Waldere

The legend of Walter of Aquitaine was widely popular in medieval Europe: versions are preserved from Germany, Poland, Italy, England and Norway. The fullest early version, the Latin poem Waltharius, written perhaps in ninth-century Germany, tells how Attila the Hun (Ætla in Old English), on his rise to dominate much of Europe, takes three young hostages: Hagen (Hagena) from the Franks, Hildegund (Hildegȳð) from the Burgundians, and Walter (Waldere) from Aquitaine. (The parents of Hildegund and Walter have planned that they will one day be married.) Walter grows up to become Attila’s greatest general while Attila himself grows old and slack. Hagen eventually escapes and returns home. After winning a great battle for the Huns, Walter devises an escape plan for himself and Hildegund: they steal away with a quantity of treasure from Attila’s hoard, and the Huns are too cowardly to pursue them. The fugitives’ route takes them near Worms, where the Frankish king Gunther (Gūðhere) sees their presence with so much Hunnish treasure as an opportunity to recover the tribute that his people long ago paid to Attila. Gunther rides out with Hagen and eleven other retainers to seize the treasure. In successive single combats, Walter slays the eleven, and then a battle ensues among Walter, Gunther and Hagen, at the end of which the three great warriors, maimed in different ways, reconcile and divide the treasure among themselves.

The Old English Waldere is preserved in two single-leaf fragments, probably used as binding materials in a later book. (Late medieval and early modern readers often regarded Old English manuscripts, which they could not read, as worthless; but as they were written on sturdy calfskin, bookbinders found them useful.) The carelessly written manuscript is now in poor condition; but most of the text has been recovered by examination under ultraviolet light. It is impossible to determine even the outline of the story from such short fragments, but it clearly differs from Waltharius in several respects. First, it appears that instead of fighting Gūðhere and Hagena together Waldere fights them separately: first Hagena (the various versions seem to agree that Waldere wounds Hagena but does not kill him) and then Gūðhere. Second, the legendary sword Mimming, made by Wēland and once possessed by his son Widia, figures in this version: Waldere seems to have acquired it by some means from the Franks (perhaps winning it from Hagena), while Gūðhere thinks it is still safely hidden away in a stānfæt ‘stone container’.

The first of the two fragments of Waldere probably belongs to a point in the story just before the hero fights with Gūðhere: it is a speech by Hildegȳð encouraging Waldere to fight bravely and ethically with the sword Mimming. In this version she is a strong character with firm opinions: unlike Hildegund in the Waltharius, she seems to have no fears for her own safety. The second fragment presents part of a dialogue that takes place just before Waldere’s battle with Gūðhere: it is clear that the scene when complete exemplified well the challenges and boasts that typically precede battles in heroic poetry, of which we have several examples in the poems of the Old Icelandic Edda. The existence of such fragments as Waldere and The Battle of Finnesburh, together with the more complete Beowulf, suggests that there was once a considerable body of vernacular heroic poetry which was lost—or rather discarded—when people were no longer able to read it. There are separate editions of Waldere by Zettersten 1979 and Himes 2009.