The New International Encyclopædia/Simrock, Karl Joseph

SIMROCK, sĭm'rṓk, (1802-76). A German poet and scholar. He was born at Bonn, studied there and at Berlin, entered the civil service in 1826, and in 1827 published a translation of the Nibelungenlied, which has become classic in more than fifty editions. He followed this with metrical renderings of Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich (1830), was expelled from the Prussian service for a political poem, and gave himself wholly to literature, modernizing the poems of Walther von der Vogelweide (1833); the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach (1842); Reineke Fuchs (1845); the Edda (1851); Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan und Isolde (1855); the Old Saxon Heljand (1856); the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf (1859); Der Wartburgkrieg (1858); Brant's Narrenschiff (1872); and other less important works. Simrock wrote many works on German legends, proverbs, etc., and also published a study of the sources of Shakespeare. From 1850 till his death he was professor of the Old German language and literature at Bonn. Consult Hocker, Karl Simrock (Leipzig, 1877).