Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen was born in Schmiedeberg in 1780 as the illegitimate child of a Brandenburg nobleman. During his law studies in Halle (1797-1800) he was captivated by Friedrich August Wolf’s lectures on Homeric poetry. After his graduation he nevertheless first pursued a legal career and entered public service in Berlin. There he was again caught by a famous lecture series: A.W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über schöne Litteratur und Kunst (1803-04). It brought the Nibelungenlied to his notice; von der Hagen – backed by his mentor Johannes von Müller, a long-standing champion of this ancient German epic – began working on a modern reworking. In 1805 he published a first version, followed by an edition of the entire text in 1807. With its feistily nationalistic preface, which invoked the ancient blood-and-vengeance tale as an example of German courage to be heeded under the shadow of Napoleon’s triumph and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the book was not only a critical, but also a commercial success. Despite carpings from the Grimm brothers and, later, from Lachmann, who disapproved of von der Hagen’s modernizing text presentation, it launched the Nibelungenlied into its status as Germany’s national epic, and also enabled von der Hagen to focus fully on his scholarly career. In a short time he established himself as a prominent specialist in medieval German literature and – thanks to a recommendation by Heinrich Luden – was granted a doctorate from the University of Jena. Subsequently, von der Hagen obtained a position at the newly founded University of Berlin as the very first professor of German literature. None of this helped to lessen the Grimms’ professional jealousy.

After only one academic year, von der Hagen – due to a lack of financial compensation and career perspectives – already relocated to Breslau. There he was primarily occupied with the reorganization of the library, under the regional Silesian direction of his friend Johann Gustav Büsching, with whom he had collaborated on the Deutsche Gedichte des Mittelalters (1808) and the Literarischer Grundriß zur Geschichte der Deutschen Poesie (1812). Together with Bernhard Joseph Docen, the two had also founded the short-lived Museum für altdeutsche Literatur und Kunst (1812). In the years 1816-17, von der Hagen – accompanied by his fellow-student Friedrich von Raumer – undertook a state-sponsored journey through Germany, Switzerland and Italy in order to search for more German manuscripts. The – rather meagre – fruits of this field trip were presented in his Denkmale des Mittelalters (1824). In 1818, von der Hagen secured his long-awaited professorial tenure. He lectured on the Nibelungenlied, the German language and Germanic/Scandinavian mythology, and with Henrik Steffens and E.T.A. Hoffmann published a collection of Geschichten, Sagen und Märchen in 1824. In that year, he moved back to Berlin, where he chaired the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache und Alterthumskunde and – from 1834 onwards – edited its journal Germania. His scholarly career was crowned by his appointment as member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1841.

Von der Hagen’s scholarly reputation was not so much based on groundbreaking ideas or innovative research, but mainly on a sustained productivity of widely-appealing text editions, translations and collections of medieval poetry. His main projects were Der Helden Buch (1811, 1820, 1855), the Minnelieder (1838) and, above all, the Nibelungenlied, of which he published several versions – retranslations (1807, 1824) and editions of the original manuscripts (1810, 1816, 1820, 1842). He also immersed himself in Scandinavian literature. Motivated by its obvious parallels with the Nibelungenlied, von der Hagen published translations of the relevant sections of the Elder Edda in 1814-15 – provided by the Danish librarian Rasmus Nyerup. As a result of this sustained productivity, von der Hagen ensured for himself a central and prominent position in the emerging scholarly field of Germanistik. His reputation, however, was continuously challenged by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who in repeated reviews denounced the erroneous and superficial nature of von der Hagen’s text editions. von der Hagen’s reputation did not survive these repeated attacks by the younger generation; even before his death in 1856 he was already slipping into oblivion.