‘Waltharius’: Treasure, Revenge and Kingship in the Ottonian Wild West

Abstract

Those of us who make a living researching the post-Roman world of the Franks do not, give or take a Gregory of Tours, spend our days reading texts quite as complex or interesting as Bill Miller's Icelandic sagas.As fascinating as they are as historical sources, few would claim that the dry pages of the Royal Frankish Annals or even Einhard's Life of Charlemagne should be considered classics of world literature.The Latin epic poem Waltharius is, however, something different from the Frankish norm.It is a psychologically complicated story about greed, revenge, and the etiquette of violence.Set in the age of Attila the Hun, its story is built around the conflicting loyalties of three protagonists, none of whom emerges unharmed either morally or physically.The poet's black humour, his sharp appreciation of secular aristocratic culture, and his refusal to offer up a clean resolution call to mind the world of Njal and Egil as much as the straight-faced Christian chronicles of the ninth and tenth centuries.The text was popular in its own time, finding numerous known readers and copyists from the late tenth century until the thirteenth.Related stories of Walter's exploits spread widely, turning up in epics and poems including the Nibelungenlied, the Old English Waldere, and the Song of Roland.Eventually, Walter even made it into the Old Norse tradition via the stories collected by the author of 'Waltharius' 2 Thidrekssaga. 1 The text and manuscripts of Waltharius have proved no less fascinating to modern historians and philologists, inspiring hundreds of scholarly studies since the poem was first edited by Jacob Grimm in 1838, and especially since the appearance of the standard edition by Karl Strecker in 1951. 2 Many of these studies deal with the vexed question of authorship.In this article I will approach authorship via a question about readership: what might the poem have meant to its first known reader, the tenth-century bishop of Strasbourg to whom the earliest version of the poem is dedicated?I will emphasise two key themes, inspired by a reading of Miller's work on the sagas: the poet's depiction of the Vosges, where most of the action is set, and the role played in the text by treasure and gifts.First, however, we need an outline of the poem and theories on its authorship. Poem and PoetThe poem, which comes in at just under 1500 lines, is set in a pseudo-historical version of fifthcentury Europe.It has three main sections.In the first, Attila the Hun leads his armies across the Rhine and extorts tribute and hostages from the kings of the Franks, Burgundians, and 1 P. Dronke, 'Waltharius--Gaiferos', in Dronke, Latin and Vernacular Poets of the Middle Ages (Aldershot: 1996), 29 -79.For reasons of space I will not be able to cite more than a small sample of Waltharius scholarship.2 Waltharius, ed.K. Strecker, in Der Lateinischen Dichter des deutschen Mittelalters (Weimar: 1951), 1 -85.A more recent edition and English translation is provided by D.M. Kratz (ed.and trans.),Waltharius and Ruodlieb (New York: 1984).I will cite the poem by line numbers only, which are the same in both editions.Translations are based on Kratz. 'Waltharius'3 Aquitanians.The hostages, Hagen, Hildegund, and Walter respectively, gradually rise to high positions at the Hunnic court, and Walter becomes the leader of the army and its most feared warrior.When news arrives that the Frankish king Gibicho has died, and that his son Gunther has broken his father's peace treaty with Attila, Hagen flees.Walter and Hildegund, now betrothed, follow him some time later after getting the Huns drunk at a banquet.They bring with them two coffers of treasure, about which Attila is not best pleased.The poem's second section follows Walter and Hildegund as they travel through the Frankish kingdom.Gunther catches wind of them as they pass through the royal city of Worms, and works out that they are carrying treasure from Attila's court.The king is greedy for the gold and, despite the protestations of Hagen, takes twelve warriors to track down the fugitives in the forested hills of the Vosges.When they find Walter, he is barricaded into a gorge or cleft in the hills, which means the warriors have to take him on one at a time.Walter lives up to his reputation as a saga-style killing machine and takes out each of the champions in a series of gory encounters enlivened by threats and accusations.Each of these is described with some relish.In the third act, Gunther (maliciously) and Hagen (reluctantly) lure Walter into the open and engage in the final battle, after which all three are left graphically mutilated but alive.Gunther is too badly injured to speak, but the other two share some wine and joke about their wounds (Hagen has lost an eye, Walter a hand) before departing for home.Hagen carries the very ill Gunther back to Worms, while Walter and Hildegund go back to Aquitaine to reign for thirty years.The poet may not have been inventing the story as a pure act of imagination: to judge by diverse references to him in a variety of later sources, Walter had an independent life in numerous oral traditions.Nonetheless, the Latin Waltharius (which is our earliest witness to the Walter tradition) was not simply a repository of orally transmitted tales but a carefully composed 'Waltharius' 4 work in its own right, deeply influenced by patristic writings and classical epics such as Virgil's Aeneid.It was also treated as a complete work by medieval readers and copyists.For example, the eleventh-century Italian monk who incorporated Waltharius into his eccentric history of the monastery of Novalesa bent the poem to his own purposes by careful epitomisation, but in a way that nonetheless respected the original structure and content of the work.3 Scholarship on the poem has long been dominated by questions about its genre: how should we understand such a superficially profane work as the product of a profoundly Christian literary culture?Could a clerical audience really appreciate a story about the deeds of a hero who kills eleven men in a variety of inventive ways (including four by decapitation)?How did the author balance Classical, Christian, and 'Germanic' elements?Debates over such questions have generated many valuable insights about the way the poet used, interacted with, and perhaps even parodied the pagan epics by which he was inspired or repelled.4 But the problem with this line of analysis is that the categories it deals in were inextricably linked elements of early medieval culture, to the point of being indistinguishable.The notion of the 'Germanic' as a cultural 3 Chronicon Novaliciense, ed.L. Bethmann, MGH SS 7 (Hanover: 1846), 2.7 -12, 85 -94; A. Bisanti, 'La leggenda di Walthario e i distici "Vualtarius fortis" nel "Chronicon Novaliciense"', Bollettino di Studi Latini 40 (2010), 76 -85. 4 D.M. Kratz, Mocking Epic: Waltharius, Alexandreis and the Problem of Christian Heroism (Madrid: 1980); C. Ratkowitsch, 'O vortex mundi, fames, insatiatus, habendi, gurges avaritiae.Das Waltharius-Epos zwischenaltgermanischem Sagenstoff, Vergils Aeneis und christlicher Moral', Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 51 (2016), 1 -38.'Waltharius' 5 category is highly contestable, as is the notion of a sharp distinction between the tastes and perspectives of religious and lay aristocrats.Apart from anything else, we know that stories from mythical heroic pasts were widely enjoyed in early medieval monasteries-otherwise they would not have survived to the present day.5 And, as Rachel Stone has shown, the violent excesses of Waltharius cannot be interpreted as a parody of lay conduct because they are wholly consistent with the much more laconic descriptions of aristocratic atrocity and violence found in Carolingian annals (which were also written by churchmen).6 As with the Icelandic sagas, then, we are entitled to read Waltharius as an artefact of its eraa source for the tastes and social assumptions of the time in which it was written rather than a staging point on the road from antiquity to some 'fully Christianised' future.75 P. Wormald, 'Bede, Beowulf and the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy', in Bede and Anglo-Saxon England, ed.R.T. Farrell (Oxford: 1978), 32 -95.6 R. Stone, 'Waltharius and Carolingian Morality: Satire and Lay Values', Early Medieval Europe 21 (2013), 50 -70.Stone's argument would be equally applicable to the post-Carolingian period: see e.g. the straight-faced account of prisoners being beheaded and mutilated in Widukind, Rerum Gestarum Saxonicarum Libri Tres, ed.P.

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