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]

Examples

• Old High German
  • The Hildebrandslied
• Old Norse
  • Atlakviða
  • Hamðismál
• Old English
  • The Finnesburg Fragment