The Nibelungenlied is from Germany, written in High Middle German, and of the three poems discussed on this site, it has the greatest number of surviving texts at around thirty-seven manuscripts and fragments. The oldest surviving manuscript the St. Gallen (Switzerland) manuscript, and is dated around 1220-1250 CE. The Nibelungenlied manuscript is written on parchment and is believed to have originated in South Tyrol or Salzburg, and it is also called the “St. Galler Epenhandschrift.” The pages use two columns (compared to the older works of Roland and Beowulf, which do not use multiple columns) and is copied by three primary scribes and four secondary scribes (E-codices). The manuscript was purchased by the Monastery of St. Gall in 1768, when parts of the manuscript were separated out; these are held in separate collections in other German locations. Of the three manuscripts, its illuminations are the most detailed and meticulous, and its script is lined up and written with the greatest precision.

In her chapter comparing oral nature of Homeric epics to Middle High German epics like The Nibelungenlied, Sonya Zeman (2022) claims there is clear evidence that the poem was written with the purpose of aiding oral recitation, rather than being read quietly by individual readers or scholars. Those oral recitation cues provide researchers hints about the historical context of the time in which the poem was authored and the purpose of committing it to paper or parchment. According to Zeman (2022, p. 186), the poetic form, textual irregularities, and visual cues on the page,

…have been taken as an argument that the production of the text was based on memory and that the text was “without doubt” composed for recitation in an oral performance. In sum, the Nibelungenlied is thus based on a mixture of literary principles and codification through memory.

Clues in how all three texts are constructed tell us that most who encountered these stories in medieval times would have received them orally, rather than reading the books themselves, and the time between their origins and when they were written explains a lot of the scribal errors scholars today recognize. While literacy existed and books (in this case, codices) were in circulation within certain circles, this was still an oral storytelling culture, and the preference for sharing stories in a poetic verse aids the reader in memorization of these texts for an unable to read.