Abstract
Hlǫðskviða and Wīdsīð are two Germanic alliterative poems whose current forms are attested in texts written in separate languages, periods, and regions: the former in Old Norse-Icelandic from late-medieval Iceland, and the latter in Old English from later Anglo-Saxon England. Despite these differing contexts, several parallels in the poems’ content—many of which they share with that of other early-medieval continental and insular sources as well as Old Norse saga and Eddic literature—indicate that these narratives did not emerge in isolation. Within this complex of source material, the prevalence of concepts such as the Goth-Hun conflict, the reign and fall of the Gothic king Ermanaric, and the movements and conflicts of early-medieval peoples and their leaders suggests that the events of the Migration Period gave rise to a wider tradition of legends and folklore that spread across early-medieval Northern Europe, evolving both independently and through contact across vast tracts of time and space. This inquiry is driven by an interdisciplinary approach to a comparison between Hlǫðskviða and Wīdsīð, drawing on linguistic, literary, historical, archaeological, runological, folkloristic, and philological evidence. Its emphasis is firmly on the content of the poems, although discussion of the poems’ form is undertaken when pertinent to the notions of tradition and relative periodization. This wider approach allows for the demonstration of both means and motives—political, economic, social, and cultural—for the transmission and use of this tradition throughout the Baltic and North Sea regions, as well as the identification of firmer, more salient links between the poems than a mere comparison of the two texts could achieve. Furthermore, this study proposes that a similar approach, if applied on a considerably larger scale, could be instrumental in shedding further light on a relatively obscure regional period of human history.