Heroic lay

This article is about the Germanic narrative verse genre. For the French verse form, see Lai (poetic form).

The heroic lay (German Heldenlied) is a genre of Germanic epic poetry characteristic of the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages. A lay is a short narrative poem of between 80 and 200 lines concerning a single heroic episode in the life of a warrior from Germanic legend. [1][2] It is distinct from the heroic epic (Beowulf, Nibelungenlied) which combines a sequence of episodes into a longer narrative.[3]

  1. ^ Hatto 1980, p. 165. "A terse, self-contained, objective, memorized poem of epic-dramatic style imbued with an heroic ethos conveyed with art in a single-stranded plot"
  2. ^ Gloning & Young 2004, p. 42. "a short poem extolling the valour and nobility of character of a great hero of the past."
  3. ^ Heusler 1905.