SIMROCK, KARL JOSEPH (1802-1876)

This article appears in Volume V25, Page 136 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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SIMROCK, KARL JOSEPH (1802-1876) , German poet and
man of letters, was born on the 28th of August 1802 at

Bonn

BONN

, where his father was a music publisher. He studied law at the universities of

Bonn

BONN

and Berlin, and in 1823 entered the Prussian civil service, from which he was expelled in 183o for writing a poem in praise of the French July revolution. Afterwards he was admitted as lecturer at the university of Bonn, where in 185o he was made a professor of Old German literature; and in which city he died on the 18th of July 1876. Simrock established his reputation by his excellent modern rendering of the Nibelungenlied (1827), and of the poems of Walther von der
Vogelweide (1833).
Among other works translated by him into modern German were the Arme Heinrich of Hartmann von Aue (1830)the Parzival and Titurel of Wolfram von Eschenbach (1842), the Tristan of Gottfried of Strassburg (1855). and the Heldenbuch (1843-1849), which he supplemented with independent poems. Before the publication of this

work

WORK

he had shown an

original

ORIGINAL

poetical faculty in Wieland der Schmied (1835) ; and in 1844 he issued a volume of Gedichte in which there are many good lyrics, romances and

ballads

BALLADS

. In 185o appeared Lauda Sion, and in 1857 the Deutsche Sionsharfe, collections of Old German sacred poetry. Of his republications the most popular and the most valuable were the Deutschen Volksbiicher, of which fifty-five were printed between 1839 and 1867. His best contribution to scholarship was his Handbuch der deutschen Mythologie (1853-1855). At an early stage of his career Simrock took a high place among students of Shakespeare by his Quellen des Shakespeare in Novellen, Marchen and Sagen (1831); and afterwards he translated Shakespeare's poems and a considerable number of his dramas. The large number of editions through which Simrock's translations from the Middle High German have passed (the Nibelungenlied more than

forty

FORTY

)

bear

witness

WITNESS
WITNESS (from O. Eng. witan, to know)

to their popularity. An edition of his Ausgewahlte Werke in 12 vols. has been published by G. Klee (1907).
See N. Hocker, Karl Simrock, sein Leben and seine Werke (1877); H. Mintzer, " Erinnerungen an Karl Simrock," in Monatsschrift fur Westdeutschland (1877), and E.

Schroder

's article in Allg. deutsche Biographie.

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