Old English Heroic Literature

Beitrage zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur, 2007

Anglia, 2013

2013

The Indo-European Hero is a complex figure, a combination of the best and worst parts of human nature. Heroes often represent the noblest qualities of their cultures, but also possess violent instincts that make them dangerous even to their own people. In The Medieval Hero, Dr Connell Monette surveys a wide range of heroic tales from Celtic, Persian, and Anglo-Saxon tradition to decode the hidden truths about Heroes: their origins, their strengths and weaknesses, the source of their powers, and the Heroic Code. Monette demonstrates an impressive command of historical languages, and gives the reader both original passages and English translations of texts in Classical Persian, Old Irish, Old English, and Classical Greek. This book will enable the reader to better understand the Hero in ancient and medieval epics, and to correctly identify the dominant themes in modern adaptations of the heroic genre.

Published in Vincent Ferré (ed.). 2010. Médiévalisme. Modernité du Moyen Âge. Paris: L’Harmattan, 61-71. Abstract: The (popularly conceived) Middle Ages and (heroic) fantasy share a number of characteristics, such as settings in pre-technological and pre-bureaucratic worlds where men were not yet alienated from their fellow human beings and where things were more ‘authentic’. However, next to these ‘surface parallels’, we can identify a deeper underlying reason for the close affinity between the Middle Ages and (heroic) fantasy, which is due to the identification of medieval romance as the medieval literary genre per se, and the participation of (heroic) fantasy in this tradition.

RumelİDE Journal of Language and Literature Studies, 2024

Seventeenth-century England, renowned for its epic poems, stands as one of the most fruitful periods in the history of English literary criticism in terms of epic theory. One of the most significant topics of literary criticism during this era is the evolution of epic heroes. The critics at the time had comprehensive knowledge of the existing pagan and Christian traditions of epic heroes which were varied and interwoven. Moreover, the critics of the period were well acquainted with the literary criticisms of late Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century France. However, they did not simply absorb influences from Greek, Roman, French, and Italian sources. Instead, English critics engaged in an active dialogue with these traditions, interpreting and adapting their ideas in light of their own cultural, historical, and theological context. This enabled critics to create individual approaches towards epic heroes, thereby making English literary criticism diverse but also too fragmented to form a cohesive group. This aspect of the period makes drawing the contours of the epic heroes immensely challenging. However, despite the overriding eclecticism inherent in the literary criticism of the period, this article indicates that there is a surprising degree of consensus on certain characteristics of epic heroes. Accordingly, this article examines the concept of epic heroes in seventeenth-century English literary criticism, focusing on four key aspects: the didactic role of epic heroes, their depiction as paragons of virtue, the significance of their lineage, and the intricate process of Christianising them.

2017

It is both an honor and a pleasure, not to mention a reassuring change of pace, to be invited to give a lecture named in honor of someone who not only is still very much alive but is a distinguished presence in the audience. I thank Katja, Alexandra, Ilona, and all the members of the Society for this opportunity and for all they have done to make Scandinavia a site of stimulating and ground-breaking Celtic studies. Returning to the scholar who is honored in this lecture, I am sure I speak for everyone in the profession in offering praise to Professor Emeritus Ahlqvist for all he has done for the study of Celtic languages and literatures, for all he has taught us, and for all the solutions he has offered to some of the most difficult problems one can encounter in the field. Compared to him, we are all, or at least I am, merely on the level of the white cat with the Welsh name chasing mice in the famous Old Irish poem that is the subject of Professor Ahlqvist’s contribution to a recen...

Networks and Neighbours, 2013

One of the great issues in the study of what is conveniently – albeit perhaps uncritically – known as ‘Germanic heroic poetry’ has always been the pretextual evolution of the various narratives belonging to the genre. The main problem is that this requires a complex understanding of 'Germanic heroic' texts as simultaneously belonging to two worlds – the culturally and socially prestigious one of (Latinate) literacy, drawing on Classical models, and the world of (vernacular) orality, rooted in a poetics of anonymous memorial tradition. My paper argues for the relativization of this sharp dichotomy which is to be replaced by the model of a large spectrum of textual variation. More concretely, I will discuss the earliest attestations of the Sigurd/Siegfried-Brunhilda story, from the historical events related by Gregory of Tours, to the thirteenth-century Nibelungenlied and Völsungasaga. Previous understandings of the evolution of 'Germanic heroic' texts in time have been based on reconstructing various stages of development, from short action-driven lays to lengthy dialogue- and drama-laden epics. My paper will argue that rather than seeing these narratives as a series of more recent textual variants deriving in linear fashion from the earlier ones, it would be more helpful to envision the nature of Germanic heroic poetry as rhizomatic, consisting of a flux of narratives in a variety of forms (classifiable as ‘heroic lay’, ‘folk-tale’, ‘historical morality tale’ etc,) which interact with one another and with the cultural traditions into which they are adapted. The different narrative strands emerging in different milieus and shaped by them were never separate, reified objects, but rather expressions of these different cultural worlds which continuously communicated with one another. Thus, rather than attempting to reconstruct these different stages, one would gain more by looking at the forces of change – vectors for the flux of narratives and also at the interactions between the texts as such and the different cultural and social encodings of narrative and historical truth.

In this article an attempt is made to understand the way medieval Icelandic sagas stage their characters as an expression of a conflict of norms within the society which produced them, i.e. Iceland in the thirteenth century. Two contemporary sagas show how this conflict of norms is part of the reality facing chieftains in a society where they must use violence to preserve their power and protect themselves and their kinsmen, but where the fate of their souls is also at stake in a Christian world-view forcefully promoted by a militant Church. Two sagas of Icelanders are then studied in which this conflict of norms is thematized as one between Christianity and paganism. The conflict of norms in question is instrumental in generating an image of the self which is generated by the forces in presence in medieval culture.

Candidate Number: 999136 Word Count: 5,933 The Theme of Exile within Old English Christian Poetry: Developing the Positive Exilic Hero

Networks and Neighbours, Vol 1, No 1 (2013), 2013

One of the great issues in the study of what is conveniently – albeit perhaps uncritically – known as ‘Germanic heroic poetry’ has always been the pretextual evolution of the various narratives belonging to the genre. The main problem is that this requires a complex understanding of 'Germanic heroic' texts as simultaneously belonging to two worlds – the culturally and socially prestigious one of (Latinate) literacy, drawing on Classical models, and the world of (vernacular) orality, rooted in a poetics of anonymous memorial tradition. My paper argues for the relativization of this sharp dichotomy which is to be replaced by the model of a large spectrum of textual variation. More concretely, I will discuss the earliest attestations of the Sigurd/Siegfried-Brunhilda story, from the historical events related by Gregory of Tours, to the thirteenth-century Nibelungenlied and Völsungasaga. Previous understandings of the evolution of 'Germanic heroic' texts in time have been based on reconstructing various stages of development, from short action-driven lays to lengthy dialogue- and drama-laden epics. My paper will argue that rather than seeing these narratives as a series of more recent textual variants deriving in linear fashion from the earlier ones, it would be more helpful to envision the nature of Germanic heroic poetry as rhizomatic, consisting of a flux of narratives in a variety of forms (classifiable as ‘heroic lay’, ‘folk-tale’, ‘historical morality tale’ etc,) which interact with one another and with the cultural traditions into which they are adapted. The different narrative strands emerging in different milieus and shaped by them were never separate, reified objects, but rather expressions of these different cultural worlds which continuously communicated with one another. Thus, rather than attempting to reconstruct these different stages, one would gain more by looking at the forces of change – vectors for the flux of narratives and also at the interactions between the texts as such and the different cultural and social encodings of narrative and historical truth.