Karl Joseph Simrock

• 1. Introduction

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  Karl Joseph Simrock was born in Bonn on the 28th of August 1802, the son of a music publisher in a city already steeped in German cultural life. He would grow up to become the man who handed medieval German poetry to the modern world, not as a dusty relic but as a living voice. His most famous achievement, a translation of Das Nibelungenlied into modern German, went through more than 53 editions in his lifetime. That number alone raises a question: what does it take to make a thousand-year-old epic feel urgent to a new generation? And how does a man who began his career in law and civil service end up as a professor of Old German literature, with a government expulsion somewhere in between? Those answers lie in the life Simrock actually lived, which was considerably stranger and more daring than his scholarly reputation suggests.

• 2. From Law to Literature

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  Simrock studied law at the University of Bonn and then at Humboldt University in Berlin, a conventional enough beginning for a young man in early nineteenth-century Prussia. In 1823 he entered the Prussian civil service, which seemed to set him on a safe and predictable path. That path ended in 1830, when he was expelled from government service for writing a poem in praise of the July Revolution in France. The Revolution had toppled the French monarchy that summer, and Simrock's public enthusiasm for it made him politically inconvenient to his Prussian employers. After his expulsion he returned to Bonn as a lecturer, and it was there, in the institution where he had trained as a student, that he would spend the rest of his working life. By 1850 he held a professorship in Old German literature at the same university, a position he kept until his death on the 18th of July 1876.

• 3. Translating the Medieval Imagination

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  Simrock's translation of Das Nibelungenlied appeared in 1827, four years after he entered the civil service and before his political troubles had begun. It was this work that established his reputation, and the more than 53 editions it passed through are a measure of how completely he succeeded in making the old epic readable. He did not stop there. His rendering of the poems of Walther von der Vogelweide followed in 1833, and then came Hartmann von Aue's Arme Heinrich in 1830, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel in 1842, and Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan in 1855. The Heldenbuch, a compilation of heroic poetry, appeared in stages between 1843 and 1849, and Simrock supplemented it with original poems of his own. Each of these projects required not only linguistic skill but a sustained imaginative sympathy with a literary world separated from his own by centuries.

• 4. Original Voice and Sacred Poetry

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  Before the Heldenbuch was published, Simrock had already demonstrated that he could write as well as translate. His Wieland der Schmied appeared in 1835 and showed what the source describes as an original poetical faculty, separate from his gifts as a translator. In 1844 he issued a volume of Gedichte containing lyrics, romances, and ballads. Sacred material drew his attention as well. In 1850 he published Lauda Sion, and in 1857 came the Deutsche Sionsharfe, both collections focused on Old German sacred poetry. These volumes placed devotional texts alongside the heroic and courtly literature he was already known for, broadening the range of medieval writing he was bringing into modern German hands.

• 5. Scholarship and Popular Culture

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  Simrock's most popular scholarly contribution, measured by reach, was the Deutsche Volksbücher, a series of popular books of which fifty-five were printed between 1839 and 1867. These brought folk narratives and traditional stories to a wide readership over nearly three decades. His most rigorous scholarly contribution, by the source's own assessment, was the Handbuch der deutschen Mythologie, published in two stages between 1853 and 1855, a handbook of German mythology that gave the subject systematic treatment. He also turned his attention to Shakespeare relatively early in his career. His Quellen des Shakespeare in Novellen, Märchen und Sagen, examining the sources behind Shakespeare's plays, appeared in 1831 and earned him standing among Shakespeare scholars. He later translated Shakespeare's poems and a considerable number of his plays into German as well. After his death, an edition of his Ausgewählte Werke in twelve volumes was published by G. Klee in 1907, gathering the range of his output into a single collected set.