The narrator asserts that Kriemhild is innocent because she was motivated by her love to her dead husband, whereas her relatives the Burgundians needed to be punished.
Once all of the dead have been removed, Etzel comes to and laments at length, expressing his despair and his desire to leave the world.
Pilgrim orders a requiem mass sung and asks the messengers to return to Passau so that he can have everything that's happened written down.
In an epilogue, it is explained that Bishop Pilgrim ordered the events of the Nibelungenlied and the Klage to be written down in Latin by a "meister Konrad", from which it has since been translated to German.
[4] This theory is complicated by the fact that the end of the Nibelungenlied clearly does not envision the Klage, meaning it cannot have been planned from the beginning of that epic's composition.
According to Jan-Dirk Müller, the only thing that can be said for certain about the Klage's composition relative to the Nibelungenlied is that it took place before very early in the manuscript transmission of the latter work.
[7] Müller prefers to see the Klage as reacting to the oral tradition behind the Nibelungenlied in many respects rather than to the specific version offered by the poem.
It is possible that Pilgrim is made to be the original source of the poem as an oblique reference to Wolfger von Erla.
The narrator makes clear distinctions between good and bad and can even say with certainty which dead figures went to Heaven and which to Hell.
[19] The Klage even seems to make the events of the Nibelungenlied appear as though they had not just occurred in the narrative time of the poem, but rather in a distant historical past.
[23] The main character of the Klage is the hero Dietrich von Bern, who had been introduced in the Nibelungenlied as an exile living at Etzel's court.
Dietrich organizes the manner in which the characters of the Klage overcome the catastrophe of the last poem, seeing to it that the dead are buried and that survivors are informed.
In contrast to the previous poem, Dietrich appears in complete control of the situation, with unfavorable elements like his hesitancy to enter combat and his tendency to lament in an exaggerated fashion reinterpreted as positive traits.