ntic in
their subject matter and handling and in their application of the united
arts of poetry, music, and scene-painting to old national legends such as
"Parzival," "Tannhaeuser," [15] "The Knight of the Swan," and the
"Nibelungen Hoard."

History, too, and Germanic philology took impulse from this fresh
interest in the past. Johannes Mueller, in his "History of the Swiss
Confederation" (1780-95), drew the first appreciative picture of
mediaeval life, and caught, in his diction, something of the manner of
the old chroniclers. As in England ancient stores of folklore and
popular poetry were gathered and put forth by Percy, Ritson, Ellis,
Scott, and others, so in Germany the Grimm brothers' universally known
collections of fairy tales, legends, and mythology began to appear.[16]
Tieck published in 1803 his "Minnelieder aus dem Schwabischen Zeitalter."
Karl Simrock made modern versions of Middle High German poetry. Uhland,
whose "Walther von der Vogelweide," says Scherer, "gave the first
complete picture of an old German singer," carried the war into Africa by
going to Paris in 1810 and making a study of the French Middle Age. He
introduced the old French epics to the German public, and is regarded,
with A. W. Schlegel, as the founder of romance philology in Germany.

A pupil of Bodmer,[17] the Swiss Christian Heinrich Myller, had issued a
complete edition of the "Nibelungenlied" in 1784-85. The romantic school
now took up this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad,
unequalled in sublimity and natural power. Uhland gave a great deal of
study to it, and A. W. Schlegel lectured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2.
Both Schlegel and Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von der
Hagen, inspired by the former's lectures, published four editions of it,
and a version in modern German. "For a long time," testifies Heine, "the
'Nibelungenlied' was the sole topic of discussion among us. . . . It is
difficult for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or even of
the language in which it is written. It is a language of stone, and the
verses are, as it were, blocks of granite." By way of giving his French
readers a notion of the gigantic passions and rude, primitive strength of
the poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathedrals of Europe on
some vast plain, and adds, "But no! even then you can form no conception
of the chief characters of the 'Nibelungenlied'; no steeple is so high,
no stone so h