The manuscript of the Song of Ruodlieb, an epic poem in Latin composed in German territory shortly before the first crusade, was not, however, discovered until the beginning of the 19th century. The philologists who approached the old parchments then came across an exceptional material narrative: travel and adventure, kings, knights and ladies, wars, crimes and trials, stories of love and folklore; a unique creation, ignored and precocious that would come to be considered by some scholars as nothing less than the first novel of chivalry, and its protagonist, young Ruodlieb, as the first polite hero.

Although the anonymous author of the poem - which closes the cycle of the Carolingian Latin epic of which the Song of Valtario was the most exalted testimony - wrote some four thousand hexameters with rhyming leonine, only slightly more than half have reached us, it shows Enough to show the imagination and literary modernity of a text that perfectly amalgamates elements from the most diverse genres and traditions: the epic, the mirror of knights, the legend, the folk tale, the fable, the didactic poem or the saga.