Philip Otto Runge was - along with Caspar David Friedrich - not only the most important German painter of the early Romantic period, but also one of the most versatile artists of the 19th century, an individual, as rarely born, as Goethe commented about him. His letters, writings, and also artful fairy tales are presented and annotated in this critical edition. The edition begins with two volumes of letters documenting Runge's contact with a variety of his most significant contemporaries: Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Caspar David Friedrich, and August von Klinkowstrom, to name just a few.The present volumes offer for the first time all letter testimonies and present the sources preserved in the autograph text-critically according to edition-scientific criteria.