regard to Chaucer (though the ''Nibelungenlied'' is some two hundred years more removed from the modern language even than the ''[[Canterbury Tales]]''). Thus: