The author of the poem is unknown. The most plausible hypothesis as to his actual personality makes him an Austrian knight of about 1140, possibly a member of the Kürenberg family, who lived in the neighborhood of Linz, on the Danube. A Kürenberg of the twelfth century is the oldest court poet who used in his lyrics the same strophic form that is characteristic of the "Nibelungenlied," but that the two poets are identical is by no manner of means a certainty. In the same way, the place of origin of the poem is a matter of supposition. In all probability, however, it arose in southeastern German territory in Austria. Although the poet knows the region on the Rhine about Worms, he has an infinitely wider acquaintance with Austrian localities of which he makes specific mention. It was in Austria, too, at this time that the beginnings arose of the court lyric poetry, that Minnesangs Frühling, as the Germans strikingly characterize the period, that presently blossomed out into one of the fullest expressions in all its history of German life and thought. Bartsch, in the introduction to his edition of the "Nibelungenlied," has most admirably summarized this whole matter. According to him, it was an Austrian poet who, before the middle of the twelfth century, united songs sung at his time and oral tradition, known to him as well as to everybody else, into a single whole. How far folk-song and tradition had anticipated him in this is no longer to be ascertained, but it may be inferred from the Northern form of the legend that it had long since taken place. It remained to him, however, to arrange the whole in its details of sequence of action, to fill out the gaps left by popular song and story, and to give it the impress of his own day, which it so unmistakably bears. That this is not in accord with other ideas of authorship and origin must nevertheless be stated. Karl Lachmann, one of the most astute, if not one of the most mistaken, critics of the poem, taking Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer for his model, set up the theory that has since played an important part in the discussion of the genesis of the "Nibelungenlied."