Victor Millet: Literary parody and critique of Frankish ideas of empire in the Latin Waltharius (9th or 10th century)
As part of the online CML seminars spring 2023, Victor Millet (Universidade Santiago de Compostela) gave the lecture Literary parody and critique of Frankish ideas of empire in the Latin Waltharius (9th or 10th century) on Tuesday 7 March.
The Waltharius is a Latin epic poem of 1456 hexameters written by a probably German author some time in the 9th or 10th century. It retells a Germanic heroic legend with all the literary art and techneque of a highly instructed author who uses Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Prudentius and many other authorities to build his own verses. Yet the value of the poem lies not only in its ability to use classical and Christian phrases. In my lecture I want to show that it also is a delicious parody of heroic traditions, which were widely known among the Frankish lay nobility and which to some extent contributed to their self-understanding. The Latin author uses and slightly transforms the heroic models in order to ridicule them. At the same time, though, this literary parody is a critique of this same self-understanding of the 'gentes' and their concept of power in the context of the Frankish (or Ottonian) Christian empire.