[1] She was Professor of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian Linguistics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

During World War II, she and her mother were evacuated to stay with family in Eisenberg; her father had been recruited into the German army.

[1][2] Narten's Habilitation thesis, completed in 1971, was a philological and linguistic study of the Zoroastrian sacred text Yasna Haptaŋhāiti.

[1][4][5] Narten's first book, based on her PhD dissertation, was published in 1964, and is described by Almut Hintze as a 'masterpiece' which 'has remained an essential tool for grammatical analysis in Vedic and Indo-Iranian Studies to the present day'.

[7] Her later work included monographs on Zoroastrian religion and religious texts, in particular the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, which had been the subject of her Habilitation thesis,[8][9] and (with Karl Hoffman) on the Avestan script,[10] as well as numerous articles in the field of Indo-Iranian studies.