Hoc (Beowulf)

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Hoc , father of Hnæf , was a Danish king in the fifth century according to the Old English epic Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment .

Hoc and Hnæf cannot be proven outside of literary sources, so they could be mythological figures. 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.

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