The Book of Friends: Hagen and Heroic Traditions in the Waltharius

In the early medieval “poem of Walter” (so named in its own closing lines, Waltharii poesis), a Latin heroic epic composed under circumstances mostly unknown to us, there is a peculiar heroic aesthetic at work that has puzzled and delighted generations of scholars.¹ Not all for the same reasons, of course: Waltharius criticism is notorious for endless controversies, particularly concerning questions of author, date, and literary-historical context.² In this regard it fits in well with the other tantalizing scraps of the old West Germanic heroic tradition that have survived.³ But in other respects, especially its composite origins in the highly allusive language of classical epic and time-worn motifs of Germanic oral storytelling, it offers uniquely stimulating insights into the challenges posed by the medieval synthesis of Greco-Roman, “barbarian,” and Christian cultural perspectives.

Though critics have generally accorded the Waltharius high praise as the self-consciously innovative work of a skilled poet, they have disagreed sharply on how to interpret the complex heroic ethos at the heart of Walter’s story. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the continuing debate on this question by highlighting the relationship of the poem’s two most prominent characters, Walter and Hagen.⁴ Their friendship is a useful index of the poet’s ability to blend elements of classical and Germanic heroic traditions, exploiting the full narrative potential of each. This relationship has received only superficial attention from critics more often interested in other aspects of the Waltharius, and the opportunities it offers for a refined understanding of the innovative heroic aesthetic of the poem thus stand ready for a fresh appraisal.⁵

As Brian Murdoch has helpfully noted, some unresolved issues in the poem—including authorship and date—do not need to be settled anew with every interpretation of the text, and accordingly they will not detain us here.⁶ A better starting point is the only sustained attempt to understand heroism as such in the Waltharius, that of Dennis Kratz, elaborated in a 1977 article and a lengthier treatment in his provocative 1980 book Mocking Epic.⁷ In Kratz’s hands, the poem of Walter becomes a subtle satire that lampoons the conventions of Germanic epic for a serious (Christian) moral purpose. For Kratz, “The Waltharius is an epic which has no hero; for the poet has taken the traditional function of epic, the celebration of heroic excellence, and inverted it to emphasize instead the vitia which prevent Walter, Hagen, and Gunther from being Christian heroes.”⁸ In other words, the poem “resolves the problem of wedding Christian content to Classical form by attacking the values of at first glance heroic figures and rendering them, in essence, ridiculous.”⁹ Ford Parkes had previously made a similar argument, that the Waltharius is actually a tongue-in-cheek exposé of “the declining Germanic warrior-ethos.”¹⁰

Notwithstanding the poem’s occasional indulgences in irony of a more sporadic sort, which have been generally acknowledged,¹¹ Kratz’s parodic reading remains a minority view.¹² Mocking Epic overstates the extent to which echoes of the Aeneid in the Waltharius imply a deliberate effort to undermine various aspects of Walter’s (or Attila’s; or Hagen’s) behavior. But it is clearly right to recognize a major ethical component in the interplay of the poem’s classical, Christian, and Germanic perspectives. Nor should we unduly minimize obvious intrusions of Christian moral sentiment at various points in the narrative.¹³ These identifiably Christian moments should instead be understood as complementing (and not necessarily in every case satirizing) heroic values still latent in the poem, particularly those stemming from the Germanic tradition. I wish to focus on this latter tradition. As I show in what follows, we need not relegate the values of Germanic epic to a satirical or even a merely supporting role simply because they sometimes seem to clash with Christian ones. Rather, these interacting value sets are regularly allowed to coexist peaceably—indeed even to become mutually reinforcing. No inherent contradiction exists here that must be resolved by...