page_title: Legends about Theodoric the Great
hierarchical_section_title: Legends about Theodoric the Great
caption_attribution_description: English: Dietrich von Bern and Hildebrand fight against dragons. UBH Cod.Pal.germ. 324 Virginal, fol. 43r
context_page_description: In legends about Theodoric the Great that spread after his death, the Gothic king Theodoric became known as Dietrich von Bern, a king ruling from Verona who was forced into exile with the Huns. The differences between the known life of Theodoric and the picture of Dietrich in the surviving legends are usually attributed to a long-standing oral tradition that continued into the sixteenth century. The majority of legendary material about Dietrich/Theodoric comes from high and late medieval Holy Roman Empire and is composed in Middle High German or Early New High German. Another important source for legends about Dietrich is the Old Norse Thidrekssaga, which was written using German sources. In addition to the legends detailing events that may reflect the historical Theodoric's life in some fashion, many of the legends tell of Dietrich's battles against dwarfs, dragons, giants, and other mythical beings, as well as other heroes such as Siegfried. Dietrich also appears as a supporting character in other heroic poems such as the Nibelungenlied, and is frequently referenced and alluded to throughout medieval German literature.
context_section_description: In legends about Theodoric the Great that spread after his death, the Gothic king Theodoric became known as Dietrich von Bern, a king ruling from Verona (Bern) who was forced into exile with the Huns. The differences between the known life of Theodoric and the picture of Dietrich in the surviving legends are usually attributed to a long-standing oral tradition that continued into the sixteenth century. The majority of legendary material about Dietrich/Theodoric comes from high and late medieval Holy Roman Empire and is composed in Middle High German or Early New High German. Another important source for legends about Dietrich is the Old Norse Thidrekssaga, which was written using German sources. In addition to the legends detailing events that may reflect the historical Theodoric's life in some fashion, many of the legends tell of Dietrich's battles against dwarfs, dragons, giants, and other mythical beings, as well as other heroes such as Siegfried. Dietrich also appears as a supporting character in other heroic poems such as the Nibelungenlied, and is frequently referenced and alluded to throughout medieval German literature.
  Poems about Dietrich were extremely popular among the medieval German nobility and, later, the late medieval and early modern bourgeoisie, but were frequently targets of criticism by persons writing on behalf of the church. Though some continued to be printed in the seventeenth century, most of the legends were slowly forgotten after 1600. They became objects of academic study by the end of the sixteenth century, and were revived somewhat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, resulting in some stories about Dietrich being popular in South Tyrol, where many of the legends take place.
caption: Scene from the poem Virginal: Dietrich von Bern and Hildebrand fight against dragons. Note that Dietrich is breathing fire. UBH Cod.Pal.germ. 324 fol. 43r
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image DateTime": "2013:01:09 00:56:00", "Image ExifOffset": "2154", "Image XPComment": "[104, 0, 116, 0, 116, 0, 112, 0, 58, 0, 47, 0, 47, 0, 100, 0, 105, 0, 103, 0, ... ]", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "0", "Thumbnail YResolution": "0", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4432", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "16797", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "92DAF08BB43E460BB6887684213F4571", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}