Friedrich Karl Theodor Zarncke

Friedrich Karl Theodor Zarncke, German philologist, was born in Zahrensdorf, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the son of a country pastor.
He was educated at the Rostock gymnasium, and studied at the universities of Rostock, Leipzig and Berlin. In 1848 he was employed in arranging the valuable library of Old German literature of Freiherr Karl Hartwig von Meusebach, and superintending its removal from Baumgartenbrück, near Potsdam, to the Royal Library at Berlin.
In 1850 he founded the Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland in Leipzig. In 1852 he established himself as privatdozent at Leipzig University. In 1858 he was appointed full professor.

Works

He published an edition of Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, a treatise Zur Nibelungenfrage, followed by an edition of the Nibelungenlied, and Beiträge zur Erläuterung und Geschichte des Nibelungenliedes. He wrote a series of noteworthy studies on medieval literature, most of which were published in the reports of the Saxon Society of Sciences. Among them were those on

the Old High German poem Muspilli
Gesang vom heiligen Georg
the legend of the Priester Johannes
Der Graltempel
the Annolied

Among his other works were:

a treatise on Christian Reuter
a treatise on the portraits of Goethe
Die urkundlichen Quellen zur Geschichte der Universität Leipzig
Die deutschen Universitäten im Mittelalter
''Kleine Schriften''