Excerpt from Mahabharata Condensed in English Verse And if we look at the epic literature of other nations, we find much the same. The poem of the Nibelunge, such as we possess it, was composed and written down about a.d. 1200; but we see from the short ballads recording the fates of Sigurd and Brynhild, as preserved to us in the Edda, what the poems may have been like which were used as his materials by the unknown German Homer of the twelfth century. Firdusi, the author of the Persian national epic, the Shah Nameh, Book of Kings, about a.d. 1000, tells us himself what sources he consulted, and how he travelled about from village to village to collect the materials for his great poem.