Editing Alliterative verse (section)

===Available texts===
The [[Old High German]] and [[Old Saxon]] corpus of ''Stabreim'' or alliterative verse is small. Fewer than 200 Old High German lines survive, in four works: the ''[[Hildebrandslied]]'', ''[[Muspilli]]'', the ''[[Merseburg charms]]'' and the ''[[Wessobrunn Prayer]]''. All four are preserved in forms that are clearly to some extent corrupt, suggesting that the scribes may themselves not have been entirely familiar with the poetic tradition.
Two Old Saxon alliterative poems survive. One is the reworking of the four gospels into the epic ''[[Heliand]]'' (nearly 6000 lines), where Jesus and his disciples are portrayed in a Saxon warrior culture. The other is the fragmentary ''[[Old Saxon Genesis|Genesis]]'' (337 lines in 3 unconnected fragments), created as a reworking of Biblical content based on Latin sources.

In more recent times, [[Richard Wagner]] sought to evoke these old German models and what he considered a more natural and less over-civilised style by writing his ''[[Der Ring des Nibelungen|Ring]]'' poems in ''Stabreim''.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Millington |first1=Barry |title=The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World |date=2012 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-998695-8 }}{{page needed|date=December 2023}}</ref>