The Nibelungenlied is the great epic of Germany, the medieval blossom of the Teutonic legends first recorded in the Icelandic Eddas and Sagas and which later bloomed as Wagner's Ring cycle and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It is the poem that Goethe credited with "awakening the 'inner memory' of the Germanic peoples," a cultural awakening that led to the first German unification in 1871. There is no better introduction to it for the English reader than Margaret Armour's beautifully illustrated prose translation.