The poems, sagas and ballads of early Germanic and Scandinavian societies were a growing field of study in the English-speaking world around the turn of the nineteenth century. A trio of Scotsmen - the writer Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), antiquarian Robert Jamieson (1772-1844) and literary scholar Henry William Weber (1783-1818) - decided to contribute to this field by bringing together their work on 'romances' from the Old German, Danish, Swedish and Icelandic languages, claiming that these poems and tales 'offer a new and interesting subject of speculation to the English reader'. In this volume, published in 1814, each editor contributes a related scholarly essay, but the bulk of the book is taken up with the translated tales, including the German Song of the Nibelungen. This work is an important early contribution by leading Scots scholars to the study and dissemination of such Northern European literary forms.
