He was educated at the Rostock gymnasium, and studied (1844-1847) at the universities of Rostock, Leipzig and Berlin. In 1848 he was employed in arranging the valuable library of Old German literature of Freiherr Karl Hartwig von Meusebach (1781-1847), and superintending its removal from Baumgartenbrück, near Potsdam, to the Royal Library at Berlin.
In 1850 he founded at Leipzig the Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland. In 1852 he established himself as Privatdozent at the university of Leipzig, and published an excellent edition of Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1854), a treatise Zur Nibelungenfrage (1854), followed by an edition of the Nibelungenlied (1856, 12th ed. 1887), and Beiträge zur Erläuterung und Geschichte des Nibelungenliedes (1857).
In 1858 he was appointed full professor, and commenced a series of noteworthy studies on medieval literature, most of which were published in the reports (Berichte) of the Saxon Society of Sciences. Among them were that on the Old High German poem Muspilli (1866); Gesang vom heiligen Georg (1874); the legend of the Priester Johannes (1874); Der Graltempel (1876), and the Annolied (1887). He also wrote a valuable treatise on Christian Reuter (1884), on the portraits of Goethe (1884), and published the history of Leipzig university, Die urkundlichen Quellen zur Geschichte der Universität Leipzig (1857) and Die deutschen Universitäten im Mittelalter (1857). Two volumes of his Kleine Schriften appeared in 1897.
See Zur Erinnerung an den Heimgang von Dr Friedrich Zarncke (1891); Franz Vogt in Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie; Eduard Zarncke in Biographisches Jahrbuch für Altertumswissenschaft (1895); and E. Sievers in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.
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