Naumann received his Ph.D. at Freiburg in 1968 with a dissertation on translations of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Swedish.

Upon gaining his Ph.D., Naumann was appointed to the Nordic Department of the German Seminar at the University of Zurich.

He subsequently served as a lecturer at the Institute for Nordic Philology and Germanic Antiquity at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Naumann specialized in the study of Old Norse literature, runology and Germanic Antiquity.

He was the author of numerous articles for the second edition of the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde.