The next fortnightly book is the Nibelungenlied. A Middle High German epic, it was written about 1200 by a poet whose name we do not know, and, of course, it is one of the major surviving literary works that deals with the Germannic family so dysfunctional its dysfunction passed into unforgettable legend; other works on the same topic that I have done for fortnightly book were Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and the Volsunga Saga in Jackson Crawford's translation. As with both of those works, the author of the Nibelungenlied is attempting to organize prior materials that were often contradictory into some kind of coherent narrative.
I'll be reading the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Arthur Thomas Hatto.
