YMMV / Nibelungenlied

• Draco in Leather Pants: Much like Madame Defarge, modern audiences find Kriemhild more sympathetic and tragic than perhaps the original author and text intended. This is especially the case in Fritz Lang's really dark film adaptation, but then Lang was a bit of a feminist.
• Epileptic Trees: "After this [Siegfried] straightway slew a Bison and an Elk, Of the strong Aurochs four, and a single fierce Schelch." What on Earth is a schelch? The late paleontologist Björn Kurtén entertained the idea that it was a late surviving Megaloceros.
• Misaimed Fandom: It seems safe to assume that the author wanted to tell a tale of how revenge and Honor Before Reason are not good ways to live your life by. However, the Nazis quite gleefully took the senseless slaughter at Kreimhild's feast as something to emulate. In fact, Göring and Goebbels drew a parallel between what happened at Stalingrad and the doom of the Burgundians and urged the soldiers to do as Hagen had done. What makes this especially weird is the fact that the famous stab-in-the-back myth promoted by the Nazis and other German right-wing extremists cited imagery taken from Hagen doing the same to Siegfried in the epic, and yet it was Hagen and the Burgundians they wanted to emulate? The critic Lotte Eisner hung a lampshade on how the Nazis hijacked and misappropriated the epic, noting that before the Nazis, the epic of Siegfried and Kriemhild had positive associations, with Friedrich Engels citing him as a hero of the common man who was tragically destroyed by the elite nobility.
• Moral Event Horizon: Many will feel that Hagen crosses this by killing Ortlieb, Kriemhild and Etzel's son.