Karl Joseph Simrock (Bonn 1802 – Bonn 1876) was among the very first students at Bonn’s newly-founded university (1818), where he followed courses from Ernst Moritz Arndt and A.W. Schlegel, and befriended his fellow-student Hoffmann von Fallersleben. An enthusiastic adept of the new Germanistik and its discovery of ancient German literature, his main role in life was to be a popularizer and to transmute philologically specialist text editions into literary reading for the larger public. His main achievements in this field are his translation of the Nibelungenlied (1827) and Walther von der Vogelweide (1837), and his edition of the Deutsche Volksbücher (1839). These reached numerous reprints throughout the century and established the literary currency as well as the historical canonicity of these “national classics”. Simrock’s national spirit can be seen in his attempts to establish the culturally German base mentality in English classics like Beowulf and Shakespeare. The former he translated into German: Das älteste deutsche Epos (1840). In Shakespeare he traced the plot lines back to popular superstitions and literary motifs, highlighting German(ic) source traditions and their historical primacy: Die Quellen des Shakspeare in Novellen, Märchen und Sagen, mit sagengeschichtlichen Nachweisungen (1831, 2nd ed. 1870). This method overlapped with his mythology as adapted from Grimm in the Handbuch der deutschen Mythologie (1853-55).

Simrock had a special interest in a set of heroic tales collectively known, from their 19th-century editions (by von der Hagen and others), involving semi-mythical characters like Wieland the Smith and semi-historical ones like Dietrich von Bern (identified with Theodoric of Verona). These he edited in a versified synthesis as the Amelungenlied, a series of lays in the mode and metre of the Nibelungenlied, and named after the Gothic Amal tribe from which Theodoric had sprung. It appeared in 1843-69, with a dedication to Wilhelm Grimm.

Simrock’s works, which appeared in 12 collected volumes from 1907, were popular and juvenile reading, turning philological scholarship – typically merging the heroic-literary, the legendary and the mythological – into a Germanic imaginaire for generations of readers, not unlike his intellectual successor Felix Dahn. Simrock was rooted in the Vormärz, which combined national chauvinism with political liberalism; like most of his generation, his nationalism became more strident later in the century, as his war poems of 1870 and the preface to the second edition of his Shakespeare book show.