ABSTRACT
This chapter traces previous approaches to the historicity of Germanic heroic poetry, argues that this corpus is fundamentally historiographical in its production and reception, and proposes a paradigm of three modes of historical representation in which individual texts from this corpus participate in different ways: (1) a ‘bardic’ mode (e.g., The Finnsburg Fragment, the Hildebrandslied: self-contained tragic episodes from the distant ‘Germanic heroic’ past, narrated linearly with no discernible propagandistic purposes), (2) a ‘neo-bardic’ mode (e.g., The Battle of Brunanburh and other ASC poems, the Ludwigslied: triumphalist narrativizations of recent events for clear propagandistic purposes), or (3) a ‘rag-picker’ mode (e.g., Beowulf, Widsith, Deor, the Waltharius: often longer, complex, polyvocal, and self-referential texts with subversive or at least ambivalent ideological thrust).
