He is known for his recovery of the poetic traditions of Germanic languages such as Anglo-Saxon and Old Saxon, as well as for his discovery of Sievers' law.

He was educated at Leipzig and Berlin, and became professor extraordinarius of Germanic and Romance philology at Jena in 1871, receiving a full professorship there five years later.

This seemingly elementary analysis was significant because of the difficulty experienced by previous scholars in identifying where the poetic line began and ended.

Moreover, even though it was clear that some words were of greater importance than others and were thus supposed to be stressed, there were few limitations on the length of the unstressed sequences, which made the identification of the poetic line even more difficult.

In 1891 he became an editor of Paul and Braune's Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur ("Contributions to the history of the German language and its literature"), and contributed sections on runes, Gothic language and literature, and Germanic metre to Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie ("Outline of Germanic philology," Strassburg, 1891 et seq.).