Heroic lay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Germanic narrative verse genre. For the French verse form, see Lai (poetic form).
The heroic lay (German Heldenlied) is a genre of Germanic epic poetry characteristic of the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages. A lay is a short narrative poem of between 80 and 200 lines concerning a single heroic episode in the life of a warrior from Germanic legend. [1][2] It is distinct from the heroic epic (Beowulf, Nibelungenlied) which combines a sequence of episodes into a longer narrative.[3]