Rules for the Endgame

Jan-Dirk Muller is a professor at the Institute for German Philology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich. William T. Whobrey is a lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University and an assistant dean of Yale College.

• Preface to the English TranslationPrefaceIntroduction1. Variations of the Legend2. Heroic Narration and Epic Composition3. Nibelungian Society4. Nibelungian Anthropology5. The Shrouding of Visibility6. Spaces7. Disrupted Rules of Interaction8. The Failure of the Courtly Alternative9. Deconstructing the Nibelungian WorldNotesWorks CitedIndex

Muller's argumentation is thorough and his endnotes and bibliography are expansive; Whobrey's translation flows. Choice 2008 It is an exceptional treat that Johns Hopkins University Press has translated from German into English one of the most important, ground-breaking books on medieval studies of the past decade... Mueller offers a new reading of one of the major canonical texts of German medieval literature but also pioneers an innovative approach to medieval texts in general. -- Bettina Bildhauer Times Literary Supplement 2008 Jan-Dirk Muller's ground-breaking and controversial study of the Nibelungenlied... is an important book for medieval studies, and it is greatly to be welcomed that it is now available in an American translation and thus accessible to a larger audience. -- Almut Suerbaum Modern Language Review 2009 This is literary scholarship of a very high order indeed, and Muller's methods of reading a text can, I believe, be very illuminating to scholars in other areas beyond Germanic languages and literatures. -- Shami Ghosh H-Net Reviews 2010