Hnæf

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Icon tools.svg This article or section was due to content flaws on the quality assurance side of the Germanic project entered. This is done in order to bring the quality of the articles from this topic to an acceptable level. Please help to fix the shortcomings in this article and join the discussion !

Hnæf (* in the fifth century † 450 ?), Son of Hoc, was a Danish prince according to the Old English epic Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment .

He had a sister named Hildeburh who was married to Finn , the leader of the Frisians . Allegedly, while visiting his brother-in-law and sister in Finn's castle, he was attacked and killed by Frisian warriors.

Hnæf cannot be proven outside of literary sources, so it could be a mythological figure. However, scholars such as JRR Tolkien consider the Finnsburg saga to be a story based on historical events.

In 1976, the historian Hans Jänichen discussed a comparison of the father-son relationship between Hoc and Hnæf (which, in addition to the heroic poem Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment, also appear in the Old English poem Widsith ) with the historically documented Alemannic Duke Huoching and his son Hnabi. They could have been the inspiration for a later Germanic heroic poem about Hoc and Hnaef. Jänichen followed an earlier consideration from 1849, which John Mitchell Kemble made in his "History of the Saxons" in England.

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

But this theory has weaknesses in terms of place and time: The Alemanni settlement area was far more south than that of the Frisians or Danes . There was hardly any close cultural connection. In addition, Huoching died in 744 , about 300 years after the presumed death of his alleged son Hnæf.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ JRR Tolkien: Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1983.
  2. ^ John Mitchell Kemble: History of the Saxons in England. New edition 1876; German by Heinrich Bernhard Christian Brandes, Leipzig 1853, p. 419, p. 419
  3. ↑ Hans Jänichen: The Alemannic princes Nebi and Berthold and their relationships with the monasteries of St. Gallen and Reichenau, sheets for German national history (1976), pp. 30-40

literature