"Histoire poétique des Mérovingiens" by Godefroid Kurth is a historical and philological study written in the late 19th century. The work investigates how epic oral traditions and popular legend shaped the earliest narratives of the Merovingian kings, especially in sources like Gregory of Tours, Fredegar, and the Gesta Regum Francorum, and seeks to distinguish poetic invention from recoverable history. It sets the Frankish beginnings within the wider Germanic epic milieu and proposes a disciplined method to sort legend from fact in early Frankish annals.
The opening of the study traces its origin to classroom readings of Gregory of Tours, where Kurth noticed uneven tones and a mosaic of disparate pieces—prompting research that revealed a strong oral-traditional element in Merovingian historiography. The introduction defines epic as the primitive form of history, explains how legend and song precede and long coexist with written annals, criticizes historians for discarding legendary matter wholesale, and credits philology with identifying epic markers in putatively historical tales. It then surveys scholarship from Wolff and the Grimm brothers through Fauriel, Ampère, Schlegel, Junghans, Lecoy de la Marche, and others, culminating in Rajna’s argument for a Merovingian epic cycle, while faulting notable historians for ignoring these insights; the author announces his aim to apply this lens and apportion legend and history systematically. At the start of Book I, the sources are framed by evidence that Germanic peoples preserved history in song (citing Tacitus) and by examples from Goths and Lombards (via Jordanes, Cassiodorus, Ammianus, and Paul the Deacon), including legendary cycles around Hermanaric, Attila, Theodoric, Alboin, and Authari. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
