"As a medievalist, I am very interested when a new novel is not only set in the German Middle Ages, but also uses the famous Nibelungenlied as a framework, although this formulation is not entirely correct. The starting point for Conny Burian's fascinating literary draft was a somewhat absurd thesis by Berta Lösel-Wieland-Engelmann from 1980 that the anonymous poet was a woman, which has not found any resonance in research and also lacks any evidence.
But that is not the point here, because Burian has written a fictional work that ultimately aims to interpret the creation of this heroic epic from a new perspective and at the same time to trace the fate of the protagonist, Hilde, which turns out to be very complicated and problematic, making it almost impossible to provide a brief summary here. The creation of the Nibelungenlied is the subject of discussion, and Hilde is by no means the poet; rather, she works as a scribe, recording and developing the literary invention of a terminally ill Lorenz von der Aue, although for many reasons she is not actually allowed to work in a literary or copying capacity, apart from religious-didactic works.
I had a very good reading experience and am pleased that Burian has adapted the Nibelungenlied in such a creative way, even if a great deal has been changed and treated in a new way. The author has obviously done intensive research, but then decided to creatively redesign her material and not to be put into a literary-historical straitjacket. The Nibelungen poet turns out to be a successful work of fiction and is definitely recommended to today's readers, who might even develop an appetite for medieval literature."
(Excerpts from: Albrecht Classen, TRANS-LIT2, 2024)
Machine translated from German.
