I. Introduction: The Significance of Epic for National Identity

The heroic epic *The Nibelungenlied* as the literary status of the representative work of Middle High German and its dual narrative structure, tracing the media evolution of this work from oral transmission in the 5th century AD to written codification in the late 12th century. The rediscovery of "Manuscript C" in 1755 returned this slumbering medieval epic to the German intellectual horizon, with Bodmer being the first to analogize it with the *Iliad*, proposing the reception concept of the "German Iliad." In the 18th century, Germany lagged behind England and France in political, economic, and cultural domains, and national division combined with the absence of national identity gave rise to an urgent longing for a national epic. *The Nibelungenlied*, with its Germanic historical narrative and Middle High German form, timely responded to this *Zeitgeist*. Herder's discourse on national character being rooted in language and poetry, and Goethe's assertion that every independent nation must possess its own epic, jointly provided theoretical support for the nationalized reception of the epic; Goethe further placed *The Nibelungenlied* alongside Homeric epics within the "classical" category, emphasizing its manifestation of healthy vitality and "true pagan" characteristics. The collective creative attribute of heroic epics makes them naturally become the vehicle of the nation's "collective voice." The 19th-century Romantics, building upon this foundation, "Germanized" reinterpretation of the epic content, ultimately constructing it as a national epic embodying the German national spirit; this reception paradigm, though not purely a political product, profoundly refracted the anxiety of German national identity formation. The establishment of the epic's "national character" was not self-evident from the text itself, but rather depended on a historical process in which documentary conditions and interpreters actively reconstructed meaning amid national crises, imaginings of linguistic community, and appeals for cultural revival.

II. "The Poem of Loyalty": The Formation of National Interpretation

Discusses the formation process of the German Romantics' national interpretation system of *The Nibelungenlied*. The Romantics were not a literary school in the strict sense, but rather an intellectual genealogy from the late 18th to the first half of the 19th century centered on research into Middle High German literature and mythological legends, encompassing early, middle, and late Romantic scholars. They reshaped German cultural identity through linguistic reconstruction and mythological interpretation, making the epic a carrier of national memory, a marker of linguistic development, and a symbol of national spirit. The core figure Siegfried was endowed with three divine attributes: embodiment of light, eternal warrior, and world spirit, forming a binary opposition with the destructive elements constituted by the dragon, Kriemhild, and the Nibelung treasure. Schlegel inherited the "German Iliad" view, praising the epic as a "natural wonder" comparable to Homer, emphasizing its dual essence of artifice and spontaneity and the condensation of German character. Uhland further developed this interpretation, proposing that the epic was "the poem of loyalty," viewing Kriemhild's revenge as the ultimate proof of loyalty, with his reception concept becoming the paradigmatic template for nationalist interpretation. During the Biedermeier period, influenced by natural sciences, Görling constructed a transhistorical national emotional community through romantic symbols such as the "German oak" and "Rhine waters," treating heroic legends as eternal symbols of national spirit.

III. "The Epic Creates Itself": The Philological Construction of the German National Epic

Discusses how German Romantics, against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, shaped *The Nibelungenlied* into a core symbol of the German national epic through philological construction. In 1807, Hagen first compiled and published this epic, placing it within the historical context of national spiritual reconstruction, emphasizing the search for missing spiritual strength from national heritage, and enabling medieval texts to re-enter modern horizons and be transformed into poetic resources. In 1810, Hagen launched the "original language edition," marking an important turn in reception history: the epic began to be systematically collated and academically systematized as an Old German document, involving methods such as manuscript comparison, orthographic arrangement, grammatical analysis, and metrical restoration.

The early Romantic Schlegel compared *The Nibelungenlied* to Homeric epics, advocating the fusion of ancient and modern horizons through "re-creation," using poetics as a bridge to eliminate barriers of understanding. The middle Romantic Grimm held a diametrically opposed stance, emphasizing the inviolability of medieval texts, opposing any translation, abridgment, or rewriting, believing that "the glory of old poetry cannot be revived in the form of new poetry." Lachmann's 1826 critical edition represented a stricter philological orientation, attempting to reconstruct the oldest textual form through manuscript comparison.

Grimm proposed the core reception concept of "the epic creates itself," defining *The Nibelungenlied* as a folk epic and national epic transcending individual creation, a natural product of the nation's collective unconscious creativity, mysteriously generated "as water condenses and drips from clouds." He inherited Herder's thought on national spirit being rooted in folk poetry, endowing folk poetry with nearly sacred qualities, and resolutely opposing Arnim and Brentano's romanticized adaptations of folk songs. Grimm believed the epic depicted German national character and its historical destiny through symbolic images, possessing irreproducible national and homeland attributes, and should be preserved in its original state. His research drive was deeply embedded in nationalist patriotic sentiment, constructing a nationalist discourse system after the German Wars of Liberation through academic participation, making the epic a bond connecting national origins, historical processes, and present existence.

IV. Conclusion

Discusses the scholarly debate between Schlegel and Grimm surrounding *The Nibelungenlied*, revealing that although the two employed vastly different research paradigms—Grimm emphasizing the primordial nature of popular oral tradition, Schlegel focusing on the historicity of individual poetic refinement—they converged in serving the construction of German national identity. The reception history of the Romantics presents a clear trajectory of ideologization: the "Nibelungen fever" during the Wars of Liberation gave birth to the national epic paradigm, late 19th-century textbook interpretation further sanctified Germanic spirit, the theme of "loyalty" was shaped as the national essence, and it continued to serve as a nationalist educational tool until World War II. According to Gadamer's theory of the fusion of horizons, this interpretation was essentially the Romantics' projection of their own pre-understanding onto the text, making the epic a footnote to the spirit of the age rather than a presentation of its authentic context. Through aesthetic intensification of heroic images, dissolution of historical complexity, and metaphorization of individual fate as collective spirit, the Romantics systematically constructed a German national mythological system, strengthening national subjectivity cognition and endowing the people with spiritual conviction in creating history.