The book "From Tacitus to Tolkien. The Germanic Trail in Western Poetry" is planned as a yearbook for the Swedish Humanities Association in 2017. The book deals with what has traditionally been called Germanic poetry, from how narrative poems emerged among Germanic tribes during the Migration Period and eventually, in the course of the Middle Ages, developed into masterpieces such as the Old English heroic poem Beowulf, the Old High German knightly poem Nibelungenlied, the Norse Poetic Edda, Old Norse skaldic poems such as Egil Skallagrimsson's The Loss of the Son and Icelandic ancestral sagas such as Njal's Saga. The traces of this poetry in the literature of recent centuries are also discussed. No comprehensive overview of the subject has been published since Andreas Heusler's (1865-1940) Die altgermanische Dichtung (1929), which quickly became an influential classic. However, Heusler's account has aged considerably, mainly because the term 'Germanic' has become obsolete. Modern research has shown that the texts in this tradition were strongly influenced by Latin, Christian and Romanesque medieval literature. Original ideas have been transformed in the Christian spirit and adapted to the medieval European world of thought. The view of oral tradition has also changed. The new book has been written in the light of a completely new research situation and with different scientific starting points.