Siegfried the dragon-slayer is murdered with a spear through the one spot the dragon's blood didn't seal — and his widow spends the rest of the epic arranging the most complete revenge in literature.
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Germany's national epic is a slow-burn thriller: a hero's murder in the first half, and in the second, Kriemhild's decades-long vengeance closing like a trap until an entire warrior court burns in a foreign hall. No medieval poem is more ruthless.
Middle High German sits close enough to modern German — and to English — that the interlinear opens it startlingly fast. The strophes toll like bells; you hear the doom coming stanza by stanza.
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