Heroic Epic / Maere and Novellas

The Motif Index of German Secular Narratives from the Beginning to 1400 is an indispensable reference work for narratologists, medievalists, literary historians, historians, ethnologists, art historians, cultural historians. Using the system of the epoch-making Motif Index of Folk Literature by Stith Thompson (1955ff.), this new motif index will catalogue and access all the important narrative motifs in secular narrative literature written in German from the 9th to 14th centuries. The Motif Index of German Secular Narratives provides: a complete catalogue of all the occurrences in each individual work of medieval literature of widespread narrative patterns (such as "Fairies becoming visible through a magic ring", "Salamander resists fire", "Fight with the dragon«, "Strength in battle through a magic belt"), a sophisticated system of indexing and referencing to make it possible to access and research the individual motifs across diff erent works, detailed indices of motifs and names, and keywords belonging to the naming of a particular motif, an effi cient CD-ROM (accompanies volume 6), the complete inventory of motifs in German medieval narrative literature written organised according to international standards.