Goths, Huns, and The Dream of the Rood

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that two poems concerned with legends of Goths and Huns, the Old Norse Hlǫðskviða and the Old High German Hildebrandslied, provide an illuminating literary context for The Dream of the Rood. The critical utility of these poems inheres in their ability to delineate more precisely the intertextual relationship that obtains between The Dream of the Rood and the vernacular tradition of heroic poetry. When the poem is read in this context, Christ appears not to be vaguely heroic, but to be modelled on a specific type of hero: the intransigent youth who compels his unwilling adversary to fight him and ultimately take his life. The figures of Hlǫð and Hadubrand are shown to constitute the most relevant extant realizations of this type, while related examples from Waltharius and the Finnsburg fragment are adduced in order to confirm that the type was both traditional and widespread.