Heldenbücher is the conventional title under which a group of manuscripts and prints of the 15th and 16th centuries has come down to us. Each Heldenbuch contains a collection of primarily German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 epic poetry

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

, typically including material from the Theodoric cycle, and the cycle of Hugdietrich, Wolfdietrich

Wolfdietrich

Wolfdietrich is a German hero of romance. The tale of Wolfdietrich is connected with the Merovingian princes, Theodoric and Theodebert, son and grandson of Clovis; but in the Middle High German poems of Ortnit and Wolfdietrich in the Heldenbuch....

 and Ortnit

Ortnit

Ortnit, or Otnit, German hero of romance, was originally Hertnit or Hartnit, the elder of two brothers known as the Hartungs, who correspond in German mythology to the Dioscuri.-The story:...

.
The Heldenbuch texts are thus based on medieval German literature, but adapted to the tastes of the Renaissance, remodelled in rough Knittelvers or doggerel

Doggerel

Doggerel is a derogatory term for verse considered of little literary value. The word probably derived from dog, suggesting either ugliness, puppyish clumsiness, or unpalatability in the 1630s.-Variants:...

.

The Heldenbücher group was edited in 19th-century German scholarship, by Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen]von der Hagen (Leipzig 1855, 2 vols.), Müllenhoff

Karl Mullenhoff

Karl Viktor Müllenhoff was a German philologist and a student of Teutonic antiquities.-Biography:...

  (Berlin 1866-73, 5 vols.), Simrock  (Stuttgart 1843-49, 6 vols.) and A. von Keller (Stuttgart, 1867).

Manuscripts

A fragmentary manuscript of the first half of the 14th century, containing Eckenlied, Virginal, Ortnit and Wolfdietrich, may be considered a predecessor or the earliest member of this group. Apart from this, the oldest Heldenbuch is a manuscript dated 1472, the so-called Dresdner Heldenbuch, containing Ortnit

Ortnit

Ortnit, or Otnit, German hero of romance, was originally Hertnit or Hartnit, the elder of two brothers known as the Hartungs, who correspond in German mythology to the Dioscuri.-The story:...

/Wolfdietrich

Wolfdietrich

Wolfdietrich is a German hero of romance. The tale of Wolfdietrich is connected with the Merovingian princes, Theodoric and Theodebert, son and grandson of Clovis; but in the Middle High German poems of Ortnit and Wolfdietrich in the Heldenbuch....

, Eckenlied, Rosengarten zu Worms, Sigenot, Wunderer, Laurin, Virginal, the Younger Lay of Hildebrand, with Meerwunder and Herzog Ernst

Herzog Ernst

Herzog Ernst is a German epic from the early high Middle Ages , first written down by an anonymous author from the Rhein region.-Story:...

 added in a later hand. A manuscript of the 1480s contains, Virginal, the tale of Antelan, Ortnit/Wolfdietrich, Nibelungenlied and Lorengel.
There are two Heldenbuch manuscripts of Strassbourg, written between 1476 and 1480.

Prints

The first printed Heldenbuch dates to 1479, bearing the title der helden buch/das nennet den wolfdieterich, putting its main focus on Wolfdietrich, whom it makes an ancestor of Dietrich's.
Later printed Heldenbücher appeared in Augsburg 1491, Hagenau 1509, Augsburg 1545, Frankfurt 1560 and Frankfurt 1590.

Editions

Das Heldenbuch, which F. von der Hagen published in two volumes in 1855, was the first attempt to reproduce the original text by collating the manuscripts. A critical edition, based not merely on the oldest printed text — the only one which has any value for this purpose, as the others are all copies of it — but also on the manuscripts, was published in five volumes by O. Jänicke, E. Martin, A. Amelung and J. Zupitza at Berlin (1866–1873). A selection, edited by E. Henrici, will be found in Kürschner's Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vol. 7 (1887).

Late in the 19th century, editions appeared of Der Rosengarten and Laurin. by G. Holz (1893 and 1897). All the poems were translated into modern German by Karl Simrock and others. See F. E. Sandbach, The Heroic Saga-Cycle of Dietrich of Bern (1906). The literature of the Heldensage is very extensive. See especially W. Grimm, Die deutsche Heldensage (3rd ed., 1889); L. Uhland

Ludwig Uhland

Johann Ludwig Uhland , was a German poet, philologist and literary historian.-Biography:He was born in Tübingen, then Duchy of Württemberg, and studied jurisprudence at the university there, but also took an interest in medieval literature, especially old German and French poetry...

, "Geschichte der deutschen Poesie im Mittelalter", Schriften, vol. i. (1866); O. L. Jiriczek, Deutsche Heldensage, vol. i. (1898); and especially B. Symons, "Germanische Heldensage", in Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie (2nd ed., 1898).